News by Subject Technology & Engineering

In the cover article in the current issue of Cell, BU Biomedical Engineer Ahmad S. Khalil along with colleagues from MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, among others, describe the synthetic genetic tool they built to quantitatively sense, measure and manipulate protein aggregation in live cells. This may open the door to greater understanding and treatment of a range of maladies from Alzheimer's to type II diabetes.

A new vaccine under development provoked an immune response to 72 forms of the bacteria that's responsible for pneumonia, sepsis and meningitis. That's up from the 23 forms of bacteria covered by current immunizations. The new vaccine, which represents the 'most comprehensive' coverage of pneumococcal disease to date, could greatly reduce the number of deaths from the disease.

A Nature Communications study, led by Germany's University of Tuebingen and published Oct. 20, demonstrated how composting of biochar creates a very thin organic coating that significantly improves the biochar's fertilizing capabilities.

For some crystalline catalysts, what you see on the surface is not always what you get in the bulk, according to two studies led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The investigators discovered that treating a complex oxide crystal with either heat or chemicals caused different atoms to segregate on the surface, i.e., surface reconstruction. Those differences created catalysts with dissimilar behaviors, which encouraged different reaction pathways and ultimately yielded distinct products.

A new study has discovered that ice grows differently on water-absorbent vs. water-repellent surfaces. The research suggests that applying water-repellent coatings to windshields before winter storms -- or engineering surfaces that inherently repel water -- could enable a strong breeze to handle the burden of ice removal.