Lifeboat Foundation

“Batteries are the crux of many of the most important emerging technologies in both the civilian world and, important to our profession, on the battlefield,” said United States Military Academy Cadet Michael Williams. “More energy dense batteries allow, for instance, greater range on electric vehicles, longer battery lives for radios, and longer flight times for drones. Our work helps make manufacturing these batteries easier.”

Cadets Michael Williams, Avery Patel, and Nancy Astable have been working on a long-term project with their faculty mentors Dr. Enoch Nagelli, Dr. Simuck Yuk, and Army Col. John Burpo to develop new ways to maximize energy storage and generation for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Armaments Center. In collaboration with Cornell University, the team at USMA’s Department of Chemistry and Life Sciences is pursuing innovative approaches to increasing the quality and use of batteries and fuel cells.

The value of conducting scientific research to solve real-world problems is clear to the cadets.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have fabricated a device no wider than a human hair that will help physicists investigate the fundamental nature of matter and light. Their findings, published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology (“Topological valley Hall polariton condensation”), could also support the development of more efficient lasers, which are used in fields ranging from medicine to manufacturing.

The device is made of a special kind of material called a photonic topological insulator. A photonic topological insulator can guide photons, the wave-like particles that make up light, to interfaces specifically designed within the material while also preventing these particles from scattering through the material itself.

Because of this property, topological insulators can make many photons coherently act like one photon. The devices can also be used as topological “quantum simulators,” miniature laboratories where researchers can study quantum phenomenon, the physical laws that govern matter at very small scales.

Researchers discovered a trick for dragging an object in a fluid with minimal effort, suggesting an optimal strategy for nanorobots.

A research team has demonstrated that the most efficient protocol for dragging a microscopic object through a fluid has an unexpected feature: the variation of the velocity with time after the midpoint of the trip is the reverse of its variation up to the midpoint [1]. This time-symmetry property, the researchers say, can help to identify the most efficient control strategy in a wide variety of micromechanical systems and could improve the operation of tiny machines.

Biomedical engineers are exploring micro-and nanoscale devices that swim through the body under their own power to deliver drugs [2]. Machine-like motion at tiny scales is also common in biology, for instance in the transport of compartments called vesicles by motor proteins inside cells [3]. To understand the energetics of such systems, Sarah Loos of the University of Cambridge and colleagues have studied a simple model of microscale transport. They used optical tweezers—a laser beam that can trap a small particle—to drag a 2.7-micrometer-diameter silica sphere through fluids. “This problem is simple enough to be solved analytically and realized experimentally, yet rich enough to show some fundamental characteristics of optimal control in complex systems,” says Loos. In practice, the device inducing the motion “could be a nanorobot carrying a drug molecule or a molecular motor that pulls or pushes against a microscopic object.”

Researchers from TU Delft and Brown University have engineered string-like resonators capable of vibrating longer at ambient temperature than any previously known solid-state object—approaching what is currently only achievable near absolute zero temperatures. Their study, published in Nature Communications, pushes the edge of nanotechnology and machine learning to make some of the world’s most sensitive mechanical sensors.

The ability to genetically modify haematopoietic stem cells would allow the durable treatment of a diverse range of genetic disorders but gene delivery to the bone marrow has not been achieved. Here lipid nanoparticles that target and deliver mRNA to 14 unique cells within the bone marrow are presented.

An international research team including Los Alamos National Laboratory and Tel Aviv University has developed a unique, mechanical metamaterial that, like a computer following instructions, can remember the order of actions performed on it. Named Chaco, after the archaeological site in northern New Mexico, the new metamaterial offers a route to applications in memory storage, robotics, and even mechanical computing.

From the rain drops rolling down your window, to the fluid running through a COVID rapid test, we cannot go a day without observing the world of fluid dynamics. Naturally, how liquids traverse across, and through, surfaces is a heavily researched subject, where new discoveries can have profound effects in the fields of energy conversion technology, electronics cooling, biosensors, and micro-/nano-fabrications.

The shimmering of butterfly wings in bright colors does not emerge from pigments. Rather, photonic crystals are responsible for the play of colors. Their periodic nanostructure allows light at certain wavelengths to pass through while reflecting other wavelengths. This causes the wing scales, which are in fact transparent, to appear so magnificently colored.

The Buccino Leadership Institute presents Ideas & Trends (2024) Nanotechnology: The Three Lenses — Past, Present and Future.