Imagine seeing a furry, four-legged animal that meows. Mentally, you know what it is, but the word “cat” is stuck on the tip of your tongue. 

This phenomenon, known as Broca’s aphasia or expressive aphasia, is a language disorder that affects a person’s ability to speak or write. While the current go-to treatment is speech therapy, scientists at Northwestern University are working toward a different, possibly more effective treatment: using a brain computer interface (BCI) to convert brain signals into spoken words. In a new study, Northwestern Medicine scientists have, for the first time, identified specific brain regions outside the frontal lobe — in the temporal and parietal cortices — involved in the intent to produce speech. This opens the door to one day using a BCI to treat Broca’s aphasia. 

Biological motors, which aid microorganism movement in fluids, are composed of two components—the rotor and stators. Despite much research, the exact molecular mechanism underlying stator function is yet unclear. In a new study, researchers from Nagoya Institute of Technology analyzed the flagellar motor in Vibrio alginolyticus using cryo-electron microscopy and described how sodium ion flow through stators underlies stator function. Understanding biological motors better could lead to the development of efficient microscopic machines.

A research team led by Prof. CHEN Wei at University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has introduced a new chemical battery system which utilizes hydrogen gas as the anode. The study was published in the Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

A team led by Prof. Guo Guangcan from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has demonstrated the ability to electrically manipulate the spin filling sequence in a bilayer graphene (BLG) quantum dot (QD). This achievement, published in Physical Review Letters, showcases the potential to control the spin degree of freedom in BLG, a material with promising applications in quantum computing and advanced electronics.

A team of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has recently developed a lightweight prosthetic hand with 19 degrees of freedom (DOF), capable of replicating human hand functions. This development can assist in the functional rehabilitation and daily activities of millions of upper-limb amputees. The research was published in Nature Communications.

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have synthesized a Bi₅^--ring, a molecule with five bismuth atoms, and stabilized it in a metal complex. Their discovery fills a gap in chemical knowledge and enables future applications in materials research, catalysis, and electronics. Their findings have been published in Nature Chemistry. (DOI: 10.1038/s41557-024-01713-8)