In case you missed it (ICYMI), here are some of the stories that made headlines in the world of cleanrooms and nanotechnology in the past week:

Researchers at Berkeley Lab have, for the first time, reengineered a building block of a geometric nanocompartment that occurs naturally in bacteria. A metal binding site was introduced to its shell — this will permit electrons to be transferred to and from the compartment, which offers a brand new functionality that greatly expands the potential of nanocompartments to serve as custom-made chemical factories. It’s hoped that this new technology can be used to create high-value chemical products on demand, like medicine.

Scientists in Singapore have developed a more efficient DNA technology to find and treat infectious diseases and cancer. The researchers used existing technology to come up with “aptamer,” a modified single-stranded DNA molecule that’s good for pharmaceutical applications since it’s able to specifically bind to any molecular target in the body such as proteins, viruses, bacteria, and cells.

Finally, an international collaboration led by Canadian scientists has presented new findings that may eventually lead to a theory of how superconductivity initiates at the atomic level. This is an important step in understanding how to harness the potential of materials that could provide lossless energy storage, levitating trains, and ultra-fast supercomputers. These findings represent the most direct experimental evidence to date of electronic nematicity as a universal feature in cuprate high-temperature superconductors.