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

Scientists from Rice University and Tokyo Metropolitan University have woven custom-made #nanotube fibers into enhanced, flexible #cotton #fabric that turns #heat into enough #energy to power a light-emitting diode (#LED). The researchers note that the nanotube-enhanced materials could become building blocks for fiber and #textile #electronics and energy harvesting. The materials can act as both #thermoelectric generators and heat sinks to actively cool sensitive electronics with high efficiency.

Immunotherapies help boost the immune system's ability to fight off cancer cells. Immune checkpoints are regulators of the immune system, but some types of cancer circumvent these checkpoints, allowing cancerous cells to avoid detection and continue to spread. Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) is a newer therapy that can essentially "release the brakes" on the immune system and help the body fight back. Researchers at the University of Arizona Health Sciences have created the first nanotherapeutic platform of its kind to enhance the ability of camptothecin, a chemotherapeutic agent, to synergize with ICB therapies, making them more effective against aggressive tumors.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed an innovative technique for creating nanomaterials. The new electron beam nanofabrication technique, plasmon engineering, achieves unprecedented near-atomic scale control of patterning in silicon. Structures built using this approach produce record-high tuning of electro-optical properties. 

A UC Berkeley-led team found that using nanometer-thin layers of black phosphorus in optoelectronic devices and subjecting them to varying degrees of strain results in reversibly tunable output wavelengths over an unexpectedly large range. The ability to use a broader range of the infrared spectrum, tunable within one device, could help meet the growing demand for applications in optical communications, thermal imaging, health monitoring, spectroscopy, and chemical sensing. 

MIT engineers and colleagues report important new advances on a tunable metasurface, or flat optical device patterned with nanoscale structures, that they compare to a Swiss army knife while its passive predecessor can be thought of as just one tool, like a flat-bladed screwdriver. The new material, composed of germanium, selenium, antimony, and tellurium (GSST), is key to the new metasurface. The metasurface is a film of GSST only about half a millimeter square patterned with some 100,000 nanoscale structures which allow for control over the propagation of light. 

A biochemistry researcher from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine has found that a nanoparticle drug delivery system can reduce HIV/AIDS viral reservoirs in the brain that normally contribute to neurological problems. Nanoparticle drug delivery offers a new strategy for treating HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders, such as HIV dementia, which can be magnified by recreational drug use in HIV-positive individuals.

Researchers from the University of Connecticut are collaborating to develop novel asthma therapeutics using gene-silencing nanocapsules in a bid to help patients who aren't benefiting from existing treatments. The nucleic acid nanocapsule is designed to selectively deliver an enzyme to silence a component of the immune response that leads to the over-expression of immune components that play a significant role in allergic asthma attacks. 

Researchers at North Carolina State University have studied the behavior of birnessite – a hydrated layered form of manganese oxide – to understand what happens when ions penetrate very small spaces. The adsorption of ions from the electrolyte at an electrode surface is a ubiquitous process of use for both existing and emerging electrochemical energy technologies. The researchers found that nanoconfined water in between the layers of birnessite is effectively serving as a buffer that makes capacitive behavior possible without causing significant structural change in the birnessite.

A team of researchers from University of Chicago, the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, and international institutions wrote an article that gives an overview of almost three decades of research into colloidal quantum dots, assesses the technological progress for these nanometer-sized specs of semiconductor matter, and weighs the remaining challenges on the path to widespread commercialization for this promising technology, with applications in everything from TVs to highly efficient sunlight collectors.

Researchers at Penn State have discovered new types of defects in two-dimensional (2D) materials, which may give insight into how to create materials without such imperfections. 2D materials are essential for developing new ultra-compact electronic devices, but producing defect-free 2D materials is a challenge.