News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

One of the most impactful breakthroughs of lens technology in recent history has been the development of photonic metasurfaces – artificially engineered nanoscale materials with remarkable optical properties. Now, scientists at Georgia Tech, Florida International University, Stanford University, the City University of New York, and RWTH Aachen in Germany have demonstrated the first-ever electrically tunable photonic metasurface platform with a record eleven-fold change in the reflective properties, a large range of spectral tuning for operation, and much faster tuning speed. 

Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a machine learning model that predicts interactions between nanoparticles and proteins. This model could enable the design of engineered nanoparticles that would shut down bacterial or viral infections.

Researchers from Lehigh University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medicine, the University of Maryland, and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology have developed a new detection method for ovarian cancer. The approach uses machine learning techniques to efficiently analyze spectral signatures of carbon nanotubes to detect biomarkers of the disease and to recognize the cancer itself. 

Researchers from Arizona State University and University College London have described the design and construction of artificial membrane channels, engineered using short segments of DNA. The DNA constructions are similar to natural cell channels or pores, offering selective transport of ions and proteins, with enhanced features unavailable in their naturally occurring counterparts. These innovative DNA nanochannels may one day be applied in biosensing, drug delivery, and the creation of artificial cell networks.

Bacteria that live in the ground and under the ocean floor generate electrons through tiny nanowires. Researchers at Yale University researchers have found that these nanowires move 10 billion electrons per second without any energy loss. They also found that cooling the environment around the nanowires to freezing temperatures increases their conductivity 300-fold, which is surprising because cooling typically freezes electrons and slows them down in organic materials. 

Researchers from the University of Rochester and the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nurnberg in Germany have created a logic gate that operates at femtosecond timescales by harnessing and controlling, for the first time, the real and virtual charge carriers that compose ultrafast bursts of electricity. These bursts of electricity were generated by lasers and were used to illuminate tiny graphene-based wires connecting two gold metals. The ultrashort laser pulses set in motion electrons in graphene and sent them in a particular direction, generating an electrical current.

A team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has created a device that converts a metal so it behaves like another, for use as a catalyst in chemical reactions. The device uses a combination of nanometer films to move and stabilize electrons at the surface of the catalyst. The invention opens the door for new catalytic technologies using non-precious metal catalysts for applications such as storing renewable energy, making renewable fuels, and manufacturing sustainable materials. 

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania are developing new membranes for energy-efficient organic separations by rethinking their physical structure on the nanoscale. The structures of the membranes help to minimize the limiting tradeoff between selectivity and permeability that is encountered in traditional nanofiltration membranes. Also, the uniform pores of these membranes can be fine-tuned by changing the size or concentration of the self-assembling molecules that form the membranes. 

Researchers at Texas A&M University have described how certain minerals can regulate gene expression, thus controlling the number of proteins made by a cell and encouraging tissue regeneration. The researchers introduced a new class of mineral-based nanoparticles, called nanosilicates, to direct human stem cells toward bone cells. Nanosilicates are disc-shaped mineral nanoparticles 20-30 nanometers in diameter and 1-2 nm in thickness that are highly biocompatible and are readily eaten up by cells. Once inside a cell, the nanoparticles slowly dissolve into individual minerals, which turn "on” a set of key genes that instruct the cell to take on specific functions, such as converting into another type of cell.

Researchers from Tulane University have developed a new family of two-dimensional (2D) materials that could be used in advanced electronics and high-capacity batteries. The new family of 2D materials, called transition metal carbo-chalcogenides, combines the characteristics of two other families of 2D materials – transition metal carbides and transition metal dichalcogenides.