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Category: engineering

Research moves closer to ‘smart’ sensors in knee replacements

If you have a knee replacement, imagine pointing your phone at your knee and pulling up an app that tells you how much stress the artificial joint is experiencing. Knowing the activities that cause the biggest problems—which can lead to a second replacement surgery—would be invaluable. Research led by Binghamton University is closer to making this technology a reality.

Professor Shahrzad “Sherry” Towfighian—a faculty member from the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Mechanical Engineering—has worked toward “smart-knee” tech over the past decade.

According to the American College of Rheumatology, nearly 800,000 total knee replacements are done every year in the U.S., and that number is expected to rise sharply by 2030 as the population ages and sports injuries become more common.

Breaking fuel cell barriers: New platinum catalyst brings high-efficiency hydrogen vehicles closer to commercialization

A research team has developed a next-generation platinum-based catalyst that improves both activity and durability in hydrogen fuel cells. The study is published in Advanced Materials. The team was led by Professor Sang Uck Lee of the School of Chemical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University, with Ph.D. candidate Jun Ho Seok as a co-first author and Dr. Sung Chan Cho, in collaboration with Professor Kwangyeol Lee’s team at Korea University and Dr. Sung Jong Yoo’s team at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).

Hydrogen fuel cells generate electricity through the electrochemical reaction of hydrogen and oxygen and are considered a promising clean energy technology. However, their broader commercialization has been hindered by the sluggish oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) at the cathode and by catalyst degradation during long-term operation.

Conventional platinum-based intermetallic catalysts are known for their structural stability, but their atomic composition and arrangement are difficult to tune precisely. This has limited efforts to optimize their electronic structure and has made it challenging to achieve both high catalytic activity and long-term durability under demanding operating conditions, such as those required for hydrogen-powered vehicles.

High-throughput platform helps engineer fast-acting covalent protein drugs

A team led by principal investigators Bobo Dang and Ting Zhou at Westlake University/Westlake Laboratory have developed a high-throughput platform for engineering fast-acting covalent protein therapeutics. Their study, titled “A high-throughput selection system for fast-acting covalent protein drugs” published in Science, opens new avenues for next-generation biologics.

Covalent small-molecule drugs have shown great success in cancer therapy by forming irreversible bonds with their targets. This has inspired efforts to extend covalent strategies to protein therapeutics, especially engineered miniproteins. However, their development is limited by a kinetic mismatch: Miniproteins are rapidly cleared in vivo, whereas covalent bond formation is typically slow. In addition, high-throughput platforms for systematically optimizing covalent protein reactivity have been lacking.

To address this challenge, the researchers proposed that precise spatial positioning of chemical warheads within protein scaffolds could enable molecular preorganization, thereby accelerating covalent bond formation without increasing intrinsic reactivity.

Ending the Sun’s Monopoly: The Future of Stellarator Fusion — Brian Berzin, CEO, Thea Energy

“with Brian Berzin — Co-Founder & CEO of Thea Energy.

What if we could build a fusion reactor that runs continuously—without the instability issues that have plagued the field for years?

Brian Berzin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Thea Energy (https://thea.energy/), a next-generation fusion company focused on advancing stellarator technology—one of the most promising but historically underexplored approaches to magnetic confinement fusion.

Brian brings a unique combination of deep technical and financial expertise, with a background spanning electrical engineering, venture capital, private equity, and investment banking.

Prior to founding Thea Energy, Brian served as Vice President of Strategy at General Fusion, where he helped shape commercialization strategy and led engagement with global capital markets during a pivotal period for privately funded fusion.

Continue reading “Ending the Sun’s Monopoly: The Future of Stellarator Fusion — Brian Berzin, CEO, Thea Energy” | >

Stretching metals can tune catalysis: A new method predicts energy shifts

Heterogeneous catalysis—in which catalysts and reactants are of different phases, e.g., solid and gas—is important to many industrial processes and often involves solid metal as the catalyst. Ammonia synthesis, catalytic converters for automobile exhaust, methanol synthesis, carbon dioxide reduction, and hydrogen production are examples of such metal-catalyzed heterogeneous catalysis.

The electronic structure of metal surfaces governs the adsorption of reactants and intermediates, and thus the catalytic activity. For this reason, strain engineering —which tunes the electronic structure of a metal catalyst by stretching or compressing its crystal lattice—has emerged as an important strategy for enhancing catalytic performance. Unfortunately, scientists have not been able to quantify how metal strain influences adsorption energies and reaction barriers across different metal catalysts, thereby limiting the rational design of catalysts with desired properties.

To address this challenge, a research team from the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics (LICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a method to predict how strain modifies adsorption energies and reaction barriers across diverse metal systems. The study is published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

Terraforming Mars: Modeling engineered aerosols to warm the planet

Whenever humans arrive on Mars, they’re going to find it a difficult place to exist. Mars is cold, with an average surface temperature of −55°C; temperatures can plunge to −125°C with dust storms lasting months; its atmosphere is very thin and almost all carbon dioxide; and all the water is frozen and mixed with ice made of CO2. Oh, and solar radiation will be hazardous on Mars’ surface since the planet has no ozone layer to block ultraviolet radiation, especially so during solar flares. Disneyland it is not.

New Martians will need to live underground until, someday, maybe, Mars can be terraformed to, if not quite looking like Earth, at least a planet more hospitable to fragile human creatures.

There are arguments for and against terraforming Mars. If humans do terraform, one of the first suggestions is to increase Mars’ greenhouse effect by melting the CO2-ice caps.

Quasi-liquid layer controls growth mechanisms of ice-like materials

Clathrate hydrates are crystalline structures formed at the bottom of seafloors, created by water molecules trapping methane, carbon dioxide or other molecules. While these materials are underutilized in technology, a University of Oklahoma researcher is helping scientists better understand them through a trailblazing study.

Alberto Striolo, a professor in OU’s Gallogly College of Engineering, co-authored an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that addresses a key challenge toward utilizing hydrates: their slow growth rates. He and his fellow researchers have discovered an unusual interfacial layer on the hydrate that impacts its growth rate.

Striolo is the college’s Asahi Glass Chair in Chemical Engineering and Lloyd and Jane Austin Presidential Professor. He is also the director of the college’s Online Master of Science in Sustainability and the Materials Science and Engineering doctoral program.

Integrated strategy unlocks 29.76% efficiency for all-perovskite tandem solar cells

Two stacked layers comprise tandem solar cells (TSCs), with each subcell absorbing different wavelengths of sunlight, which makes TSCs more efficient than single-layer solar cells. All-perovskite TSCs hold great promise for next-generation photovoltaics, with a theoretical efficiency exceeding 40%. However, their practical performance is hampered by mismatched crystallization kinetics between their wide-bandgap (WBG) and narrow-bandgap (NBG) subcells, leading to phase segregation and defect accumulation.

To address this challenge, a research group led by Prof. Ge Ziyi and Prof. Liu Chang from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed an innovative colloidal chemistry strategy to enhance the performance of these TSCs, achieving a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 29.76%. Their study is published in Joule.

The researchers designed a unified carboxylate-based modulator system using two graded carboxylate anions—tartrate (Ta-) and citrate (Cit-)—to precisely regulate the nucleation dynamics of the two subcells.

Racetrack-shaped lasers developed for bright, stable frequency combs

A new, miniature laser source developed by applied physicists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien) could soon pack the power of a laboratory-based spectrometer—an important workhorse tool for precision environmental gas analysis—onto a single microchip.

The device, a ring-shaped, “racetrack” quantum cascade laser, generates a specific type of light source, called a frequency comb, in the difficult-to-access mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. It was developed in the lab of Federico Capasso, the Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, in collaboration with co-senior author Benedikt Schwarz and colleagues at TU Wien.

The research was co-led by first author Ted Letsou, a postdoctoral researcher in the Capasso group, and Johannes Fuchsberger, a graduate student at TU Wien, and is published in Optica.

Next-generation optical sensor can read photon spin across UV-to-infrared wavelengths

A research team led by Professor Jiwoong Yang of the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at DGIST has developed next-generation optical sensor technology capable of precisely detecting not only the intensity and wavelength of light but also its rotational direction—the spin information of photons. The team successfully implemented a quantum-dot-based optical sensor that can detect circularly polarized light (CPL) across an ultra-wide spectral range—from ultraviolet to short-wave infrared—demonstrating photodetection performance comparable to that of commercial silicon optical sensors. The paper is published in Advanced Materials.

CPL refers to light in which the electric field rotates helically as it propagates. This is directly linked to the spin information of photons—the fundamental particles of light. This polarization information serves as a crucial signal in next-generation security and communication technologies, such as quantum communication, quantum cryptography, and photonic quantum information processing, which is why related optical sensor technologies are attracting significant worldwide attention.

Conventional circularly polarized light sensors typically require the light-absorbing material itself to possess a specific helical orientation, known as a chiral structure. This approach not only limits the range of usable materials but also confines detection to narrow spectral regions, such as ultraviolet or visible light. Extending this technology into the infrared region, which is essential for quantum communication and optical sensing, has previously posed a major technical challenge.

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