Lifeboat Foundation

In this interview conducted at Pittcon 2023 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, we spoke to Dr. Jeffrey Dick about his work studying the chemistry of small volumes and nano-electrochemical tools.

What is your background, and what first attracted you to this field?

My name is Jeffrey Dick, and I grew up in Muncie, Indiana. I studied chemistry at Ball State University and fell in love with research and education.

Researchers from the Max Born Institute in Berlin have successfully performed X-ray Magnetic Circular Dichroism (XMCD) experiments in a laser laboratory for the first time.

Unlocking the secrets of magnetic materials requires the right illumination. Magnetic x-ray circular dichroism makes it possible to decode magnetic order in nanostructures and to assign it to different layers or chemical elements. Researchers at the Max Born Institute in Berlin have succeeded in implementing this unique measurement technique in the soft-x-ray range in a laser laboratory. With this development, many technologically relevant questions can now be investigated outside of scientific large-scale facilities for the first time.

Magnetic nanostructures have long been part of our everyday life, e.g., in the form of fast and compact data storage devices or highly sensitive sensors. A major contribution to the understanding of many of the relevant magnetic effects and functionalities is made by a special measurement method: X-ray Magnetic Circular Dichroism (XMCD).

The first protein-based nano-computing agent that functions as a circuit has been created by Penn State researchers. The milestone puts them one step closer to developing next-generation cell-based therapies to treat diseases like diabetes and cancer.

Traditional synthetic biology approaches for cell-based therapies, such as ones that destroy cancer cells or encourage tissue regeneration after injury, rely on the expression or suppression of proteins that produce a desired action within a cell. This approach can take time (for proteins to be expressed and degrade) and cost cellular energy in the process. A team of Penn State College of Medicine and Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences researchers are taking a different approach.

“We’re engineering proteins that directly produce a desired action,” said Nikolay Dokholyan, G. Thomas Passananti Professor and vice chair for research in the Department of Pharmacology. “Our protein-based devices or nano-computing agents respond directly to stimuli (inputs) and then produce a desired action (outputs).”

Nature Electronics volume 6, page 337 (2023) Cite this article.

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science and collaborators have succeeded in creating a “superlattice” of semiconductor quantum dots that can behave like a metal, potentially imparting exciting new properties to this popular class of materials.

Semiconducting colloidal quantum dots have garnered tremendous research interest due to their special optical properties, which arise from the quantum confinement effect. They are used in solar cells, where they can improve the efficiency of energy conversion, biological imaging, where they can be used as fluorescent probes, electronic displays, and even quantum computing, where their ability to trap and manipulate individual electrons can be exploited.

However, getting semiconductor quantum dots to efficiently conduct electricity has been a major challenge, impeding their full use. This is primarily due to their lack of orientational order in assemblies. According to Satria Zulkarnaen Bisri, lead researcher on the project, “making them metallic would enable, for example, quantum dot displays that are brighter yet use less energy than current devices.”

Miniaturization is progressing rapidly in many fields, and the trend toward the creation of ever smaller units is also prevalent in the world of robot technology. In the future, minuscule robots used in medical and pharmaceutical applications might be able to transport medication to targeted sites in the body. Statistical physics can contribute to the foundations for the development of such technologies.

A team of researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has now taken a new approach to the issue by analyzing a group of robots and how they behave as collectives of motile units based on the model of active Brownian particles. The team’s findings demonstrating that there may be an alternative route to realize programmable active matter have been published in Science Advances.

Researchers are looking for new ways to perform tasks on the micro-and nanoscale that are otherwise difficult to realize, particularly as the miniaturization of devices and components is beginning to reach physical limits. One new option being considered is the use of collectives of robotic units in place of a single robot to complete a task.

Researchers have developed a quantum key distribution (QKD) system based on integrated photonics that can transmit secure keys at unprecedented speeds. The proof-of-principle experiments represent an important step toward real-world application of this highly secure communication method.

QKD is a well-established method of providing secret keys for secure communication between distant parties. By using the quantum properties of light to generate secure random keys for encrypting and decrypting data, its security is based on the laws of physics, rather than computational complexity like today’s communication protocols.

“A key goal for QKD technology is the ability to simply integrate it into a real-world communications network,” said research team member Rebecka Sax from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “An important and necessary step toward this goal is the use of integrated photonics, which allows optical systems to be manufactured using the same semiconductor technology used to make silicon computer chips.”

Plants pass energy along paths similar to those of a Bose-Einstein condensate, showing quantum properties at macroscopic scales.

Every color, every flash, every sunray exacts a toll on the light-sensitive tissues at the back of our eyes, producing toxic materials that risk damaging the very cells that allow us to see.

Thankfully, the pigment responsible for darkening our hair, skin, and eyes moonlights as a clean-up crew, mopping up one such dangerous compound before it accumulates into damaging clumps.

An investigation by researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany and Yale University has revealed the removal process is somewhat unusual as far as biochemistry goes, relying upon a strange quirk of quantum-like behavior.