Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Rapid antigen tests can quickly and conveniently tell a person that they are positive for COVID-19. However, because antibody-based tests aren’t very sensitive, they can fail to detect early infections with low viral loads. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sensors ("Molecularly Imprinted Polymer Nanoparticles Enable...
Edible, fluorescent silk tags can suss out fake medications
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Recent developments such as the explosion of online pharmacies and supply chain issues have made it easier for counterfeiters to profit from fake or adulterated medications. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science ("Edible Matrix Code with Photogenic Silk Proteins") have created edible tags with...
Real-time ultrafast humidity sensing optical sensor
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) The Hercules beetle native to South America has a fascinating trait of changing its shell colors depending on the external humidity conditions. This is because the inside of the beetle’s shell consists of porous lattice structure with square holes. When light of particular wavelengths hits...
Fixing AI systems
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) For the longest time, owners of Tesla cars have complained about “phantom braking”, the phenomenon of their vehicles suddenly stopping in response to imagined hazards of oncoming traffic or stationary objects on the roads. Yet when the company recalled a version of its Full Self-Driving...
Seeing more deeply into nanomaterials (w/video)
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) From designing new biomaterials to novel photonic devices, new materials built through a process called bottom-up nanofabrication, or self-assembly, are opening up pathways to new technologies with properties tuned at the nanoscale. However, to fully unlock the potential of these new materials, researchers need to...
A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines. The...
Engineers enlist AI to help scale up advanced solar cell manufacturing
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Perovskites are a family of materials that are currently the leading contender to potentially replace today’s silicon-based solar photovoltaics. They hold the promise of panels that are far thinner and lighter, that could be made with ultra-high throughput at room temperature instead of at hundreds...
Hubble sheds light on origins of supermassive black holes
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Astronomers have identified a rapidly growing black hole in the early universe that is considered a crucial "missing link" between young star-forming galaxies and the first supermassive black holes. They used data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to make this discovery. Until now, the monster,...
New polymer materials make fabricating optical interconnects easier
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Researchers have developed new polymer materials that are ideal for making the optical links necessary to connect chip-based photonic components with board-level circuits or optical fibers. The polymers can be used to easily create interconnects between photonic chips and optical printed circuit boards, the light-based...
Rotating blue laser light reveals unimagined dynamics in living cells
Apr 13, 2022 (Nanowerk News) When cities transform into a colorful world of lights as darkness falls, it’s often only possible to estimate their contours, which depending on the perspective can draw the attention to key details or trivia. In fluorescence microscopy, biological cells are marked with fluorescent dyes and...