May 30, 2023 (Nanowerk News) While it can take years for the pharmaceutical industry to create medicines capable of treating or curing human disease, a new study suggests that using generative artificial intelligence could vastly accelerate the drug-development process. Today, most drug discovery is carried out by human chemists who...
Extracting a clean fuel from water
May 30, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A plentiful supply of clean energy is lurking in plain sight. It is the hydrogen we can extract from water (H2O) using renewable energy. Scientists are seeking low-cost methods for producing clean hydrogen from water to replace fossil fuels, as part of the quest to...
Quest for alien signals in the heart of the Milky Way takes off
May 30, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Akshay Suresh, a graduate student at Cornell University, spearheads an extraordinary scientific endeavor -- a groundbreaking mission to uncover periodic signals emanating from the core of the Milky Way called the Breakthrough Listen Investigation for Periodic Spectral Signals (BLIPSS). Such repetitive patterns could be the...
The making of a Mona Lisa hologram
May 30, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Holograms are often displayed in science fiction as colorful, life-sized projections. But what seems like the technology of the future is actually the technology of the present, and now it has been used to recreate the Mona Lisa. In Applied Physics Reviews ("Deep-Learning-Aided Metasurface Design...
Novel solar desalination system for remote areas
May 30, 2023 (Nanowerk News) With summer temperatures soaring, the spectre of water scarcity looms large. As a possible solution to increase the availability of clean, potable water, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a novel thermal desalination system which can work using solar energy. The...
A novel high-throughput method for screening protein-secreting microbial strains
May 30, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A unique method to screen large-scale libraries for industrially useful bacterial strains was recently developed by Tokyo Tech researchers. The simple approach combines biosensors and microfluidics to quickly identify mutant strains that secrete large amounts of industrially useful proteins, opening the doors to more applications,...
New research on molecular response to nanoparticles reveals power of nanoinformatics
May 29, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Researchers have discovered a new response mechanism specific to exposure to nanoparticles that is common to multiple species. By analysing a large collection of datasets concerning the molecular response to nanomaterials, they have revealed an ancestral epigenetic mechanism of defence that explains how different species,...
Robot centipedes go for a walk
May 29, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Researchers from the Department of Mechanical Science and Bioengineering at Osaka University have invented a new kind of walking robot that takes advantage of dynamic instability to navigate. By changing the flexibility of the couplings, the robot can be made to turn without the need...
Laser-induced monolayer graphene nanoprocessing
May 26, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Graphene has revolutionized materials science since its discovery in 2004, with its high electron mobility, mechanical strength, and thermal conductivity. But processing graphene at the micro/nanoscale is a challenging process that often involves large-scale equipment and complex operations. Now, Tohoku University researchers have applied their...
A celebration of artificial light sources
If you have wondered how we managed to progress from a simple lightbulb to energy-efficient LEDs, put your doubts to rest now. Delve into From Edison to LEDs: The Science and Story of Light Sources to embark on a fascinating journey to see how the earliest attempts at creating electric...