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Findings suggest way to help patients heal from dangerous C. difficile.

New research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine sheds light on why a fecal transplant can benefit patients with dangerous recurrent C. difficile infections – and suggests a way to improve patient outcomes.

C. difficile infection causes life-threatening diarrhea, and it often takes hold in patients in hospitals and nursing homes as a result of long-term antibiotic use. Doctors have known that fecal transplants – literally transplanting fecal material from a healthy person into the sick – can improve C. difficile outcomes, but they haven’t fully understood why. The new UVA research offers important answers.

Nature’s strongest material now has some stiff competition. For the first time, researchers have hard evidence that human-made hexagonal diamonds are stiffer than the common cubic diamonds found in nature and often used in jewelry.

Named for their six-sided crystal structure, hexagonal diamonds have been found at some meteorite impact sites, and others have been made briefly in labs, but these were either too small or had too short of an existence to be measured.

Now scientists at Washington State University’s Institute for Shock Physics created hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness using sound waves. Their findings are detailed in a recent paper in Physical Review B.

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Continue reading “Upcoming Advances in Material Science” »

This design can either double the performance of chips or reduce power use by 85%.

In May of 2021, we brought you a breakthrough in semiconductor materials that saw the creation of a chip that could push back the “end” of Moore’s Law and further widen the capability gap between China and U.S.-adjacent efforts in the field of 1-nanometer chips.

The breakthrough was accomplished in a joint effort, involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), National Taiwan University (NTU), and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), which is the world’s largest contract manufacturer of advanced chips. At the core of the breakthrough was a process that employs semi-metal bismuth to allow for the manufacture of semiconductors below the 1-nanometer (nm) level.

Continue reading “Samsung and IBM Could Break the Nanosheet Threshold in Chips With ‘Vertically Stacked Transistors’” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tcjmJavrOvI

From self-healing robots to reconfigurable electronic circuits, the applications of liquid metal are only limited by the imaginations of the scientists working with them. Let’s take a look at some of the latest revolutions, discoveries, and innovations in this material.

2D morphing metal

Continue reading “Shape Shifting Liquid Metal Could Revolutionize Robotics” »

Volvo’s recent investment in the Israeli startup Spectralics gives the Swedish company the opportunity to revolutionize the in-car user experience by turning the entire windshield into a heads-up display. According to the press release, the startup has a background in developing aerospace tech and is focused on developing better images. However, instead of working on just one aspect, the start-up is leveraging hardware, software, and even materials to improve the final product.

Of special interest to Volvo is the startup’s core product, multi-layered thin combiner (MLTC), a new type of optical film that can be applied on any type of surface or size. When applied to glass, it can be used to overlay images, making it an ideal candidate to make a full-scale heads-up display.

Car manufacturers have been tinkering with the idea of a windshield display for a few years now. While this is a great way to ensure that the driver does not take his eyes off the road, currently available displays are rather small, either due to cost constraints or to ensure that they do not become the cause of distraction.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have shown that a jet of material propelled from the core of a giant galaxy is channeled by a corkscrew-shaped magnetic field out to nearly 3,300 light-years from the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole. That is much farther than such a magnetic field previously had been detected in a galactic jet.

“By making high-quality VLA images at several different radio wavelengths of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), we were able to reveal the 3-dimensional structure of the magnetic field in this jet for the first time,” said Alice Pasetto of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, leader of the team. “The material in this jet traces a double helix, similar to the structure of DNA,” she added.

M87 is a giant elliptical galaxy about 55 million light-years from Earth. A supermassive black hole some 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun lurks at the center of M87. That black hole is the first one ever to be imaged—an achievement done with the world-wide Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration and announced in 2019. Earlier this year, new EHT images traced the magnetic field in the vicinity of the black hole event horizon.

Wakanda, the mythical setting for Marvel’s superhero film “Black Panther,” is home to some not-so-mythical technology. An indestructible cape might not yet be possible, but Wakanda’s levitating high-speed trains could zoom into reality with the help of superconductors.

Now, a new discovery about electron behavior may represent a step toward that superpowered world.

Superconductors give electrons—and, therefore, electricity—resistance-free highways. They have the potential to create power lines that permit super-fast transmission without shedding energy, enhance imaging technologies like MRIs, and levitate more than trains. But most of today’s fledgling superconductors require extremely cold temperatures to work. And while some scientists hope to find an answer in the right combination of materials, the solution might be hidden in how electrons move, not only what they move through.

Engineers at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore teamed up to develop a chain mail-inspired fabric that transforms from a fluid malleable material into a solid protective material when under pressure, a press statement reveals.

The material could be used for a host of potentially lifechanging applications, including as smart fabric for exoskeletons, for a cast that becomes more or less rigid when needed to facilitate the healing of an injury, and as a deployable bridge that could be thrown over an obstacle and stiffened so that people can walk across with ease.