Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers say they were inspired by living things from trees to shellfish.

They were inspired by living things, from trees to shellfish. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin set their collective advanced minds on creating a plastic that would mimic real life. It would be like many life forms that are soft and stretchy in some places and hard and rigid in others.

Their success, a first ever, using only light and a catalyst to change the properties such as hardness and elasticity in molecules of the same type. The resulting material is ten times stronger than natural rubber and could very well change flexibility of electronics and robotics.

Continue reading “Scientists develop ‘smart plastic’ that changes its form from soft to hard in sunlight” »

Engineers at Duke University have developed a novel delivery system for cancer treatment and demonstrated its potential against one of the disease’s most troublesome forms. In newly published research in mice with pancreatic cancer, the scientists showed how a radioactive implant could completely eliminate tumors in the majority of the rodents, demonstrating what they say is the most effective treatment ever studied in these pre-clinical models.

Pancreatic cancer is notoriously difficult to diagnose and treat, with tumor cells of this type highly evasive and loaded with mutations that make them resistant to many drugs. It accounts for just 3.2 percent of all cancers, yet is the third leading cause of cancer-related death. One way of tackling it is by deploying chemotherapy to hold the tumor cells in a state that makes them vulnerable to radiation, and then hitting the tumor with a targeted radiation beam.

But doing so in a way that attacks the tumor but doesn’t expose the patient to heavy doses of radiation is a fine line to tread, and raises the risk of severe side effects. Another method scientists are exploring is the use of implants that can be placed directly inside the tumor to attack it with radioactive materials from within. They have made some inroads using titanium shells to encase the radioactive samples, but these can cause damage to the surrounding tissue.

The study describes the integration of cell division machinery in synthetic cells, a breakthrough in the field.

For decades, researchers have been fascinated by the process of cell division, a highly intricate process driven by a precise cocktail of components. To better understand this phenomenon, researchers have been trying to create synthetic cells that mimic nature.

While it will take some time before we have fully functional synthetic cells, a study led by researchers from DWI—Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials has brought this goal one step closer. The study describes the integration of cell division machinery in synthetic cells, a breakthrough in the field.

CERN’s “irradiation station” will investigate the effect of radiation on commercial materials, such as lubricants and gaskets, that are used regularly in accelerator beamlines and other radiation environments.

While automated manufacturing is ubiquitous today, it was once a nascent field birthed by inventors such as Oliver Evans, who is credited with creating the first fully automated industrial process, in flour mill he built and gradually automated in the late 1700s. The processes for creating automated structures or machines are still very top-down, requiring humans, factories, or robots to do the assembling and making.

However, the way nature does assembly is ubiquitously bottom-up; animals and plants are self-assembled at a cellular level, relying on proteins to self-fold into target geometries that encode all the different functions that keep us ticking. For a more bio-inspired, bottom-up approach to assembly, then, human-architected materials need to do better on their own. Making them scalable, selective, and reprogrammable in a way that could mimic nature’s versatility means some teething problems, though.

Continue reading “Reprogrammable materials selectively self-assemble” »

Field-effect transistors (FETs) are transistors in which the resistance of most of the electrical current can be controlled by a transverse electric field. Over the past decade or so, these devices have proved to be very valuable solutions for controlling the flow of current in semiconductors.

To further develop FETs, electronics engineers worldwide have recently been trying to reduce their size. While these down-scaling efforts have been found to increase the device’s speed and lower the power consumption, they are also associated with short-channel effects (i.e., unfavorable effects that occur when an FET’s channel length is approximately equal to the space charge regions of source and drain junctions within its substrate).

These undesirable effects, which include barrier lowering and velocity saturation, could be suppressed by using 2D semiconductor channels with high carrier mobilities and ultrathin high–k dielectrics (i.e., materials with high dielectric constants). Integrating 2D semiconductors with dielectrics with similar oxide thicknesses has been found to be highly challenging.

UCLA / Flexible Research Group.

The study was published today in the journal Science Robotics.

“Approximately 200,000 times thinner than human hair.”

New energy-efficient devices are made possible by the thinnest ferroelectric material ever created, thanks to the University of California Berkeley and Argonne National Laboratory.

As a result of this development, intriguing material behavior at small scales could reduce energy demands for computing, revealed ANL.

This work studies how a lattice of tunable beams can learn desired behaviors and what factors affect mechanical learning.