News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Superconductors' never-ending flow of electrical current could provide new options for energy storage and superefficient electrical transmission and generation. But the signature zero electrical resistance of superconductors is reached only below a certain critical temperature and is very expensive to achieve. Physicists in Serbia believe they've found a way to manipulate superthin, waferlike monolayers of superconductors, thus changing the material's properties to create new artificial materials for future devices.

A team of Lehigh University researchers is working to characterize the mysterious protein known as the Von Willebrand Factor (vWF). In a recent paper published in Biophysical Journal, they advance experimental data for the shear-induced extensional response of vWF, using a microfluidic device and fluorescence microscopy.

A collaborative research team from Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has now developed 'Signal Amplification by Exchange Reaction' (SABER), a highly programmable and practical method that significantly enhances the sensitivity as well as customization and multiplexing capabilities of FISH analysis.

The group of Prof. Dr. Matthias Karg at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf (HHU) in Germany is creating ultra-thin, highly ordered layers of spherical hydrogel beads that encapsulate gold or silver particles. These structures are of interest for applications in optoelectronics -- light-based information and communication technology -- and nanophotonics. The researchers have recently published findings on a significant step in the direction of 'plasmonic nanolasers' in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

In a recent study published in BBA -- General Subjects, Kanazawa university researchers have used high-speed microscopy to investigate native structure and conformational dynamics of hemagglutinin in influenza A.

DGIST announced on May 8 that a polariton nano-laser operating at room temperature was developed by Professor Chang-Hee Cho's team in the Department of Emerging Materials Science, in collaboration with Professor Seong-Ju Park at GIST and Professor Ritesh Agarwal at University of Pennsylvania.