To treat or manage various heart, gastrointestinal and neurological conditions, including arrhythmias, heart block, gastroparesis, epilepsy and some nerve injuries, doctors rely on a technique known as electrical stimulation. Electrical stimulation entails the delivery of small electrical pulses to target locations to prompt the activation of nerves, muscles or organs.
Many existing approaches for delivering electrical stimulation rely on electronic devices that are permanently or temporarily implanted inside the body. These devices can sometimes fail, cause adverse effects and might need to be surgically removed.
Researchers at Northwestern University, Sungkyunkwan University and other institutes recently developed a new implantable and bioresorbable system that could be used to electrically stimulate specific organs, muscles or nerves inside the body. This stimulator, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could gradually disappear after a treatment is complete, so it would not need to be surgically extracted.
Europe’s first and only TES spectrometer at a synchrotron source is now in operation at BESSY II, developed within a collaboration between the HZB, the MPI-CEC (Mühlheim-an-der-Ruhr, Germany) and the NIST (Boulder, Colorado, U.S.). The photon detection efficiency of the new instrument exceeds that of wavelength-dispersive X-ray emission spectrometers by a factor of 100 to 1,000. It will be used to investigate the electronic properties of atomically thin layers, nanostructures and highly diluted atomic and molecular samples. The team is looking forward to receiving exciting research proposals from the user community.
Synchrotron radiation sources such as BESSY II provide intense, highly brilliant X-ray light that can be used to examine a wide variety of samples. However, X-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and Resonant Inelastic X-ray Scattering (RIXS), where the photons emitted from the sample are detected, are extremely photon-hungry techniques. Therefore, XES and RIXS have so far been largely limited to high-concentration and bulk samples. The details are presented in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments.
When living cells grow, divide or respond to drugs, they give off tiny amounts of heat that offer information about what the cells are doing. But because these heat signals are so vanishingly small, they have traditionally been impossible to measure directly. Researchers in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a calorimeter—a device that measures the heat transfer between a living system and its environment—that can detect metabolic heat signals on the order of 100 picowatts, or trillionths of a watt, in living cells.
The device is the most sensitive of any comparable bio-calorimeter to date. The new “pico-calorimeter” can track the metabolism of small populations of bacteria in real time, as well as monitor how bacterial growth changes in response to different antibiotics.
The work is from the lab of Joost Vlassak, the Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Materials Engineering, and was carried out by Harvard associate Juanjuan Zheng, a former postdoctoral researcher in Vlassak’s lab. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers at University College Dublin and international collaborators have just published a detailed and accessible guide that aims to translate theoretical ideas into practical devices for quantum enhanced sensing technologies.
Conventional sensors have enabled technologies from global positioning systems to satellite imaging. Quantum systems, however, provide the absolute best precision allowable by the laws of physics.
The challenge, however, is that quantum devices are often fragile. A promising theoretical avenue for designing quantum sensors not hindered by this fragility is called “critical quantum sensing.”
