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Category: chemistry

Laser-assisted electron scattering seen with circularly polarized light for the first time

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have succeeded in detecting laser-assisted electron scattering (LAES) using circularly polarized light for the first time. The use of circularly polarized light promises valuable insights into how atomic scale “helicity” impacts how electrons interact with matter and light.

Using synchronized femtosecond laser pulses and electron pulses directed at argon atoms, they succeeded in detecting a LAES signal showing excellent agreement with theory. The findings are published in The Journal of Chemical Physics.

LAES is a cutting-edge tool for understanding how electrons interact with matter under the influence of strong fields. When electrons are fired at atoms or molecules, they are scattered in all directions; the presence of strong light can change the way in which the scattering takes place due to an exchange of energy with the surrounding light field.

First-of-its-kind ion pump developed for seawater desalination, energy and biomedical applications

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, Israel’s Tel Aviv University and other institutions have developed a first-of-its-kind membrane through which charged molecules pass using nothing more than a rapidly switching low-voltage signal. This “ratchet-based ion pump” has no moving parts and requires no chemical reactions.

The device opens the door to advances in water desalination, lithium ion harvesting from seawater, heavy-metal removal from drinking water, battery recycling and various biomedical applications. The team’s findings are outlined in a paper published recently in Nature Materials.

Molecular chains with bite: Customized carbon nanoribbons open a cleaner path to molecular electronics

The longest chains of the conductive polymer poly(p-phenylene; PPP) produced to date are just under one micrometer (thousandth of a millimeter) long—almost an order of magnitude longer than previously possible. A research team from the fields of chemistry and physics led by Prof. Dr. Michael Gottfried from Marburg University, Germany, has demonstrated for the first time that PPP can be synthesized on surfaces via a specific ring-opening polymerization as genuine chain growth.

The statistically most frequently measured length is around 170 nanometers—with one outlier reaching nearly 1,000 nanometers—a record. The new, halogen-free process does not produce any disruptive by-products, thus opening up a particularly clean approach to ultra-long, conjugated polymer chains.

The results have been published by the interdisciplinary team from the Universities of Marburg, Giessen and Leipzig and Chinese researchers in the journal Nature Chemistry.

Abstract: Patients with recurrent kidney stone disease stand to benefit from personalized diagnostics

In this Research Article, Ruxandra Bachmann-Gagescu & team integrate blood and urine biochemistry with genetics to improve interpretation of genetic findings in adults with kidney stone disease—the approach has prognostic value, enabling personalized risk assessment.

3Department of Molecular Life Sciences, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.

4National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Kidney. CH, Bern, Switzerland.

5Department of Nephrology and Hypertension, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.

Plastic bottles transformed into Parkinson’s drug using bacteria

A drug to treat Parkinson’s disease can be made from waste plastic bottles using a pioneering method, a study shows. The approach harnesses the power of bacteria to transform post-consumer plastic into L-DOPA, a frontline medication for the neurological disorder. It is the first time a natural, biological process has been engineered to turn plastic waste into a therapeutic for a neurological disease, researchers say.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh engineered E. coli bacteria to turn a type of plastic used widely in food and drink packaging—polyethylene terephthalate, or PET—into L-DOPA. The process involves first breaking down PET waste—some 50 million tonnes of which are produced annually—into chemical building blocks of terephthalic acid. Molecules of terephthalic acid are then transformed into L-DOPA by the engineered bacteria through a series of biological reactions.

Using the new technique to produce L-DOPA is more sustainable than traditional methods of making pharmaceuticals, which rely on the use of finite fossil fuels, the team says.

Ultrasound-based technology to deliver large therapeutics into cancer cells

In the study, the authors equipped these microbubbles with synthetic nucleic acid strands designed to bind with specific biochemical receptors that appear on the cell membranes of cancer cells but not healthy cells. They then tried several combinations of ultrasound frequencies and intensities to find the perfect pairing for opening pores in the cell membranes to allow the PROTACs to enter.

Once the optimal settings were identified, the researchers validated the platform by attaching fluorescent molecules to the PROTACs. They conducted separate experiments on cancer cells and healthy cells to compare the delivery efficiency. After a minute of ultrasound exposure, the cells treated with SonoPIN glowed seven times brighter than those treated with traditional PROTAC delivery methods, indicating that they were taking in many PROTACs. This resulted in half of the cancer cells self-destructing, while 99% of the healthy cells remained viable.

Moving forward, the researchers plan to test this approach in mouse models and have already applied for a patent covering the work. By injecting the PROTACs and cancer-seeking microbubbles into their veins and focusing the ultrasound waves on tumor locations, they believe SonoPIN could form a highly potent cancer-killing technology with few side effects. sciencenewshighlights ScienceMission.

Engineers have demonstrated a technique that uses microbubbles and ultrasound to help relatively large cancer drugs enter tumor cells and cause them to self-destruct.

Dubbed “Sonoporation-assisted Precise Intracellular Nanodelivery”—or SonoPIN for short—the technology caused 50% of targeted cancer cells in a benchtop experiment to self-destruct, while leaving 99% of non-targeted cells healthy. The results show promise for precisely delivering a wide variety of large-molecule therapeutics to cells with few off-target effects.

The research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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THOR AI solves a 100-year-old physics problem in seconds

A new AI framework called THOR is transforming how scientists calculate the behavior of atoms inside materials. Instead of relying on slow simulations that take weeks of supercomputer time, the system uses tensor network mathematics and machine-learning models to solve the problem directly. The approach can compute key thermodynamic properties hundreds of times faster while preserving accuracy. Researchers say this could accelerate discoveries in materials science, physics, and chemistry.

‘Bugs delivering drugs’: A new approach to colorectal cancer treatment using common food-borne bacteria

Baylor University researchers have developed a novel approach to fight colorectal cancer, using modified bacteria as a courier to deliver potent cancer-killing proteins into tumor cells. Michael S. VanNieuwenhze, Ph.D., FRSC, University Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Biology, along with Baylor doctoral students and a colleague at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, have published their research in Cell Chemical Biology.

Colorectal cancers accounted for the second-most deaths caused by cancer in 2025, according to the National Cancer Institute, highlighting the importance of new strategies for therapy and treatment.

Building on growth in the use of bacteria as a tool in fighting cancer, VanNieuwenhze and his team attached saporin, a known cancer-killing toxin, to the surface Listeria monocytogenes, which delivers the toxin to tumor cells. Listeria, commonly recognized as a food-borne bacteria, can be modified for express therapeutic purposes while maintaining its ability to penetrate human cells—making it, VanNieuwenhze said, a particularly promising agent in the fight against colorectal cancer.

The Singularity Needs a Navigator

In 2013, physicist Alex Wissner-Gross published a single equation for intelligence in [ITALIC] Physical Review Letters [/ITALIC]: # F = T∇Sτ

The force of an intelligent system equals its temperature — computational capacity, raw horsepower — multiplied by the gradient of its future option-space. Intelligence is not a mysterious property of carbon-based brains.

It is a physical force: the tendency of any sufficiently energetic system to maximize the number of future states accessible to it.

The equation was elegant. Correct. And incomplete.

It describes the force. It does not describe the geometry of the space through which that force navigates.

A gradient without a metric is a direction without distance — it tells the system where to push but not what distortion it will encounter on the way there.

We spent three years building the geometry. We tested it across 69 billion simulations. What we found changes everything. ## The Missing Geometry — From Force to Navigation.

Continue reading “The Singularity Needs a Navigator” | >

3 Questions: On the future of AI and the mathematical and physical sciences

Curiosity-driven research has long sparked technological transformations. A century ago, curiosity about atoms led to quantum mechanics, and eventually the transistor at the heart of modern computing. Conversely, the steam engine was a practical breakthrough, but it took fundamental research in thermodynamics to fully harness its power.

Today, artificial intelligence and science find themselves at a similar inflection point. The current AI revolution has been fueled by decades of research in the mathematical and physical sciences (MPS), which provided the challenging problems, datasets, and insights that made modern AI possible. The 2024 Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, recognizing foundational AI methods rooted in physics and AI applications for protein design, made this connection impossible to miss.

In 2025, MIT hosted a Workshop on the Future of AI+MPS, funded by the National Science Foundation with support from the MIT School of Science and the MIT departments of Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics. The workshop brought together leading AI and science researchers to chart how the MPS domains can best capitalize on — and contribute to — the future of AI. Now a white paper, with recommendations for funding agencies, institutions, and researchers, has been published in Machine Learning: Science and Technology. In this interview, Jesse Thaler, MIT professor of physics and chair of the workshop, describes key themes and how MIT is positioning itself to lead in AI and science.

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