News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a graphene device that's thinner than a human hair but has a depth of special traits. It easily switches from a superconducting material that conducts electricity without losing any energy, to an insulator that resists the flow of electric current, and back again to a superconductor -- all with a simple flip of a switch.

For decades, researchers have chased ways to study biological machines. Every mechanical movement--from contracting a muscle to replicating DNA--relies on molecular motors that take near-undetectable steps. Trying to see them move is like trying to watch a soccer game taking place on the moon. Now, with DNA origami helicopters, researchers have captured the first recorded rotational steps of a molecular motor as it moved from one DNA base pair to another.

Reactive molecular oxygen singlets have a multitude of uses in chemistry and medicine, but they are less abundant than non-reactive oxygen triplets. A multinational research team led by Osaka University has developed a novel method of producing reactive molecular oxygen through controlled, reversible bond formation between two oxygen atoms using atomic force microscopy. In addition, the researchers could alter the charge of individual oxygen atoms, presumably changing oxygen spin in the process.

A new University at Buffalo-led study describes how researchers wirelessly controlled FGFR1 -- a gene that plays a key role in how humans grow from embryos to adults -- in lab-grown brain tissue. The ability to manipulate the gene, the study's authors say, could lead to new cancer treatments, and ways to prevent and treat mental disorders such as schizophrenia.

Engineers have mimicked the human brain with an electronic chip that uses light to create and modify memories.

A Japanese research team led by Osaka University produced Fe3O4 nanowires on 10-nm length scales by deposition on an MgO substrate. When cooled to 110 K, the nanowires showed a sharp Verwey transition -- greater resistivity resulting from a change in crystal structure. This switching is essential for nanoelectronics, but hard to achieve in Fe₃O₄ nanowires. It was possible because of the low density of antiphase boundary defects, and will promote advances in green electronic technologies.

An end-to-end transmitter-receiver created by engineers in UCI's Nanoscale Communication Integrated Circuits Labs, is a 4.4-millimeter-square silicon chip that is capable of processing digital signals with significantly greater speed and energy efficiency because of its unique digital-analog architecture.

The quantum logic clock -- perhaps best known for showing you age faster if you stand on a stool -- has climbed back to the leading performance echelons of the world's experimental atomic clocks.

The research group of Prof. Junsuk Rho, Sunae So and Jungho Mun of Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering at POSTECH developed a design with a higher degree of freedom which allows to choose materials and to design photonic structures arbitrarily by using Deep Learning.