Lifeboat Foundation

Recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the use of chemical weapons in the Syria conflict have provided a stark reminder of the plethora of chemical and biological threats that soldiers, medical personnel and first responders face during routine and emergency operations.

Personnel safety relies on protective equipment which, unfortunately, still leaves much to be desired. For example, high breathability (i.e., the transfer of water vapor from the wearer’s body to the outside world) is critical in protective military uniforms to prevent heat-stress and exhaustion when soldiers are engaged in missions in contaminated environments. The same materials (adsorbents or barrier layers) that provide protection in current garments also detrimentally inhibit breathability.

To tackle these challenges, a multi-institutional team of researchers led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist Francesco Fornasiero has developed a smart, breathable fabric designed to protect the wearer against biological and chemical warfare agents. Material of this type could be used in clinical and medical settings as well. The work was recently published online in Advanced Functional Materials and represents the successful completion of Phase I of the project, which is funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency through the Dynamic Multifunctional Materials for a Second Skin “D[MS]²” program.

A group of scientists led by Teruki Honma of the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research and including collaborators from Hoshi University and Mizuho Information & Research Institute have released key data on the proteins associated with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. As a means to facilitate the development of anti-COVID-19 therapeutics, crystal structures of dozens of drug targets including the virus’s main protease, RNA dependent RNA polymerase, and S protein have been published by Protein Data Bank (PDB). The research group has performed ab initio quantum chemical calculations based on the crystal structures using the fragment molecule orbital method, and published the data at FMODB as a database for data acquired using that method. According Honma, “We hope that this data will help scientists quickly develop therapies for this devastating virus. We will continue to perform FMO calculations on newly released protein structures and update our data. This data will be important by allowing an understanding of the precise energy data for interactions between drug candidates and virus proteins.”

The data is available at FMODB: The database of quantum mechanical data based on the FMO method.

There is no vaccine or specific treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2.

Since the outbreak began in late 2019, researchers have been racing to learn more about SARS-CoV-2, which is a strain from a family of viruses known as coronavirus for their crown-like shape.

Northeastern chemical engineering professor Thomas Webster, who specializes in developing nano-scale medicine and technology to treat diseases, is part of a contingency of scientists that are contributing ideas and technology to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fight the COVID-19 outbreak.

Continue reading “Here’s how nanoparticles could help us get closer to a treatment for COVID-19” »

Recently, Prof. Yang Xueming from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. Yang Tiangang from the Southern University of Science and Technology discussed significant advances in the study of quantum resonances in atomic and molecular collisions at near absolute zero temperature. Their article was published in Science on May 7.

The rules of quantum mechanics govern all atomic and molecular collision processes. Understanding the quantum nature of atomic and molecular collisions is essential for understanding energy transfer and chemical reaction processes, especially in the low collisional energy region, where quantum effect is the most prominent.

A remarkable feature of quantum nature in atomic and molecular collision is quantum scattering resonances, but probing them experimentally has been a great challenge due to the transient nature of these resonances.

Exotic atoms in which electrons are replaced by other subatomic particles of the same charge allow deep insights into the quantum world. After eight years of ongoing research, a group led by Masaki Hori, senior physicist at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, has now succeeded in a challenging experiment: In a helium atom, they replaced an electron with a pion in a specific quantum state and verified the existence of this long-lived “pionic helium” for the very first time. The usually short-lived pion could thereby exist 1000 times longer than it normally would in other varieties of matter. Pions belong to an important family of particles that determine the stability and decay of atomic nuclei. The pionic helium atom enables scientists to study pions in an extremely precise manner using laser spectroscopy. The research is published in this week’s edition of Nature.

For eight years, the group worked on this challenging experiment, which has the potential to establish a new field of research. The team experimentally demonstrated for the first time that long-lived pionic helium atoms really exist. “It is a form of chemical reaction that happens automatically,” explains Hori. The exotic atom was first theoretically predicted in 1964 after experiments at that time pointed toward its existence. However, it was considered extremely difficult to verify this prediction experimentally. Usually, in an atom, the extremely short-lived pion decays quickly. However, in pionic helium, it can be conserved in a sense so it lives 1000 times longer than it normally does in other atoms.

North Korea has an active nuclear weapons program & has repeatedly tested nuclear explosive devices. It is also believed to possess biological & chemical weapons.

I shared about this startup in January, now it’s hitting US Markets. The Israeli startup Sonovia, which sped up efforts to manufacture masks using its anti-pathogen fabric at the start of the coronavirus crisis in Israel, has launched commercial sales.

“When coronavirus started, we were an Israeli startup,” Dr. Jason Migdal, a research scientist with Sonovia, told The Jerusalem Post. “Now, we are a commercial business that is having success internationally.”

Sonovia developed an almost-permanent, ultrasonic, fabric-finishing technology for mechanical impregnation of zinc oxide nanoparticles into textiles.

Continue reading “Israeli masks designed with unique anti-pathogen fabric enter US market” »

Rice University researchers have discovered a hidden symmetry in the chemical kinetic equations scientists have long used to model and study many of the chemical processes essential for life.

The find has implications for drug design, genetics and biomedical research and is described in a study published on April 21, 2020, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. To illustrate the biological ramifications, study co-authors Oleg Igoshin, Anatoly Kolomeisky and Joel Mallory of Rice’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) used three wide-ranging examples: protein folding, enzyme catalysis and motor protein efficiency.

Igoshin said the symmetry “wasn’t that hard to prove, but no one noticed it before.”

Spinels are oxides with chemical formulas of the type AB₂O₄, where A is a divalent metal cation (positive ion), B is a trivalent metal cation, and O is oxygen. Spinels are valued for their beauty, which derives from the molecules’ spatial configurations, but spinels in which the trivalent cation B consists of the element chrome (Cr) are interesting for a reason that has nothing to do with aesthetics: They have magnetic properties with an abundance of potential technological applications, including gas sensors, drug carriers, data storage media, and components of telecommunications systems.

A study by Brazilian and Indian researchers investigated a peculiar kind of spinel: zinc-doped manganese chromite. Nanoparticles of this material, described by the formula Mn_0.5 Zn_0.5 Cr₂O₄ [where manganese (Mn) and zinc (Zn) compose the A-site divalent cation], were synthesized in the laboratory and characterized by calculations based on density functional theory (DFT), a method derived from quantum mechanics that is used in solid-state physics and chemistry to resolve complex crystal structures.

The material’s structural, electronic, vibrational and magnetic properties were determined by X-ray diffraction, neutron diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy. A report of the study has been published in the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials with the title “Structural, electronic, vibrational and magnetic properties of Zn2+ substituted MnCr2O4 nanoparticles.”