Researchers Discover Self-assembling 2D And 3D Materials

Green method developed for making artificial spider silk

A team of architects and chemists from the University of Cambridge has designed super-stretchy and strong fibres which are almost entirely composed of water, and could be used to make textiles, sensors and other materials. The fibres, which resemble miniature bungee cords as they can absorb large amounts of energy, are sustainable, non-toxic and can be made at room temperature.

This new method not only improves upon earlier methods of making synthetic spider silk, since it does not require high energy procedures or extensive use of harmful solvents, but it could substantially improve methods of making synthetic fibres of all kinds, since other types of synthetic fibres also rely on high-energy, toxic methods. The results are reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Spider silk is one of nature’s strongest materials, and scientists have been attempting to mimic its properties for a range of applications, with varying degrees of success. “We have yet to fully recreate the elegance with which spiders spin silk,” said co-author Dr Darshil Shah from Cambridge’s Department of Architecture.

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According to legend, Pythagoras invented a cup to prevent his students from drinking too greedily. If they overfilled the cup, it would immediately drain out all the fluid. The trick works thanks to a U-shaped tube in the center of the cup. As long as the liquid level is below the highest point in the U-tube, only the entrance side of the tube will be filled. As soon as the liquid level in the cup is higher, the weight of all that fluid forces liquid up and around the bend. This kicks off a siphoning effect that pulls all the fluid out. Coincidentally, this is the same way that toilet flushing works! Pulling the handle releases extra water into the bowl that raises the fluid level higher than the highest point in a U-bend. That establishes a siphon, which (provided nothing has clogged the pipe), empties the toilet bowl. (Video credit: Periodic Videos)

Depositing books due at the library, the grad student takes a humiliating whirlwind tour of everything his past self had planned to read.

Glowing crystals can detect, cleanse contaminated drinking water

Tiny, glowing crystals designed to detect and capture heavy-metal toxins such as lead and mercury could prove to be a powerful new tool in locating and cleaning up contaminated water sources.

Motivated by publicized cases in which high levels of heavy metals were found in drinking water in Flint, Mich., and Newark, N.J., a science team led by researchers at Rutgers University used intense X-rays at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to probe the structure of the crystals they developed and learn how they bind to heavy metals.

The crystals function like miniature, reusable sensors and traps, and are known as luminescent metal-organic frameworks, or LMOFs.

Top performer for detecting and trapping heavy metals

One type of LMOF that the team tested was found to selectively take up more than 99 percent of mercury from a test mixture of heavy and light metals within 30 minutes, according to recent results published in Applied Materials and Interfaces. No other MOFs have performed as well in this dual role of detecting and capturing, or “adsorbing,” toxic heavy metals, the team reported.

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Packing numerous books and papers that he plans to read over winter break, the grad student deludes himself.

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Jeremy Miranda (American, b. 1980, Newport, RI, based Dover, NH, USA) - 1: Nectar, 2014, Oil on Panel  2: Waves Of Winter, 2014, Oil on Panel  3: Recording, 2014, Oil on Panel  4: Untitled, 2013  5: Know Your Garden, 2014, Oil on Panel  6: Renovation No. 2, Oil on Panel  7: Sea Foam, Oil on Panel  8: Salt Marsh, 2014  9: Untitled, 2014  10: Overgrown Path, 2013, Acrylics on Canvas

To keep pain in check, count down

Diverse cognitive strategies affect our perception of pain. Studies by LMU neuroscientist Enrico Schulz and colleagues have linked the phenomenon to the coordinated activity of neural circuits located in different brain areas.

Is the heat still bearable, or should I take my hand off the hotplate? Before the brain can react appropriately to pain, it must evaluate and integrate sensory, cognitive and emotional factors that modulate the perception and processing of the sensation itself. This task requires the exchange of information between different regions of the brain. New studies have confirmed that there is a link between the subjective experience of pain and the relative levels of neural activity in functional structures in various sectors of the brain. However, these investigations have been carried out primarily in contexts in which the perception of pain was intensified either by emotional factors or by consciously focusing attention on the painful stimulus. Now, LMU neuroscientist Enrico Schulz, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Oxford, has asked how cognitive strategies that affect one’s subjective perception of pain influence the patterns of neural activity in the brain.

In the study, 20 experimental subjects were exposed to a painful cold stimulus. They were asked to adopt one of three approaches to attenuating the pain: (a) counting down from 1000 in steps of 7, (b) thinking of something pleasant or beautiful, and (c) persuading themselves – by means of autosuggestion – that the stimulus was not really that bad. During the experimental sessions, the subjects were hooked up to a 7T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to visualise the patterns of neural activity in the brain, which were later analysed in detail.

In order to assess the efficacy of the different coping strategies, participants were also asked to evaluate the subjective intensity of the pain on a scale of 0 to 100. The results revealed that the countdown strategy was the most effective of the three methods. “This task obviously requires such a high level of concentration that it distracts the subject’s attention significantly from the sensation of pain. In fact some of our subjects managed to reduce the perceived intensity of pain by 50%,” says Schulz. “One participant later reported that she had successfully adopted the strategy during the most painful phase of childbirth.”

In a previous paper published in the journal Cortex in 2019, the same team had already shown that all three strategies help to attenuate the perception of pain, and that each strategy evoked a different pattern of neural activity. In the new study, Schulz and his collaborators carried out a more detailed analysis of the MRI scans, for which they divided the brain into 360 regions. “Our aim was to determine which areas in the brain must work together in order to successfully reduce the perceived intensity of the pain,” Schulz explains. “Interestingly, no single region or network that is activated by all three strategies could be identified. Instead, under each experimental condition, neural circuits in different brain regions act in concert to varying extents.”

The attenuation of pain is clearly a highly complex process, which requires a cooperative response that involves many regions distributed throughout the brain. Analysis of the response to the countdown technique revealed close coordination between different parts of the insular cortex, among other patterns. The imaginal distraction method, i.e. calling something picturesque or otherwise pleasing to mind, works only when it evokes intensive flows of information between the frontal lobes. Since these structures are known to be important control centres in the brain, the authors believe that engagement of the imaginative faculty may require a greater degree of control, because the brain needs to search through more ‘compartments’ – to find the right memory traces, for instance. Comparatively speaking, counting backwards stepwise – even in such awkward steps – is likely to be a more highly constrained task. “To cope with pain, the brain makes use of a recipe that also works well in other contexts,” says Anne Stankewitz, a co-author of the new paper: “success depends on effective teamwork.” Her team now plans to test whether their latest results can be usefully applied to patients with chronic pain.