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

In an effort to curb global warming, engineers at Purdue University have created the whitest paint yet. Coating buildings with this paint may one day cool them off enough to reduce the need for air conditioning, the researchers say. The new paint formulation, which contains barium sulfate nanoparticles, reflects up to 98.1% of sunlight—compared with the 95.5% of sunlight reflected by the researchers' previous ultra-white paint—and sends infrared heat away from a surface at the same time. 

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a self-assembling nanomaterial that can help limit damage caused by inflammatory diseases by activating key cells in the immune system. In mouse models of psoriasis, the team showed that their nanofiber-based drug could effectively mitigate damaging inflammation as effectively as a gold-standard therapy.

Mathematicians and engineers at the University of Utah have shown how ultrasound waves can organize carbon nanoparticles in water into a pattern that never repeats. The results, they say, could result in materials called "quasicrystals," with custom magnetic or electrical properties. This discovery might lead to materials that can manipulate electromagnetic waves, such as those used by 5G cellular technology.

Creating a two-dimensional (2D) material, just a few atoms thick, is often an arduous process requiring sophisticated equipment. So, scientists were surprised to see 2D puddles emerge inside a three-dimensional (3D) superconductor – a material that allows electrons to travel with 100% efficiency and zero resistance – with no prompting. Within those puddles, superconducting electrons acted as if they were confined inside an incredibly thin, sheet-like plane. The results have practical implications for creating 2D materials.

Researchers from Northeastern University and the University of California, San Francisco, have developed a new type of nanosensor that allows scientists to image communication between the brain and the body in real time. The DNA-based nanosensor detects acetylcholine, a specific neurotransmitter that is released and picked up by target cells in living animals. Understanding how the brain and the body communicate with each other is particularly important when treating illnesses, such as Parkinson's disease, that are the result of the degeneration of nerve cells and the breakdown of communication between the brain and the body.

A clean energy future propelled by hydrogen fuel depends on figuring out how to reliably and efficiently split water into hydrogen and oxygen, a process that depends on a key—but often slow—step: the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). A study led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory illuminates a shape-shifting quality in perovskite oxides, a promising type of material for speeding up the OER. The study found that the perovskite oxide's surface evolved into a cobalt-rich amorphous film just a few nanometers thick. When iron was present in the electrolyte, the iron helped accelerate the OER, while the cobalt-rich film had a stabilizing effect on the iron, keeping it active at the surface.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed an electrocatalyst that not only enables water and carbon dioxide to be split but also enables the recombined atoms to form higher-weight hydrocarbons for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. The technology is a carbon nanospike catalyst that uses nanoparticles of a custom-designed alloy. The carbon nanospike catalyst was invented using a one-of-a-kind nanofabrication instrument and staff expertise at ORNL's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences.

In a finding that could help make artificial photosynthesis a practical method for producing hydrogen fuel, researchers from the University of Michigan and the U.S Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered why a water-splitting device made with cheap and abundant materials unexpectedly becomes more efficient during use. The new understanding of this mechanism could radically accelerate the commercialization of technologies that turn light and water into carbon-free hydrogen fuel. The device includes a forest of nanowires of gallium nitride, an inexpensive semiconductor that is widely used in everyday electronics.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, and the University of Florida have created stable nanosheets containing boron and hydrogen atoms, with potential applications in nanoelectronics and quantum information technology. The researchers grew borophene – a one-atom-thick sheet of boron – on a silver substrate, and then exposed it to hydrogen to form borophane, a sheet of boron and hydrogen a mere two atoms in thickness.

Researchers at MIT have developed a screening platform that combines machine learning with high-throughput experimentation to identify self-assembling nanoparticles that, when loaded with small-molecule drugs, could be used to treat cancer, asthma, malaria, and viral and fungal infections. These findings point to a strategy that solves both the complexity of producing nanoparticles and the difficulty of loading large amounts of drugs onto them.