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Artificial ‘leaf’ powers wireless biomedical device

Plants convert light into energy efficiently through photosynthesis—an ability that scientists and engineers still struggle to match with electronic devices. Recently, researchers have looked beyond traditional semiconductor materials to create devices using a promising class of materials called nanoplasmonics. These tiny metal structures can absorb and concentrate optical energy and generate energetic charge carriers.

In a new study, researchers from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and Department of Chemistry developed a nanoplasmonic “leaf,” a wireless bioelectronic device they used to stimulate nerves and pace heartbeats in an animal model.

The team also showed that their material could be used as a computer-like sensing platform, where users can interact with the screen using invisible light—a potentially secure way to transmit information.

Dog-bone design helps 2D nanoribbon transistors stay fast and efficient as widths shrink

Transistors, small semiconductor-based switches that control the flow of electricity, are central components of all electronic devices, from computers to smartphones, wearables, sensors and smart appliances. Over the past decades, electronics engineers have been continuously working to boost the speed and performance of transistors while also reducing their size.

A promising approach for miniaturizing transistors entails the use of two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, materials that are only one or a few atoms thick. Despite their potential, most high-performing 2D transistors have so far been demonstrated using relatively wide channels, and it has remained unclear whether their performance can be preserved when the channels are made much narrower.

Researchers at Stanford University recently developed new compact transistors based on narrow strips of monolayer 2D semiconducting materials known as nanoribbons. These transistors, introduced in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, were found to perform remarkably well despite their small size, outperforming previously developed nanoribbon transistors based on the same 2D materials.

The Role of [18F]FDG PET/CT in Predicting Toxicity in Patients with NHL Treated with CAR-T: A Systematic Review

CAR-T-cell therapy, also referred to as chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, is a novel method in the field of immunotherapy for the treatment of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL). In patients receiving CAR-T-cell therapy, fluorodeoxyglucose Positron Emission Tomography/Computer Tomography ([18F]FDG PET/CT) plays a critical role in tracking treatment response and evaluating the immunotherapy’s overall efficacy. The aim of this study is to provide a systematic review of the literature on the studies aiming to assess and predict toxicity by means of [18F]FDG PET/CT in patients with NHL receiving CAR-T-cell therapy. PubMed/MEDLINE and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) databases were interrogated by two investigators to seek studies involving the use of [18F]FDG PET/CT in patients with lymphoma undergoing CAR-T-cell therapy.

Invasive neurophysiology and whole brain connectomics for neural decoding in patients with brain implants

A modularized open-source pipeline for invasive brain signal decoding bridges the gap between closed-loop neuromodulation and clinical brain–computer interface approaches in a large patient cohort.

Scientists develop predictive roadmap to boost performance in next-gen spintronics

Chiral 2D metal halide perovskites (MHPs) are among the most promising materials for future technologies that exploit the spin of electrons in spin-based optoelectronics, or spintronics, but getting them to perform consistently has proven difficult. Now scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a data-driven approach that identifies and models key synthesis parameters to optimize their performance.

The difficulty stems in part from the sheer number of factors involved in making these materials. Although chiral 2D MHPs are low-cost and easy to fabricate as thin films, optimizing those films for optoelectronic technologies such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) or photodetectors is a formidable challenge. Advanced spin-based optoelectronics use circularly polarized light to encode and transmit data. For several years, scientists have searched for ways to enhance these materials’ selectivity for circularly polarized light, but progress has been hampered by a reproducibility problem: Reported performance values for nominally the same material vary by more than two orders of magnitude across different laboratories.

A new study published in the journal Matter offers a roadmap for solving that problem. Scientist Carolin Sutter-Fella and her team at Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry show how systematically tuning several “knobs” in the fabrication process—such as solvent choice, annealing temperature and film thickness—can reliably improve the material’s chiroptical properties, or its ability to interact with circularly polarized light.

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