/ en-us Â鶹ÒùÔº internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Â鶹ÒùÔºics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Nature has developed a unique structure as a scaffold for almost all nerve cells: the membrane-associated periodic skeleton (MPS). This specialized cytoskeletal structure is located below the cell membrane and consists of numerous proteins in a periodic arrangement. The MPS is involved in various cellular processes, such as inter- and intracellular signaling. To date, many proteins have been identified that interact with the MPS, but the mechanisms underlying its organization are not yet fully understood. /news/2025-04-regulatory-protein-neuronal-cytoskeleton.html Cell & Microbiology Molecular & Computational biology Wed, 23 Apr 2025 11:52:03 EDT news664627921 Bio-based thermoplastics are produced from renewable organic materials and can be recycled after use. Their resilience can be improved by blending bio-based thermoplastics with other thermoplastics. However, the interface between the materials in these blends sometimes requires enhancement to achieve optimal properties. /news/2024-11-thermoplastic-blends-polylactic-acid.html Polymers Analytical Chemistry Mon, 04 Nov 2024 13:01:03 EST news649947661 A team led by physicists Steffen Sahl and Stefan Hell at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen and the MPI for Medical Research in Heidelberg has succeeded in measuring distances within biomolecules using a light microscope, down to 1 nanometer and with Ã…ngström precision. /news/2024-10-intra-molecular-distances-biomolecules-optically.html Molecular & Computational biology Fri, 11 Oct 2024 10:03:15 EDT news647859789 In the search for more efficient and sustainable energy generation methods, a class of materials called metal halide perovskites have shown great promise. In the few years since their discovery, novel solar cells based on these materials have already achieved efficiencies comparable to commercial silicon solar cells. /news/2024-07-small-electrons-big-future-ultrafast.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 17 Jul 2024 11:06:04 EDT news640433161 One of the challenges of cramming smarter and more powerful electronics into ever-shrinking devices is developing the tools and techniques to analyze the materials that make them up with increasingly intimate precision. /news/2024-07-physicists-method-atom-defects-semiconductors.html Condensed Matter Optics & Photonics Thu, 04 Jul 2024 05:00:01 EDT news639232201 When trying to measure molecular structures with nanometer precision, every bit of noise shows up in the data: someone walking past the microscope, tiny vibrations in the building and even the traffic outside. A new processing technique removes noise from optical microscope data in real time, allowing scientists to track individual molecules over 10 times more precisely than was possible before. /news/2024-05-aim-algorithm-super-resolution-microscope.html Molecular & Computational biology Wed, 29 May 2024 17:22:04 EDT news636222121 In the 1880s Heinrich Hertz discovered that a spark jumping between two pieces of metal emits a flash of light—rapidly oscillating electromagnetic waves—which can be picked up by an antenna. To honor his groundbreaking work, the unit of frequency was named "Hertz" in 1930. Hertz's findings were later used by Guglielmo Marconi (Nobel Prize in Â鶹ÒùÔºics, 1909) to transmit information over long distances creating radio communication and revolutionizing wireless telegraphy—shaping the modern world until today. /news/2024-05-physicists-atomic-scale-telegraphy.html Optics & Photonics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 08 May 2024 11:00:01 EDT news634290649 A team at the University of Tokyo have constructed an improved mid-infrared microscope, enabling them to see the structures inside living bacteria at the nanometer scale. Mid-infrared microscopy is typically limited by its low resolution, especially when compared to other microscopy techniques. Their work has been published in Nature Photonics. /news/2024-04-mid-infrared-nanoscopy-enables-clearer.html Optics & Photonics Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:03:03 EDT news632570578 Imagine having a microscope that magnifies and enhances the tiniest details, revealing a world beyond the limits of conventional resolution. That's precisely what enhanced super-resolution radial fluctuations (eSRRF) brings to the scientific forefront—an upgraded super-resolution magic wand for microscopes. /news/2023-11-power-invisible-visible-revolution-microscopy.html Cell & Microbiology Biotechnology Tue, 14 Nov 2023 10:59:02 EST news619181941 Imagine shrinking light down to the size of a tiny water molecule, unlocking a world of quantum possibilities. This has been a long-held dream in the realms of light science and technology. Recent advancements have brought us closer to achieving this incredible feat, as researchers from Zhejiang University have made groundbreaking progress in confining light to subnanometer scales. /news/2023-07-waveguiding-scheme-enables-highly-confined.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 17 Jul 2023 15:11:07 EDT news608825463 Scientists led by Nobel Laureate Stefan Hell at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have developed a super-resolution microscope with a spatio-temporal precision of one nanometer per millisecond. An improved version of their recently introduced MINFLUX super-resolution microscopy allowed tiny movements of single proteins to be observed at an unprecedented level of detail: the stepping motion of the motor protein kinesin-1 as it walks along microtubules while consuming ATP. The work, published in Science, highlights the power of MINFLUX as a revolutionary new tool for observing nanometer-sized conformational changes in proteins. /news/2023-03-major-advance-super-resolution-fluorescence-microscopy.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Fri, 10 Mar 2023 10:01:57 EST news597664914 At the heart of every mobile phone, laptop and autonomous vehicle is a tiny semiconductor whose properties and, ultimately, performance are determined by free electrons. Now, UC Berkeley researchers have developed a new way to measure these electrons that could lead to more energy-efficient semiconductor materials and electronics. /news/2023-02-tool-electron-dynamics-semiconductors.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Mon, 20 Feb 2023 10:58:26 EST news596113101 Chemists' long-held dream of observing the structural dynamics of a single molecule have been now been made possible. Single molecules sized about 1 nanometer exist in a volatile state under ambient conditions. Considering that the coronavirus, which is about 100 nm in size, spreads rapidly in the air shows how difficult it is to observe a single molecule. Recently, a Korean research team has discovered a reliable way to observe single molecules at room temperature by capping them with a thin insulating layer, like a blanket. /news/2022-09-difference-dynamics-nm-single-molecules-room.html Biochemistry Analytical Chemistry Thu, 15 Sep 2022 10:11:01 EDT news582455458 Inside a living cell, proteins and other molecules are often tightly packed together. These dense clusters can be difficult to image because the fluorescent labels used to make them visible can't wedge themselves in between the molecules. /news/2022-08-microscopy-technique-reveals-hidden-nanostructures.html Bio & Medicine Mon, 29 Aug 2022 11:00:04 EDT news580986524 Controlling strong electromagnetic fields on nanoparticles is the key to triggering targeted molecular reactions on their surfaces. Such control over strong fields is achieved via laser light. Although laser-induced formation and breaking of molecular bonds on nanoparticle surfaces have been observed in the past, nanoscopic optical control of surface reactions has not yet been achieved. An international team led by Dr. Boris Bergues and Prof. Matthias Kling at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in collaboration with Stanford University has now closed this gap. The physicists determined for the first time the location of light-induced molecular reactions on the surface of isolated silicon dioxide nanoparticles using ultrashort laser pulses. /news/2022-05-light-controlled-reactions-nanoscale.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 19 May 2022 09:04:32 EDT news572169869 Sugars interact with the cell surface through sugar-binding proteins called lectins. These interactions play a fundamental role in many of the cell's biological processes. One important function is the modulation of the immune response towards an outside threat. In a recent Nature Chemical Biology paper, ICMS researchers team up with researchers from Leiden University to unravel the interactions of individual sugar molecules with cells using super-resolution microscopy. /news/2021-11-unraveling-interactions-individual-sugar-molecules.html Cell & Microbiology Biotechnology Tue, 23 Nov 2021 11:30:01 EST news556887490 Â鶹ÒùÔºicists and engineers have found a way to identify and address imperfections in materials for one of the most promising technologies in commercial quantum computing. /news/2021-09-fabrication-technique-paves-quantum-devices.html Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 01 Sep 2021 10:41:46 EDT news549711704 An MIT physicist has built a new instrument of interest to MIT researchers across a wide range of disciplines because it can quickly and relatively inexpensively determine a variety of important characteristics of a material at the nanoscale. It's capable of not only determining internal properties of a material, such as how that material's electrical or optical conductivity changes over exquisitely short distances, but also visualizing individual molecules, like proteins. /news/2021-07-scattering-type-scanning-nearfield-optical-microscope.html Optics & Photonics Quantum Â鶹ÒùÔºics Wed, 14 Jul 2021 08:21:22 EDT news545469678 Electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a technology that improves the resolution of an ordinary light microscope so that it can be used to directly observe finer structures and details in living cells. /news/2021-06-light-shrinking-material-ordinary-microscope-super.html General Â鶹ÒùÔºics Optics & Photonics Tue, 01 Jun 2021 03:18:03 EDT news541736270 A team of physicists from Germany, the .S. and the U.K. managed to observe the motion of electrons from one atomically thin layer into an adjacent one with nanoscale spatial resolution. The new contact-free nanoscopy concept, which shows great potential for investigations into conducting, nonconducting and superconducting materials, will be introduced in the new volume of the science journal Nature Photonics. /news/2021-05-contact-free-nanoscopy-concept-potential-materials.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Thu, 13 May 2021 11:00:12 EDT news540024883 Scientists have developed a pioneering new technique that could revolutionize the accuracy, precision and clarity of super-resolution imaging systems. /news/2021-01-technique-revolutionise-super-resolution-imaging.html Biotechnology Molecular & Computational biology Thu, 21 Jan 2021 12:46:48 EST news530455600 Using barcodes to label and identify everyday items is as familiar as a trip to the supermarket. Imagine shrinking those barcodes a million times, from millimeter to nanometre scale, so that they could be used inside living cells to label, identify and track the building blocks of life or, blended into inks to prevent counterfeiting. This is the frontier of nanoengineering, requiring fabrication and controlled manipulation of nanostructures at atomic level—new, fundamental research, published in Nature Communications, shows the possibilities and opportunities ahead. /news/2020-11-nanoscopic-barcodes-science-limit.html Bio & Medicine Nanomaterials Mon, 30 Nov 2020 09:18:15 EST news525950292 A Northwestern University research team has developed a new method to conduct spectroscopic nanoscopy, an approach that could help researchers understand more complicated biomolecular interactions and characterize cells and diseases at the single-molecule level. /news/2020-05-technique-higher-resolution-molecular-imaging.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 28 May 2020 10:35:38 EDT news509880934 Since Robert Hooke's first description of a cell in Micrographia 350 years ago, microscopy has played an important role in understanding the rules of life. /news/2020-05-imaging-technology-visualization-nanoscale-cells.html Nanophysics Mon, 04 May 2020 15:55:35 EDT news507826531 An international team with researchers from Leiden revealed how a bacterium repurposed an internal system to control its movements. Movement control is very important in host invasion, which can lead to disease. Publication on 27 April in Nature Communications. /news/2020-04-evolution-bacterial-movement-revealed.html Evolution Cell & Microbiology Wed, 29 Apr 2020 09:23:30 EDT news507371008 Imaging at the scale of a single molecule has gained much recent research interest in diverse fields of molecular biology, physics and nanotechnology. Researchers have used super-resolution microscopy to access subdiffraction resolution, but the technique does not apply for plasmonic nanoparticle dimer structures that form intense areas of field enhancement also known as plasmonic hot spots, due to plasmonic coupling (interaction between two or more plasmonic particles) and the loss of positional information. In a recent study, Matthew J. Horton and a team of interdisciplinary researchers in the NanoPhotonics Centre at the University of Cambridge, Blackett Laboratory at the Imperial College of London, and the School of Â鶹ÒùÔºics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham, U.K., reconstructed the locations of molecules within a plasmonic hotspot with 1-nm precision. /news/2020-01-nanoscopy-plasmonic-nanolens.html Nanophysics Nanomaterials Tue, 28 Jan 2020 09:30:01 EST news499340226 Researchers have used advanced imaging approaches to achieve super-resolution microscopy at unprecedented speeds. The new method should make it possible to capture the details of processes occurring in living cells at speeds not previously possible. /news/2019-12-ghost-imaging-super-resolution-microscopy.html Optics & Photonics Thu, 12 Dec 2019 10:00:03 EST news495357373 Our lives are governed by submicroscopic processes in the nanocosmos. Indeed many natural phenomena begin with a minuscule shift in the states of atoms or molecules, triggered by radiation. One such process has now been elucidated by a team led by Prof. Matthias Kling and Dr. Boris Bergues at the Laboratory for Attosecond Â鶹ÒùÔºics (LAP), which is jointly run by Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ). The group studied how molecules that were attached to the surface of nanoparticles responded to irradiation with light. Light-induced molecular processes on nanoparticles play an important role in atmospheric chemistry, and can ultimately influence our climate. /news/2019-10-ultrafast-glimpse-photochemistry-atmosphere.html Nanomaterials Fri, 11 Oct 2019 07:49:33 EDT news489998962 In 1977, Carl Woese et al introduced the three-domain system of biological classification that divides life forms into Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryotes. This was the first time that the differences between Archaea and Bacteria were recognized. The first observed archaea were extremophiles, able to survive and thrive in extremely harsh conditions, but ongoing research has found them in a wide range of habitats; they are particularly abundant in the oceans. Archaea form part of the microbiota of all organisms, including humans, and their unique survival capabilities mean they can be used to enhance our understanding of early life on Earth. We are just beginning to investigate viruses that can infect Archaea, and in work recently published in Nature Communications, an international team of researchers determined the near-atomic structures of HCIV-1 and HHIV-2 by cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Their results show how nature has solved the complexity of arranging vertical single β-barrels and provide insights into the evolutionary consequences of the fusion event of the two consecutive major capsid protein (MCP) genes, which has ultimately led to the membrane-less vertical double β-barrel MCP assembly seen in adenovirus. /news/2019-07-cryo-em-vertical-barrel-viruses-self-assembly.html Cell & Microbiology Molecular & Computational biology Thu, 25 Jul 2019 09:30:01 EDT news483263960 In "Avengers: Endgame," Tony Stark warned Scott Lang that sending him into the quantum realm and bringing him back would be a "billion-to-one cosmic fluke." /news/2019-06-fiber-optic-probe-molecular-bonds.html Optics & Photonics Mon, 10 Jun 2019 11:00:08 EDT news479375344