Lifeboat Foundation

A previously unknown mechanism of active matter self-organization essential for bacterial cell division follows the motto “dying to align”: Misaligned filaments “die” spontaneously to form a ring structure at the center of the dividing cell. The study, led by the Šarić group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), was published in Nature Physics. The work could find applications in developing synthetic self-healing materials.

Atomic-scale 2D magnets can be polarized to represent binary states — the 1s and 0s of computing data. These can lead to far more dense and energy-efficient components.

Two teenagers won $50,000 for creating an ultrasonic microplastics filter, offering hope in the fight against plastic pollution.

The body is pretty good at repairing itself, but some parts of our anatomy struggle to bounce back after an injury.

One such material is cartilage – the spongy yet firm connective tissue that keeps our bones from rubbing and jarring against each other. Over time, the translucent or ‘hyaline’ components of cartilage can become heavily degraded, resulting in painful conditions like osteoarthritis and chondromalacia.

Scientists have been working on a way to regenerate hyaline cartilage for years, and now a team led by Northwestern University in the US has achieved a breakthrough. They have developed a biomaterial that, injected into damaged cartilage in living sheep, acted as a scaffold that promoted cartilage regrowth in active joints.

Fascinating study!

A new study suggests that cloud-to-ground lightning likely provided the necessary material for the first organisms on Earth to form.

How do astronauts cope with life onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and how can scientists study it? This is what a recent study published in PLoS ONE hopes to address as an international team of researchers used archaeological investigation strategies to ascertain how ISS crew members managed their lives in space, specifically pertaining to the astronauts’ habits of using and storing the various materials onboard the orbiting outpost. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand how humans cope with living in space for long periods of time, which could be useful for trips to the Moon and Mars, someday.

The study, known as the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment (SQuARE) experiment, was conducted over a 60-day period between January and March 2022 where six common locations onboard the ISS were designated as “squares”, which is a common archaeology strategy of digging pits to ascertain the most viable areas of further investigation. During the study, the astronauts photographed each square every day to ascertain how they were used, and the researchers would compare that to the location’s original purpose.

Helical foldamers are a class of artificial molecules that fold into well-defined helical structures like helices found in proteins and nucleic acids. They have garnered considerable attention as stimuli-responsive switchable molecules, tuneable chiral materials, and cooperative supramolecular systems due to their chiral and conformational switching properties.

Double-helical foldamers exhibit not only even stronger chiral properties but also unique properties, such as the transcription of chiral information from one chiral strand to another without chiral properties, enabling potential applications in higher-order structural control related to replication, like nucleic acids.

However, the artificial control of the chiral switching properties of such artificial molecules remains challenging due to the difficulty in balancing the dynamic properties required for switching and stability. Although various helical molecules have been developed in the past, reversal of twist direction in double-helix molecules and supramolecules has rarely been reported.

Shock experiments are widely used to understand the mechanical and electronic properties of matter under extreme conditions, like planetary impacts by meteorites. However, after the shock occurs, a clear description of the post-shock thermal state and its impacts on material properties is still lacking.

Soon, data storage centers are expected to consume almost 10% of the world’s energy generation. This increase is, among other things, due to intrinsic limitations of the materials used—ferromagnets. Consequently, this problem has ignited a quest for faster and more energy-efficient materials.