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Category: chemistry – Page 104

Surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) is a powerful fingerprint analysis and detection technique that plays an important role in the fields of food safety, environmental protection, bio-imaging and hazardous substance identification. Electromagnetic enhancement (EM) and chemical enhancement (CM) are the two recognized mechanisms of action for amplifying Raman signals.

EM originates from the localized surface plasmonic resonance effect of noble metal nanostructures such as gold, silver, and copper, while CM originates from the charge transfer between the substrate and the probe molecules. In principle, the charge transfer efficiency depends on the coupling of the incident laser energy to the energy levels of the substrate-molecule system.

Compared to EM-based SERS substrates, CM-based SERS substrates are usually made of including semiconductor oxides, metal carbides, and graphene and its evolutions, which have weaker signal enhancement capabilities. However, the advantages of CM-based SERS substrate, such as high specificity, homogeneity and biocompatibility, have attracted the attention of researchers.

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The fact that nanoparticle and polymer hybrid materials can often combine the advantages of each has been demonstrated in several fields. Embedding PNCs into polymer is an effective strategy to enhance the PNCs stability and polymer can endow the PNCs with other positive effects based on different structure and functional groups.

The uniform distribution of PNCs in is critical to the properties of the nanocomposites and the aggregation of PNCs induced by high surface energy has a severe influence on the performance of related applications. As such, the loading fraction is limited owing to the phase separation between PNCs and polymer.

Chemical interaction between PNCs and polymer is necessary to suppress the phase separation. Meanwhile, most of the fabrication methods of PNCs/polymer nanocomposites are spin coating, swelling-shrinking and electrospinning based on the in-situ synthesis of PNCs in polymer matrix and physical mixing, but extremely few works can achieve the fabrication of PNCs/ nanocomposites by bulk polymerization.

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Designing a heat engine capable of producing maximum power while maintaining maximum efficiency has long been a significant challenge in physics and engineering. Practical heat engines are constrained by a theoretical limit to their efficiency, known as the Carnot limit, which sets a cap on how much heat can be converted to useful work.

In a breakthrough, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) have devised a novel “micro heat engine” that has overcome this limitation at the lab scale. The study was recently published in the journal Nature Communications

<em> Nature Communications </em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access, multidisciplinary, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and earth sciences. It began publishing in 2010 and has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.

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How are synapses formed, those points of contact that allow the transmission of information from one neuron to the other? Working with an international team, researchers from the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie (FMP) have now uncovered a crucial mechanism and elucidated the identity of the axonal transport vesicles that generates synapses. The findings provide an important basis for promoting the regeneration of nerve cells and counteracting the aging process in the future. The results have just been published in the journal Science.

Whether in the brain or in the muscles, wherever there are nerve cells, there are synapses. These contact points between neurons form the basis for the transmission of excitation, i.e. communication between neurons. As in any communication process, there is a sender and a receiver: Nerve cell processes called axons generate and transmit electrical signals thereby acting as signal senders. Synapses are points of contact between axonal nerve terminals (the pre-synapse) and post-synaptic neurons. At these synapses, the electrical impulse is converted into chemical messengers that are received and sensed by the post-synapses of the neighboring neuron. The messengers are released from special membrane sacs called synaptic vesicles.

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Toxins high-cite paper🤩

Title: ☎Dr. Sara Ragucci and Dr. Antimo Di Maro.

Read this review to have an overview of Mushrooms:

Here, we report the current status of the bioactive peptides isolated and characterized from mushrooms during the last 20 years, considering ‘peptide’ a succession from to 2 to 100 amino acid residues. According to this accepted biochemical definition, we adopt ~10 kDa as the upper limit of molecular weight for a peptide. In light of this, a careful revision of data reported in the literature was carried out. The search revealed that in the works describing the characterization of bioactive peptides from mushrooms, not all the peptides have been correctly classified according to their molecular weight, considering that some fungal proteins (10 kDa MW) have been improperly classified as ‘peptides’. Moreover, the biological action of each of these peptides, the principles of their isolation as well as the source/mushroom species were summarized.

Continue reading “An Updated Review of Bioactive Peptides from Mushrooms in a Well-Defined Molecular Weight Range” | >

Emmett Short discusses these comments on this episode of Lifespan News.

But first, the mad scientist David Sinclair, this time with Peter Diamandis at Abundance 360, giving more details into human trials for the genetic engineering side of the technology versus the chemical and pill side of the technology. Which would you want more? We’ll also hear David’s thoughts on how AI will affect the advancement of this tech. Spoiler: A lot. I’m going to play the best parts and add my commentary along the way.

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When someone dies in the US, the vast majority of the time, their body is either embalmed, placed in a coffin, and buried in a cemetery, or cremated and the ashes returned to their loved ones in an urn — but those aren’t the only options.

A growing number of funeral directors, startups, and nonprofits are providing people with alternative ways to have their bodies honored after death — suggesting that the funeral landscape of tomorrow won’t be so binary.

Traditional burial and cremation has a cost for the environment, releasing chemicals into the ground or greenhouse gasses into the air, but a number of other funeral options are showing that death can be green.

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Lung cancer is the third most common cancer in the U.S. and there have been more than 235,000 new cases of lung cancer in 2021. While this figure is significant, the rate of new lung and bronchus cancer cases is decreasing, in part because more people have stopped smoking. This trend, along with innovations in early detection and treatment, is also reducing the number of lung cancer deaths.

Dr. Robert Taylor Ripley, associate professor of surgery in the Division of General Thoracic Surgery, is an expert in mesothelioma and thoracic surgical oncology. In the following Q&A, he discusses common causes of lung cancer, risks and the latest treatments.

Q: What are the most common causes of lung cancer? A: Smoking cigarettes is the most common cause, but others include secondhand smoke and environmental inhalants. We see a fair number of patients with lung cancer who have never smoked. Exposure to diesel exhaust or other chemicals may also cause lung cancer in some non-smokers.

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The Melanoma Treating Soap (MTS) was created using cancer-fighting chemicals, mainly Imidazoquinoline, integrated with a nanolipid-based particle transporter.

As child prodigies emerge in the world of innovation at younger ages than ever before, a 14-year-old student named Heman Bekele, residing in Fairfax, Virginia, developed a soap called MTS (Melanoma Treating Soap) to treat skin cancer.

Bekele’s efforts earned him the top prize in the 3M Young Scientist’s Challenge this year, a competition that motivates children to devise innovative solutions for common issues.

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Nanotechnology sounds like a futuristic development, but we already have it in the form of CPU manufacturing. More advanced nanotech could be used to create independent mobile entities like nanobots. One of the main challenges is selecting the right chemicals, elements, and structures that actually perform a desired task. Currently, we create more chemically oriented than computationally oriented nanobots, but we still have to deal with the quantum effects at tiny scale.

One of the most important applications of nanotechnology is to create nanomedicine, where the technology interacts with biology to help resolve problems. Of course, the nanobots have to be compatible with the body (e.g. no poisonous elements if they were broken down, etc).

We dive into an interesting study on creating nanobarrels to deliver a particular payload within the bloodstream (currently in animals, but eventually in humans). This study is able to deliver RNA to cancer cells that shuts them down, without affecting the rest of the body. This type of application is why the market for nanotechnology keeps growing and will have a substantial impact on medicine in the future.

#nanotech #nanobots #medicine.

Continue reading “How nanobots and nanomedicine will improve our health” | >