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Category: engineering – Page 23

Redefining physics to roll a ball vertically

Researchers from the University of Waterloo have achieved a feat previously thought to be impossible—getting a sphere to roll down a totally vertical surface without applying any external force.

The spontaneous rolling motion, captured by high-speed cameras, was an unexpected observation after months of trial, error, and theoretical calculations by two Waterloo research teams.

“When we first saw it happening, we were frankly in disbelief,” said Dr. Sushanta Mitra, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering and executive director of the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology.

Customizable chips mimic real-life blood vessel structures for disease research

Blood vessels are like big-city highways; full of curves, branches, merges, and congestion. Yet for years, lab models replicated vessels like straight, simple roads.

To better capture the complex architecture of real human , researchers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University have developed a customizable vessel-chip method, enabling more accurate vascular disease research and a drug discovery platform.

Vessel-chips are engineered microfluidic devices that mimic human vasculature on a microscopic scale. These chips can be patient-specific and provide a non-animal method for pharmaceutical testing and studying . Jennifer Lee, a biomedical engineering master’s student, joined Dr. Abhishek Jain’s lab and designed an advanced vessel-chip that could replicate real variations in vascular structure.

A new method to generate muons with ultra-short high-intensity lasers

Muons are elementary particles that resemble electrons, but they are heavier and decay very rapidly (i.e., in just a few microseconds). Studying muons can help to test and refine the standard of particle physics, while also potentially unveiling new phenomena or effects.

So far, the generation of muons in experimental settings has been primarily achieved using proton accelerators, which are large and expensive instruments. Muons can also originate from , rays of high-energy particles originating from outer space that can collide with atoms in the Earth’s atmosphere, producing muons and other secondary particles.

Researchers at the China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP), Guangdong Laboratory, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and other institutes recently introduced a new method to produce muons in experimental settings, using an ultra-short high-intensity laser.

Scientists test real-time view of brain’s waste removal with new monitoring device

A new device that monitors the waste-removal system of the brain may help to prevent Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, according to a study published today in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

In the study, participants were asleep when they wore the device: a head cap embedded with electrodes that measures shifts in fluid within , the from sleep to wakefulness and changes in the brain’s blood vessels.

By measuring these three features, the researchers found they could monitor the brain’s glymphatic system, which acts as a waste-removal and nutrient-delivery system.

Phonon decoupling in naturally occurring mineral enables subatomic ferroelectric memory

A research team has discovered ferroelectric phenomena occurring at a subatomic scale in the natural mineral brownmillerite.

The team was led by Prof. Si-Young Choi from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Semiconductor Engineering at POSTECH (Pohang University of Science and Technology), in collaboration with Prof. Jae-Kwang Lee’s team from Pusan National University, as well as Prof. Woo-Seok Choi’s team from Sungkyunkwan University. The work appears in Nature Materials.

Electronic devices store data in memory units called domains, whose minimum size limits the density of stored information. However, ferroelectric-based memory has been facing challenges in minimizing domain size due to the collective nature of atomic vibrations.

Novel blood purification technique eliminates antibiotic-resistant bacteria via artificial clots

A research team affiliated with UNIST has unveiled a novel extracorporeal blood purification technology that captures and removes bacteria from the bloodstream by leveraging sticky, clot-like surfaces. This breakthrough could pave the way for new treatments against deadly systemic infections, including sepsis, even those caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The work is published in Advanced Science.

Led by Professor Joo H. Kang, from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST, the research team announced the development of an innovative extracorporeal bacterial purification device that utilizes artificial blood clots. Similar to dialysis, the technique involves extracting infected blood outside the body, adsorbing bacteria onto artificial thrombi, and then returning the purified blood to the patient.

The newly developed extracorporeal blood purification device (eCDTF) features a spiral structure inserted into the central tube. Inside this spiral, artificial blood clots are embedded, which attract and trap bacteria flowing through the tube. Composed solely of without any cellular components like , these artificial thrombi facilitate effective bacterial adhesion to the device’s surface.

Diamond nanoparticles get a quantum upgrade with shell inspired by TV technology

Putting hypersensitive quantum sensors in a living cell is a promising path for tracking cell growth and diagnosing diseases—even cancers—in their early stages.

Many of the best, most powerful quantum sensors can be created in small bits of diamond, but that leads to a separate issue: It’s hard to stick a diamond in a cell and get it to work.

“All kinds of those processes that you really need to probe on a , you cannot use something very big. You have to go inside the cell. For that, we need nanoparticles,” said University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Ph.D. candidate Uri Zvi. “People have used diamond nanocrystals as biosensors before, but they discovered that they perform worse than what we would expect. Significantly worse.”

Facing the storm: Researchers model a new line of coastal defense with horizontal levees

As ocean levels rise, coastal communities face an ever-increasing risk of severe flooding. The existing infrastructure protecting many of these communities was not built to withstand the combined threat of rising seas and severe storms seen in this century.

While reinforcing existing flood barriers poses a costly challenge for at-risk communities, it also provides the opportunity to introduce innovative solutions that can provide both flood prevention and environmental benefits.

A group of researchers at UC Santa Cruz and the U.S. Geological Survey has evaluated one such flood mitigation solution, which can reinforce while creating environmentally beneficial coastal habitats. In a study published on May 9 in Scientific Reports, the team evaluated the effectiveness of “horizontal levees”—traditional levees retrofitted with a sloping, wetland border—as a means of strengthening shorelines against the threat of rising sea levels.

A new approach could fractionate crude oil using much less energy

Separating crude oil into products such as gasoline, diesel, and heating oil is an energy-intensive process that accounts for about 6% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Most of that energy goes into the heat needed to separate the components by their boiling point.

In an advance that could dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for fractionation, MIT engineers have developed a that filters the components of crude oil by their molecular size.

“This is a whole new way of envisioning a separation process. Instead of boiling mixtures to purify them, why not separate components based on shape and size? The key innovation is that the filters we developed can separate very at an atomistic length scale,” says Zachary P. Smith, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.

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