Chemists have developed a nanomaterial they can trigger to shape-shift — from flat sheets to tubes and back to sheets again — in a controllable fashion. The Journal of the American Chemical Society published a description of the nanomaterial, which was developed at Emory University and holds the potential for a range of biomedical applications, from controlled-release drug delivery to tissue engineering.

The research is funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Biochemists have developed a synthetic collagen nanomaterial they can trigger to shape-shift. Image credit: Nevit Dilmen/Wikimedia Commons

The nanomaterial, which in sheet form is 10,000

Two novel techniques, atomic-resolution real-time video and conical carbon nanotube confinement allow researchers to view never-before-seen details about crystal formation. The observations confirm theoretical predictions about how salt crystals form and could inform general theories about the way in which crystal formation produces different ordered structures from an otherwise disordered chemical mixture.

Salt nucleation. A sodium chloride crystal growing in a vibrating carbon nanohorn. Image credit: American Chemical Society

Crystals include many familiar things, such as snowflakes, salt grains and even diamonds. They are regular and repeating arrangements of constituent molecules that grow from a chaotic sea of those molecules.

NineSigma, representing a global food manufacturer with sales of multi-billion dollars, seeks technologies to measure or estimate blood glucose levels in a non-invasive manner. In this RFP, proposals for technology that is intended for human use and is at least in the prototype stage.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0

The average life expectancy grows longer globally. The significance of technologies that offer simple ways to monitor the human body conditions is becoming greater. The Client has worked on the development of non-invasive blood glucose monitoring technology with great usability. They have faced challenges in terms of accuracy and other

There is currently no cure for osteoarthritis, but a group of scientists believe they’ve discovered a method through which a simple knee injection could potentially stop the disease’s effects. These researchers showed that they could target a specific protein pathway in mice, put it into overdrive and halt cartilage degeneration over time. Building on that finding, they were able to show that treating mice with surgery-induced knee cartilage degeneration through the same pathway via the state of the art of nanomedicine could dramatically reduce the cartilage degeneration and knee pain. These findings were published in Science Translational Medicine.

“Our

Engineers from Penn State University are working on a new lithium iron phosphate battery that could provide electric vehicles (EVs) with 400 km-worth of range and charge in as little as 10 minutes. If successful, the new battery could significantly reduce the anxiety that owners of EVs have about running out of change on the road.

“We developed a pretty clever battery for mass-market electric vehicles with cost parity with combustion engine vehicles,” said co-author Chao-Yang Wang. “There is no more range anxiety and this battery is affordable”.

They key to the battery’s rapid recharging and long-life (the battery is

ETH Zurich researchers conducted an experiment to investigate the initial steps in the formation of aerosols. Their findings are now aiding efforts to better understand and model that process – for example, the formation of clouds in the atmosphere.

Aerosols are suspensions of fine solid particles or liquid droplets in a gas. Clouds, for example, are aerosols because they consist of water droplets dispersed in the air. Such droplets are produced in a two-step process: first, a condensation nucleus forms, and then volatile molecules condense onto this nucleus, producing a droplet. Nuclei frequently consist of molecules different to those that