Cement and carbon black are two of the most widely utilized materials in human history. Scientists believe they may potentially pave the way for future energy usage.

By combining cement, water, and carbon black, MIT researchers have created a unique, energy-storing substance. The design is adaptable, and it might be used to convert highways or buildings into renewable energy sources. The way of mixing the base materials to generate a supercapacitor, according to the experts, is the key to the novel design.

Researchers have already sought to imbue structural materials with battery-like capabilities by combining concrete with graphene-based carbon nanotubes. However, nanotubes are costly to manufacture and are not easily scalable for real-world applications. Carbon black, on the other hand, is a substance made from the incomplete combustion of coal, vegetable waste, or fuel, and it provides a more cost-effective alternative to nanotubes due to its widespread availability.

The researchers discovered that when carbon black is combined with water and cement, it produces a "fractal-like," electron-conducting network. They then formed the final product into small plates 1mm thick by 10mm wide and enclosed it in a potassium chloride membrane, a common electrolyte material, to form a sandwich-like structure.

According to the researchers, two electrodes composed of this material are separated by an insulating layer, allowing them to form a very powerful supercapacitor. When powered, the plates can illuminate a succession of LED lights. The researchers believe that the new substance might be used to store a day's worth of energy in roadways or buildings.

Even if the basic combination functions as a supercapacitor, keeping its energy-storing capability as well as structural strength can be difficult. Increasing the amount of carbon black increases the amount of stored energy, but the concrete weakens. The researchers discovered that using roughly 10% carbon black in the mix is the sweet spot for foundations or other structural elements.
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When structural strength is not an issue, the amount of carbon black in the supercapacitors could be raised to make even more potent supercapacitors. Franz-Josef Ulm, a civil engineer at MIT, is now working on developing a 12V battery comparable for automotive purposes. The prototype might be ready in 18 months and could even be used as an elemental brick for energy storage in homes.

The way we construct homes, cars, and even food is changing thanks to 3D printers. They may alter how transplant patients receive new organs in part because of researchers at Stanford University. Their innovative method might eventually enable the printing of organs from the patient’s own cells on demand.

Bioengineers Mark Skylar-Scott and his group have created a method that enables them to 3D-print living heart tissue. One day, they hope to print vital components of the heart, such as valves and ventricles, that would really develop with the patient.

In the US, one in every 100 babies is born with a cardiac problem. Even though they can receive transplants, the body may reject the transplants up to 20 or 30 years after they were given. Using a patient's own cells to bio-print a new organ could lower those incidences.

"It is ambitious, but we believe that a lot of the basic building blocks to start a project like this are in place," Skylar-Scott said.

The method is an illustration of bio-printing, a technique that uses living cells to produce structures that resemble organs. Although the idea of modern bio-printing is not new, the process is laborious. Typically, one cell must be printed at a time. A single human heart would require more than a thousand years to create, even if 1,000 cells were printed per second.

By printing with organoids, collections of tens of thousands of cells, Skylar-Scott and his team have created a technique for accelerating the process. “We take millions of those and condense them into what is essentially a human stem cell mayonnaise, that we can then print through the printer,” he said.

Once the cells are printed, they take on the general shape of tissue that can then have blood vessel networks printed within them.

The group has already created a self-pumping structure that resembles a human vein and is made of tubes. Printing a larger structure, such as a useful chamber that could be grafted onto an existing heart, would be the next stage.
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Although we're probably at least two decades away from a fully printed heart, Skylar-Scott said he believes a heart valve printed using this technique could be implanted in a human patient in as little as five years.

According to a study lead by Li Qian, PhD, at the UNC School of Medicine, a protein that aids in the formation of neurons also functions to reprogram scar tissue cells into heart muscle cells, particularly when working with another protein.

Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine have made important strides in the exciting fields of cellular reprogramming and organ regeneration, and their findings could have a substantial impact on the development of future treatments for damaged hearts.

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found a more streamlined and effective way to transform scar tissue cells (fibroblasts) into healthy heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) in a study that was published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

The fibrous, stiff tissue that causes heart failure after a heart attack or because of cardiac disease is created by fibroblasts. Researchers are looking into the possibility of treating or maybe one day curing this widespread and deadly illness by converting fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes.

Surprisingly, a gene activity-controlling protein called Ascl1, which is well recognized to be an essential protein involved in converting fibroblasts into neurons, turned out to be the key to the new cardiomyocyte-making approach. Ascl1 was once assumed to be neuron-specific by researchers.

“It’s an outside-the-box finding, and we expect it to be useful in developing future cardiac therapies and potentially other kinds of therapeutic cellular reprogramming,” said study senior author Li Qian, PhD, associate professor in the UNC Department of Pathology and Lab Medicine and associate director of the McAllister Heart Institute at the UNC School of Medicine.

In the past 15 years, researchers have created several methods to convert adult cells into stem cells and then drive those stem cells to differentiate into other types of adult cells. Recently, researchers have discovered strategies to reprogram cells directly from one mature cell type to another.

It has been hoped that once these techniques are as safe, effective, and efficient as possible, clinicians will provide a straightforward injection to patients to transform harmful cells into helpful ones.

“Reprogramming fibroblasts has long been one of the important goals in the field,” Qian said. “Fibroblast over-activity underlies many major diseases and conditions including heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, liver disease, kidney disease, and the scar-like brain damage that occurs after strokes.”

In the new study, Qian's team used three currently used approaches to reprogram mice fibroblasts into cardiomyocytes, liver cells, and neurons. This team also included co-first authors Haofei Wang, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher, and MD/PhD student Benjamin Keepers. Their goal was to document and contrast the variations in gene activity patterns and variables that control gene activity during these three separate reprogrammings.

Unexpectedly, the scientists discovered that converting fibroblasts into neurons activated a group of genes related to cardiomyocytes. They quickly discovered that Ascl1, one of the master-programmer "transcription factor" proteins that had been employed to create the neurons, was the cause of this activation.

The researchers added Ascl1 to the three-transcription factor cocktail they had been using to create cardiomyocytes to see what would happen because Ascl1 activated cardiomyocyte genes. They were shocked to see that it significantly increased reprogramming efficiency—the percentage of effectively reprogrammed cells—by over ten times. In reality, they discovered that only Ascl1 and another transcription factor known as Mef2c remained from their original cocktail of three factors.

Further research revealed that Ascl1 activates the genes for both cardiomyocytes and neurons on its own, but that it shifts away from the pro-neuron position in the presence of Mef2c. Ascl1 activates a wide range of genes related to cardiomyocytes in cooperation with Mef2c.

“Ascl1 and Mef2c work together to exert pro-cardiomyocyte effects that neither factor alone exerts, making for a potent reprogramming cocktail,” Qian said.

The findings show that the key transcription factors involved in direct cellular reprogramming are not always exclusive to the cell type being altered.
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More importantly, they represent a development toward potential cell-reprogramming treatments for serious diseases. To repair failing hearts, Qian and her team plan to create a two-in-one synthetic protein that combines the active components of Ascl1 and Mef2c.

A ground-breaking group of new vaccines for a variety of illnesses, including cancer, might save millions of lives, according to researchers. A major pharmaceutical company expressed confidence that vaccines for ailments including cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, as well as others, will be available by the end of this decade.

Studies into these vaccinations are also "very promising," according to some researchers, who claim that the Covid jab's success has "unspooled" 15 years' worth of development in just 12 to 18 months.

In as little as five years, according to Dr. Paul Burton, chief medical officer of the pharmaceutical company Moderna, the company will be able to provide such medicines for "all sorts of illness areas."

Moderna, which developed a well-known coronavirus vaccine, is working on producing cancer vaccinations that specifically target certain tumor types.

Burton said: “We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalized cancer vaccines against multiple different tumor types to people around the world.”

He added that mRNA therapy might be available for uncommon diseases for which there are presently no medications, allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covidio, the flu, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) with just one injection. mRNA-based treatments function by instructing cells to produce a protein that starts the body's immunological response to sickness.

Burton said :“I think we will have mRNA-based therapies for rare diseases that were previously undruggable, and I think that 10 years from now, we will be approaching a world where you truly can identify the genetic cause of a disease and, with relative simplicity, edit that out and repair it using mRNA-based technology.”

Scientists caution that if a high level of investment is not maintained, the fast progress, which has increased "by an order of magnitude" in the last three years, will be for naught.

Our cells can pump out the proteins we want our immune system to attack by injecting them with a synthetic form. The immune system would be made aware of an existing cancer via an mRNA-based cancer vaccine, allowing it to attack and eradicate it without harming healthy cells.

By first identifying the protein fragments on the surface of cancer cells that are absent from healthy cells and are most likely to elicit an immune response, bits of mRNA that will educate the body on how to produce those protein fragments can then be created.

To find mutations that don't exist in healthy cells, doctors first take a biopsy of a patient's tumor and submit it to a lab for genetic sequencing.

The mutation(s) fueling the cancer's growth are subsequently determined by a machine learning system. It also gains knowledge of the regions of the aberrant proteins these mutations encode that are most likely to elicit an immunological response. The most promising antigens' mRNAs are then produced and assembled into a customized vaccination.

Burton said: “I think what we have learned in recent months is that if you ever thought that mRNA was just for infectious diseases, or just for Covid, the evidence now is that that’s absolutely not the case.”
“It can apply to many disease areas; we are in cancer, infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune diseases, rare disease. We have studies in all of those areas and they have all shown tremendous promise.”

The experimental mRNA vaccine for RSV was 83.7% efficient at preventing at least two symptoms, such as cough and fever, in adults 60 and older, according to results from a late-stage trial published in January by Moderna. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designated the vaccine as a breakthrough medicine based on this information, which expedites the regulatory review process.

Based on recent outcomes in patients with the skin cancer melanoma, the FDA gave Moderna's personalized cancer vaccine the same classification in February.

Burton said: “I think it was an order of magnitude that the pandemic sped [this technology] up by. It has also allowed us to scale up manufacturing, so we’ve gotten extremely good at making large amounts of vaccine very quickly.”

Moderna is not alone in its interest in mRNA technology. Pfizer has also begun recruitment for a late-stage clinical trial of an mRNA-based influenza vaccine, and has its sights set on other infectious diseases, including shingles, in collaboration with BioNTech. A spokesperson for Pfizer said: “The learnings from the Covid-19 vaccine development process have informed our overall approach to mRNA research and development, and how Pfizer conducts R&D (research and development) more broadly. We gained a decade’s worth of scientific knowledge in just one year.”

The major effect of the pandemic, according to Dr. Richard Hackett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI), has been the acceleration of the creation of many as-yet-unvalidated vaccine platforms. “It meant that events that might have unfolded over the following ten or even fifteen years were condensed into a year or a year and a half,” he said.
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There is a real need to keep the level of research and development investment high. Prof Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) said: “If you take a step back to think about what we are prepared to invest in during peacetime, like having a substantial military for most countries. Pandemics are as much a threat, if not more, than a military threat, because we know they are going to happen as a certainty from where we are today. But we’re not investing even the amount that it would cost to build one nuclear submarine.”

A novel substance has been found by scientists, and it has the potential to revolutionize society.

Researchers claim to have developed a superconducting substance that operates at temperatures and pressures low enough to be used in real-world applications.

In creating a material that can transport electricity without resistance and pass magnetic fields around the substance, it achieves a breakthrough that scientists have been chasing for more than a century.

The discovery could result in power networks with flawless energy transmission, preventing the loss of up to 200 million megawatt hours because of resistance. Also, it might help with nuclear fusion, a long-awaited process that has the potential to produce endless electricity.

They propose new types of medical equipment and high-speed, hovering trains as additional applications.

The development of two somewhat less ground-breaking but similarly superconducting materials was previously reported by a team led by the same scientist, Ranga Dias, in studies that appeared in Nature and Physical Review Letters. The Nature publication was ultimately retracted by the journal's editors after the scientists' methodology came under scrutiny.

Professor Dias and his team claim they went above and beyond this time to fend off similar criticism. With a team of scientists observing live, scientists sought to corroborate that old study with new data acquired outside of a lab, and they followed a similar procedure for the new research.

 ‘Evidence of near-ambient superconductivity in a N-doped lutetium hydride,’ an article describing the novel material, was just published in Nature.

The substance has been given the moniker "reddmatter" in honor of its color and a Star Trek substance. When scientists discovered that it unexpectedly changed throughout the creation process to become a "very vivid red," they gave it that name.

The substance was created by Professor Dias and his team by combining lutetium, a rare earth metal, with hydrogen and a tiny amount of nitrogen. They were then left to react for two or three days, at high temperatures.

The chemical appeared as a deep blue, per the paper. However, it was then subjected to extremely high pressures, at which point it changed from blue to pink as it attained superconductivity, before changing back to its metallic condition and turning a rich red.

The material still needs to be heated to 20.5ºC and compressed to roughly 145,000 PSI to function. However, that is significantly less intense than other, comparable materials, such as those Professor Dias announced in 2020, that sparked both enthusiasm and skepticism from experts.

And because it is so useful, the researchers claim it will usher in a new era of using superconducting materials in practical applications.

“A pathway to superconducting consumer electronics, energy transfer lines, transportation, and significant improvements of magnetic confinement for fusion are now a reality,” Professor Dias said in a statement. “We believe we are now at the modern superconducting era.”
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Those practical applications might include using the material to speed up the development of “tokamak machines” that are being developed to achieve nuclear fusion.

In what's being hailed as an important first for chemistry, an international team of scientists has developed a new technology that can selectively rearrange atomic bonds within a single molecule. The breakthrough allows for an unprecedented level of control over chemical bonds within these structures and could open up some exciting possibilities in what's known as molecular machinery.

Molecules comprise clusters of atoms and are the product of the nature and arrangement of those atoms within. Where oxygen molecules we breathe feature the same repeating type of atom, sugar molecules are made of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.

To create precisely the chemical interactions between atoms they desire, scientists have been working on a concept known as "selective chemistry" for some time. This could cause the development of sophisticated chemicals and machinery that can be tailored for specific purposes.

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Dutch scientist Ben Feringa for his development of a molecular car propelled by molecular motors spinning at 12 million revolutions per second. These so-called molecular machines were the subject of the award. To specifically target cancer cells, scientists have also developed molecular pumps, small gear wheels, and molecular submarines, to name a few examples.

This new study's authors compare “putting Lego bricks in a washing machine and hope that the quintillions of molecules somehow manage to assemble themselves into the intended product.” Their latest research hopes to rely more on deliberate control of the chemical bonding process and less on chance.

The study focuses on molecules known as structural isomers, which share the same atomic structure but differ in the way those atoms are connected to one another. The researchers showed they could specifically rearrange the chemical interactions by applying different voltage pulses using the tip of a scanning probe microscope. It was possible to change a molecule with a 10-membered carbon ring in the middle into, for instance, a molecule with a 4- and 8-member ring or a molecule with two 6-member rings in the middle.

The scientists discovered these processes were also reversible, allowing them to flip between different molecular configurations in a controlled way by arbitrarily breaking and forming the various connections. The team claims that this type of "selective chemistry" is unique.

Leo Gross, an IBM Research scientist and the senior author of the study, said “it is the first time that selectivity different bonds can be formed in a single molecule. By the magnitude of the voltage pulse applied on the molecule in the center, we can choose if we want to create the molecule on the right or the one on the left (see above left).”

Although molecular machinery is still in its infancy, technology that allows for more precise control over these kinds of structures may drastically speed up their development.

The movement of molecules or nanoparticles, the creation and manipulation of nanostructures, and the facilitation of chemical reactions are just a few of the activities that molecular machines may be used, according to Gross. Future uses could involve medication delivery, chemical synthesis, nanoelectromechanical systems, and single-electron molecular devices.