Scientists have created a rubbery, shape-shifting material that morphs from one sophisticated form to another on demand.
The shapes programmed into a polymer appear in ambient conditions and melt away when under heat. The process also works in reverse.
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Coming up with potent anti-cancer drugs is one thing, delivering them to the site of a tumor inside the body is very much another. With a complicated organism guarded by a highly evolved immune system to navigate, getting these particles to there target in one piece is a challenging task, and one that scientists are continuing to tackle from all angles. A promising new approach developed at Virginia Tech leans on the penetrative properties of a salmonella infection, which they’ve found can be used as a vehicle to smuggle cancer-fighting nanoparticles into a tumor in a huge abundance.
MIT researchers invented a method of shrinking objects to the nanoscale.
The team can generate structures one-thousandth the volume of the original using a variety of materials, including metals, quantum dots, and DNA.
Existing techniques—like etching patterns onto a surface with light—work for 2D nanostructures, but not 3D. And while it’s possible to make 3D nanostructures, the process is slow, challenging, and restrictive.
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Nano-sized particles already make bicycles and tennis rackets lighter and stronger, protect eyeglasses from scratches, and help direct chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells. But their usefulness depends on being able to precisely sculpt them into the right configurations—no easy task when they’re so tiny that thousands of them could fit into the thickness of a sheet of paper.
Cancer research is an area of medical science that, rightfully, gets considerable attention. There are nearly 14.5 million Americans with a history of cancer and with more than 13 million estimated new cancer cases each year. It’s no wonder even artificial intelligence (AI) has gotten into the field. Researchers from the University of Michigan are not getting left behind, with a groundbreaking method that has the potential to eliminate tumors.
This new technology uses nano-sized discs, about 10 nm to be exact, to teach the body to kill cancer cells. “We are basically educating the immune system with these nanodiscs so that immune cells can attack cancer cells in a personalized manner,” said James Moon from the University of Michigan.
Each of these ‘nanodiscs’ is full of neoantigens (tumor-specific mutations) that teach the immune system’s T-cells to recognize each neoantigen and kill them. These work hand-in-hand with immune checkpoint inhibitors that boost the responses of T-cells — forming an anti-cancer system in the body that wipes out tumors and potentially keeps them from reemerging.
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A longstanding problem in optics holds that an improved resolution in imaging is offset by a loss in the depth of focus. Now, scientists are joining computation with X-ray imaging as they develop a new and exciting technique to bypass this limitation.
The upcoming Advanced Photon Source Upgrade (APS-U) project at Argonne will put this problem under one of the brightest spotlights imaginable. The upgrade will make the APS, a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, 500 times brighter than it is today, further enhancing the capabilities of its X-rays to study the arrangements of atoms and molecules in a wide range of biological and technological materials.
“A whole variety of X-ray imaging experiments ultimately will need something like this as they all push the resolution to finer length scales in the future,” said Chris Jacobsen, an Argonne Distinguished Fellow and professor of physics at Northwestern University. With the Upgrade in place, the APS’s X-rays could allow scientists to study systems like the brain’s full network of synaptic connections, or the entire volume of an integrated circuit down to its finest details.
