…laser upgrade opens new research possibilities. A new addition to the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator Center means researchers can explore extreme plasmas, radiation biology, materials for quantum computers, and beyond. Things are looking brighter than ever at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center run by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A recently completed upgrade will expand the center’s capabilities into new areas, including studies of particle acceleration, extremely hot plasmas, cancer treatment techniques, and materials for…
Photochemistry… Rather than being released into the atmosphere and exacerbating the problem of climate change, CO2 can also be used as a raw material for substances required in industrial processes, such as formic acid or methanol. The conversion of CO2 has already been investigated in detail in laboratory studies, with nanodiamonds serving as an environmentally friendly photocatalyst. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM are now working with partners to turn this reaction into a contin-uous process…
Precise therapeutics testing — preventing animal testing. To prevent testing on animals and create even more precise ways of testing therapeutics, the pharmaceutical industry is increasingly turning to human immune cells. However, the availability of cells like these has been limited to date. Now, Fraunhofer researchers have succeeded in scaling the production of customized immune cells from laboratory up to industrial level. Human immune cells and immune cell preparations are gaining an increasingly prominent role in modern medicine – in…
New Fraunhofer safety technology reduces transportation accidents. Warehouses are home to heavy volumes of traffic. The numbers of industrial trucks (pallet trucks, forklift vehicles and the like) traversing their aisles are growing especially large – in facilities that are themselves increasing in size all the time. Under these conditions, accidents become an inevitability even if numerous safety measures are put in place. Now, optical sensors on industrial trucks might provide warehouse staff with better protection as they do their jobs….
A Europe-wide consortium of 19 universities, research institutions, and companies will investigate indoor air pollution over the next four years. The Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) in Leipzig is the only partner in Germany and will develop an innovative tool to monitor indoor air quality. By the end of 2026, the consortium, led by the Brussels-based think tank Lisbon Council, aims to provide scientifically sound information for legislation so that guidelines for indoor air quality can be set and…
How quantum optics illuminates the nature of the quark. Scientists from the University of Rostock, Germany were able to recreate fundamental physical properties from the realm of elementary particle physics in a photonic system. The results are published in the renowned scientific journal “Nature Physics”. In their fundamental research, experimental physicists routinely bring giant yet intricate machinery to bear: Particle accelerators of enormous size smash together microscopic particles at velocities close to the speed of light, releasing unimaginable amounts of…
Device could advance quantum computing and quantum networks. Optical photons are ideal carriers of quantum information. But to work together in a quantum computer or network, they need to have the same color — or frequency — and bandwidth. Changing a photon’s frequency requires altering its energy, which is particularly challenging on integrated photonic chips. Recently, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) developed an integrated electro-optic modulator that can efficiently change the frequency…
New research helps explain the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and predicts its severit. Alzheimer’s disease has always had its puzzles and contradictions. For Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researcher Vladislav Petyuk, whose research on the progressive, age-related disease spans over a decade, some of the struggles have come from studies where “we can only connect the dots a pair at a time.” Petyuk’s research touches multiple areas in biological and computational science at PNNL. He has produced dozens of publications…
Thanks to laboratory produced human mini-retinas, researchers were able to observe complex changes in the retina as they occur in macular degeneration. This enabled them to discover the so-called cell extrusion as a potential mechanism for neurodegenerative diseases. Visual cells in the human retina may not simply die in some diseases, but are mechanically transported out of the retina beforehand. Scientists from DZNE and the Center for Regenerative Therapies Dresden (CRTD) at TU Dresden have now discovered this. For their…
Effective thermal management with programmable materials. Energy is scarce – and like all scarce things, it comes at a price. That is why Germany needs to greatly reduce its energy consumption. There is significant potential for this in the area of heating and cooling energy which accounts for a large proportion of Germany’s energy consumption. Innovative materials that can be programmed to control heat transition can be a valuable tool in this scenario. The use of materials like these could,…
Until now, it has been extremely tedious to perform measurements with high sensitivity and high spatial resolution using X-ray light in the tender energy range of 1.5 – 5.0 keV. Yet this X-ray light is ideal for investigating energy materials such as batteries or catalysts, but also biological systems. A team from HZB has now solved this problem: The newly developed monochromator optics increase the photon flux in the tender energy range by a factor of 100 and thus enable…
Airborne campaign solves parts of the riddle of clouds. In a major field campaign in 2020, Dr. Raphaela Vogel who is now at Universität Hamburg’s Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN) and an international team from the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique in Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg analyzed observational data they and others collected in fields of cumulus clouds near the Atlantic island of Barbados. Their analysis revealed that these clouds’ contribution to…
Automated reaction path search method predicts accurate stereochemistry of pericyclic reactions using only target molecule structure. Researchers at the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery (WPI-ICReDD) have demonstrated the expanded use of a computational method called the Artificial Force Induced Reaction (AFIR) method, predicting pericyclic reactions with accurate stereoselectivity based only on information about the target product molecule. The accurate prediction of a molecule’s stereochemistry—i.e., the 3D arrangement of its constituent atoms—is unprecedented for such an automated reaction path…
… drives a deeper understanding of ALS, Alzheimer’s. Oregon State University scientists have taken a key step toward better understanding neurodegenerative diseases by using a suite of biophysical techniques to learn more about a motor protein whose malfunction is associated with many disorders. The study, published in the journal eLife, represents important progress toward improved care for the millions of people around the world affected by conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. Neurodegenerative…
Researchers at Google Quantum AI have produced quantum states that are resilient to decoherence that typically plagues quantum computers. Physicists at Google Quantum AI have used their quantum computer to study a type of effective particle that is more resilient to environmental disturbances that can degrade quantum calculations. These effective particles, known as Majorana edge modes, form as a result of a collective excitation of multiple individual particles, like ocean waves form from the collective motions of water molecules. Majorana…
Understanding of cell motility’s evolution swims forward! The origin of all biological movements, including walking, swimming, or flying, can be traced back to cellular movements; however, little is known about how cell motility arose in evolution. A research team led by graduate student Hana Kiyama, from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka City University, and Professor Makoto Miyata, from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka Metropolitan University, introduced seven proteins, believed to be directly involved in allowing Spiroplasma…
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