Lifeboat Foundation

MIT researchers and colleagues have demonstrated a way to precisely control the size, composition, and other properties of nanoparticles key to the reactions involved in a variety of clean energy and environmental technologies. They did so by leveraging ion irradiation, a technique in which beams of charged particles bombard a material.

They went on to show that nanoparticles created this way have superior performance over their conventionally made counterparts.

“The materials we have worked on could advance several technologies, from fuel cells to generate CO₂-free electricity to the production of clean hydrogen feedstocks for the chemical industry [through electrolysis cells],” says Bilge Yildiz, leader of the work and a professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Autoimmune disorders are among the most prevalent chronic diseases across the globe. Emerging treatments for autoimmune disorders focus on “adoptive cell therapies,” or those using cells from a patient’s own body to achieve immunosuppression. These therapeutic cells are recognized by the patient’s body as “self,” therefore limiting side effects, and are specifically engineered to localize the intended therapeutic effect.

In treating autoimmune diseases, current adoptive cell therapies have largely centered around the regulatory T cell (T_reg), which is defined by the expression of the Forkhead box protein 3, orFoxp3. Although T_regs offer great potential, using them for therapeutic purposes remains a major challenge. In particular, current delivery methods result in inefficient engineering of T cells.

T_regs only compose approximately 5%–10% of circulating peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Furthermore, T_regs lack more specific surface markers that differentiate them from other T cell populations. These hurdles make it difficult to harvest, purify and grow T_regs to therapeutically relevant numbers. Although there are additional tissue-resident T_regs in non-lymphoid organs such as in skeletal muscle and visceral adipose tissue, these T_regs are severely inaccessible and low in number.

A new device that can be swallowed like a pill can track vital signs such as breathing and heart rate from inside the body.

Left: Ben Pless Right: Traverso Lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

“This device can help diagnose and monitor many health conditions without requiring hospital visits, which can make healthcare more accessible and supportive for patients,” says Giovanni Traverso, the lead author of the study, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

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Metamaterials are products of engineering wizardry. They are made from everyday polymers, ceramics, and metals. And when constructed precisely at the microscale, in intricate architectures, these ordinary materials can take on extraordinary properties.

With the help of computer simulations, engineers can play with any combination of microstructures to see how certain materials can transform, for instance, into sound-focusing acoustic lenses or lightweight, bulletproof films.

But simulations can only take a design so far. To know for sure whether a metamaterial will stand up to expectation, physically testing them is a must. But there’s been no reliable way to push and pull on metamaterials at the microscale, and to know how they will respond, without contacting and physically damaging the structures in the process.

As information and communication technologies (ICT) process data, they convert electricity into heat. Already today, the global ICT ecosystem’s CO₂ footprint rivals that of aviation. It turns out, however, that a big part of the energy consumed by computer processors doesn’t go into performing calculations. Instead, the bulk of the energy used to process data is spent shuttling bytes between the memory to the processor.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Electronics, researchers from EPFL’s School of Engineering in the Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) present a new processor that tackles this inefficiency by integrating data processing and storage onto a single device, a so-called in-memory processor.

They broke new ground by creating the first in-memory processor based on a two-dimensional semiconductor material to comprise more than 1,000 transistors, a key milestone on the path to industrial production.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pBk6TweYZHE

The most powerful telescope ever built.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope that has been designed to study the universe in infrared light. It is the largest and most powerful telescope ever built, and it is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.
JWST was launched on December 25, 2021, and it is now operational. The telescope is located at the second Lagrange point (L2) of the Sun-Earth system, which is about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth.

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CAR T treatments help revolutionize treatment of blood cancer. Now, researchers are engineering immune cells to take aim at solid tumors.

Einstein’s fascination with light, considered quirky at the time, would lead him down the path to a brand new theory of physics.

Living half a century before Einstein, a Scotsman, James Clerk Maxwell, revealed a powerful unification and universalization of nature, taking the disparate sciences of electricity and magnetism and merging them into one communion. It was a titanic tour-de-force that compressed decades of tangled experimental results and hazy theoretical insights into a tidy set of four equations that govern a wealth of phenomena. And through Maxwell’s efforts was born a second great force of nature, electromagnetism, which describes, again in a mere four equations, everything from static shocks, the invisible power of magnets, the flow of electricity, and even radiation – that is, light – itself.

At the time Einstein’s fascination with electromagnetism was considered unfashionable. While electromagnetism is now a cornerstone of every young physicist’s education, in the early 20^th century it was seen as nothing more than an interesting bit of theoretical physics, but really something that those more aligned in engineering should study deeply. Though Einstein was no engineer, as a youth his mind burned with a simple thought experiment: what would happen if you could ride a bicycle so quickly that you raced beside a beam of light? What would the light look like from the privileged perspective?

The process of washing has inspired a new method for engineering efficient lithium-metal batteries.

Vi73777/iStock.

Scientists have long been trying to successfully switch from lithium-ion to lithium-metal batteries. However, there is one issue that has been causing a delay in this transition: traditional electrolytes do not perform well in metal-based batteries.

Continue reading “Soap inspires scientists to create longer-lasting batteries” »