Research & Development World

By Ken Strandberg The European X-ray Free-electron Laser (European XFEL), recently completed its first experiments that captured images of an antibiotic-disabling enzyme. Scientists use X-rays to bombard molecules and project molecular smatterings on a sensor that reconstructs what the target looks like.  With these high-energy X-rays we now have 3D visualizations of actual molecules, like…

Thermo Fisher Scientific announces the launch of a next-generation, compressor-free plate sealer, designed to alleviate the maintenance burden on operators, while offering unparalleled process customization capabilities, intuitive operation and significant work efficiencies. Biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and academic research laboratories can now benefit from a system capable of simplifying the plate sealing process and enabling improved reliability…

Who ever said bioengineers can’t get their groove on? The Rice University team led by Antonios Mikos says otherwise with its development of a groovy method to seed sophisticated, 3D-printed tissue-engineering scaffolds with living cells to help heal injuries. The researchers are literally carving grooves into plastic threads used to build the scaffolds. The grooves…

  Computer chips use billions of tiny switches, called transistors, to process information. The more transistors on a chip, the faster the computer. A material shaped like a one-dimensional DNA helix might further push the limits on a transistor’s size. The material comes from a rare earth element called tellurium. Researchers found that the material,…

Virginia Commonwealth University researchers in the College of Engineering Department of Chemical and Life Science Engineering will receive a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop next-generation rechargeable batteries. By redesigning the materials inside lithium-ion batteries, which power everything from smartphones to electric vehicles, the researchers believe they can significantly extend battery life,…

Photothermal therapy (PTT)–a proposed treatment for diseases such as antibacterial-resistant infections and cancer–makes use of a chemical agent that absorbs the light of an infrared laser and dissipates that energy as local heat capable of killing cells, including cancer cells. But most of the chemical agents used for PTT are toxic to human cells and…

An international team of researchers has discovered the hydrogen atoms in a metal hydride material are much more tightly spaced than had been predicted for decades — a feature that could possibly facilitate superconductivity at or near room temperature and pressure. Such a superconducting material, carrying electricity without any energy loss due to resistance, would…

When there are several processes going on at once, establishing cause-and-effect relationships is difficult. This scenario holds true for a class of high-temperature superconductors known as the cuprates. Discovered nearly 35 years ago,  these copper-oxygen compounds can conduct electricity without resistance under certain conditions. They must be chemically modified (“doped”) with additional atoms that introduce…

A modern airplane’s fuselage is made from multiple sheets of different composite materials, like so many layers in a phyllo-dough pastry. Once these layers are stacked and molded into the shape of a fuselage, the structures are wheeled into warehouse-sized ovens and autoclaves, where the layers fuse together to form a resilient, aerodynamic shell. Now…