News from the NNI Community - Research Advances Funded by Agencies Participating in the NNI

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly and easily turn any surface into a power source. These durable, flexible solar cells can provide energy on the go as a wearable power fabric or be transported and rapidly deployed in remote locations for assistance in emergencies. To produce the solar cells, the engineers used nanomaterials that are in the form of printable electronic inks. 

For decades, astronomers and physicists have been trying to solve one of the deepest mysteries about the cosmos: An estimated 85% of its mass is missing. Some kind of invisible matter, dubbed dark matter, could provide the extra gravitational glue. Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and elsewhere have used tungsten silicide superconducting nanowires as dark-matter detectors. Systems of such nanowires are exquisitely sensitive to extremely small amounts of energy imparted by particles of light, and perhaps dark matter particles, when they collide with these systems of nanowires.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have serendipitously discovered that when they automated the beam of an electron microscope to precisely drill holes in the atomically thin lattice of graphene, the drilled holes closed up. They expected the heat to make atoms easier to remove, but they saw the opposite effect.

Engineers from Duke University, Virginia Tech, the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Los Angeles have developed a device that uses sound waves to separate and sort the tiniest particles found in blood in a matter of minutes. Tiny biological nanoparticles called "small extracellular vesicles" are released from every type of cell in the body and are believed to play a large role in cell-to-cell communication and disease transmission. The new technology not only pulls these nanoparticles from biofluids in under 10 minutes but also sorts them into size categories believed to have distinct biological roles.

Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute have engineered cell-like nanoparticles that target only the immune cells driving an autoimmune reaction, leaving the rest of the immune system intact and healthy. The nanoparticles greatly delayed, and, in some animals, even prevented, severe disease in a mouse model of arthritis. On its surface, each nanoparticle bore copies of a target self-antigen and a sugar-related molecule that can bind to a special “off switch” receptor on B cells, and each nanoparticle also was laced with a powerful compound to stimulate the production of regulatory T cells.

Engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have developed a lightweight, ultra-shock-absorbing foam that could vastly improve helmets designed to protect people from strong blows. The new material is an architected, vertically aligned carbon nanotube foam. To create it, the researchers started with carbon nanotubes – carbon cylinders just one atom thick in each layer – as the basic building blocks.

Researchers from Columbia University and Weill Cornell Medicine have demonstrated a new method to treat obesity by using cationic nanomaterials that can target specific areas of fat and inhibit the unhealthy storage of enlarged fat cells. The nanomaterials remodeled fat rather than destroying it, as, for example, liposuction does.

In a proof-of-concept study, researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara and The University of Texas at Austin have used computers to design the inside of a carbon nanotube pore to filter boric acid-containing water and demonstrated the usefulness of artificial intelligence (AI) toward developing water purification membranes with novel properties.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have designed cancer-fighting nanoparticles that co-deliver a chemotherapy drug and a novel immunotherapy. The new immunotherapy approach silences a gene that the researchers discovered was involved in immunosuppression. When combined with an existing chemotherapy drug and packaged into tiny nanoparticles, the therapy shrunk tumors in mouse models of colon and pancreatic cancer.

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Michigan, Iowa State University, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new strategy to help build materials with unique optical, magnetic, electronic, and catalytic properties. These pinwheel-shaped structures self-assemble from nanoparticles and exhibit a characteristic called chirality – one of nature's strategies to build complexity into structures at all scales, from molecules to galaxies.