Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) When Carnegie Mellon University doctoral candidates I-Hsuan Kao and Ryan Muzzio started working together a switch flicked on. Then off. Working in the Department of Physics' Lab for Investigating Quantum Materials, Interfaces and Devices (LIQUID) Group, Kao, Muzzio and other research partners were able to...
Do ‘bouncing universes’ have a beginning?
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) In trying to understand the nature of the cosmos, some theorists propose that the universe expands and contracts in endless cycles. Because this behavior is hypothesized to be perpetual, the universe should have no beginning and no end — only eternal cycles of growing and...
Scientists offer blueprint for sustainable redesign of food systems
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) The researchers describe food systems designed not by the logic of growth such as efficiency and extraction, but by principles of sufficiency, regeneration, distribution, commons, and care. They argue that food systems can instead be the foundation of healthy communities, ecologies and economies. “For this...
Environmental impact of 57,000 multi-ingredient processed foods revealed
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A study estimating the environmental impact of 57,000 food products in the UK and Ireland has been published by an Oxford-led research team in the journal PNAS ("Estimating the environmental impacts of 57,000 food products"). The paper compares the environmental impacts of meat and meat...
Nanobiomimetic strategies for medicine
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk Spotlight) The defenses of the body's immune system tend to destroy synthetic nanoparticles and frequently they are captured and removed from the body within few minutes. This, of course, is a major barrier to the use of nanotechnology in medicine. In order to evade the host...
Gene editing via CRISPR/Cas9 can lead to cell toxicity and genome instability
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) CRISPR/Cas9 is a commonly used, very precise, gene editing technique whose development, by Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, was recognised with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Commonly known as “genetic scissors”, CRISPR allows the introduction of the desired DNA sequence into (virtually) any...
Robot helps reveal how ants pass on knowledge
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Scientists have developed a small robot to understand how ants teach one another. The team built the robot to mimic the behaviour of rock ants that use one-to-one tuition, in which an ant that has discovered a much better new nest can teach the route...
Nanopowder ceramics – in control of chaos
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Nature strives for chaos. That's a nice, comforting phrase when yet another coffee cup has toppled over the computer keyboard and you imagine you could wish the sugary, milky brew back into the coffee cup - where it had been just seconds before. But wishing...