Jan 23, 2025 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Bacterial eye infections blind millions globally each year, and current antibiotics increasingly fail to stop them. When bacteria develop resistance to drugs, they can withstand our most powerful medications - leaving doctors with few options to save patients' vision. This crisis hits hardest in cases...
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Fox and rabbit in the quantum world
Jan 23, 2025 (Nanowerk News) Researchers at the University of Basel have shown that quantum systems can have antagonistic interactions, too – one agent attracts the other, but the other way around, there is a repulsion. Such interactions could be realized using cold atoms that are coupled to each other....
Detecting edges at the speed of light
Jan 23, 2025 (Nanowerk News) Physicists from the group of Jorik van de Groep at the UvA-Institute of Physics have devised a new method that can be used to detect edges of images in an extremely energy efficient and ultrafast way. The results were recently published in the journal ACS...
Finding better photovoltaic materials faster with AI
Jan 23, 2025 (Nanowerk News) Perovskite solar cells are a flexible and sustainable alternative to conventional silicon-based solar cells. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) are part of an international team that was able to find – within only a few weeks – new organic molecules that increase...
Can DNA-nanoparticle motors reach the same speed as motor proteins?
Jan 22, 2025 (Nanowerk News) DNA-nanoparticle motors are exactly as they sound: tiny artificial motors that use the structures of DNA and RNA to propel motion by enzymatic RNA degradation. Essentially, chemical energy is converted into mechanical motion by biasing the Brownian motion. The DNA-nanoparticle motor uses the "burnt-bridge" Brownian...
3D architected materials that adapt and protect (w/video)
Jan 22, 2025 (Nanowerk News) Experiments from the Caltech lab of Chiara Daraio, G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, have yielded a fascinating new type of matter, neither granular nor crystalline, that responds to some stresses as a fluid would...
Catching a Black Hole’s turbulent accretion flow
Jan 22, 2025 (Nanowerk News) Using observations from 2017 and 2018, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration has advanced our understanding of the supermassive black hole at the centre of Messier 87 (M87*). This study marks a significant step towards multi-year analysis at horizon scales, in order to investigate the...
Astronomers thought they understood fast radio bursts. A recent one calls that into question.
Jan 22, 2025 (Nanowerk News) Astronomer Calvin Leung was excited last summer to crunch data from a newly commissioned radio telescope to precisely pinpoint the origin of repeated bursts of intense radio waves — so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) — emanating from somewhere in the northern constellation Ursa Minor. Leung,...
New research uncovers exotic electron crystal in graphene
Jan 22, 2025 (Nanowerk News) Researchers from the University of British Columbia, the University of Washington, and Johns Hopkins University have identified a new class of quantum states in a custom-engineered graphene structure. Published in Nature ("Moiré-driven topological electronic crystals in twisted graphene"), the study reports the discovery of topological...
Smart glasses detect eye position without cameras using perovskite light sensors
Jan 22, 2025 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Eye tracking holds immense potential for enabling intuitive human-computer interaction, yet existing approaches remain cumbersome. Camera-based systems require complex image processing and raise privacy concerns. Contact lens sensors can irritate the eye. Alternative methods measuring electrical signals from eye muscles provide inconsistent results. Despite decades...