Tech

URBANA, Ill. ¬- Oil produced from biomass can provide a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. But technological challenges make it difficult to scale up production and make it economically viable.

One technology known as hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) allows for production of biocrude oil from wet biomass such as algae, food waste, or animal manure. This process sidesteps costly drying procedures; however, it creates a wastewater byproduct that is considered an environmental hazard.

A new study from the University of Illinois discusses methods to manage this wastewater, providing a possible path to commercially viable production.

Jamison Watson, doctoral student in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at U of I, says the study provides a comprehensive overview of current wastewater treatment methods that can help producers and researchers going forward.

HTL techniques are still in the exploratory phase. But as oil becomes more expensive and more scarce, Watson predicts that will change.

"People haven't really started to address engineering challenges like upscaling to a large facility. We just think we're ahead of our time," he says.

Watson explains the study is a result of a collaboration among researchers working with different aspects of the technologies. Some of that work happens in the research lab of Yuanhui Zhang, professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Illinois. Zhang is Watson's advisor, and co-author of the paper.

"We work on producing oil from biomass such as food waste and algae through HTL. One of the byproducts of this process is the post-HTL wastewater (PHW), also called aqueous phase," Watson says. "We saw this big issue: what can we do with the wastewater? We have no way of managing it; we can't just dilute it; we can't just release it into the environment."

The study provides a detailed analysis of currently available methodologies, and it describes six different approaches to treating PHW. Those include separation of chemicals, cultivation of biomass, anaerobic fermentation, bioelectrochemical systems, hydrothermal gasification, and recycling of PHW as a solvent or reactant for HTL.

Some of the potential applications created through these approaches include extraction of chemicals and gases, production of electricity or hydrogen, or purifying the liquid so it is clean enough to water crops or even use as drinking water, Watson says.

For each of the six methods, Watson and his collaborators describe the technology, discuss the benefits and challenges, and assess future potential, as well as feasibility of upscaling to commercial application.

"We want to learn which technologies show the most promise," Watson says. "So when this thermochemical technology really hits its stride in the next 10 to 20 years, people will have an idea of how we can valorize the wastewater byproduct to highlight the potential of this oil production technology."

It comes as no surprise that consumer data is continuously being collected by various organizations, including local governments, marketing agencies and social media companies. These organizations assure anonymity and confidentiality when collecting this data, however, existing data privacy laws don't guarantee that data breaches won't occur. According to a recent report, more than 2,000 confirmed data breaches occurred in 2019 alone, with 34% of those executed by internal actors such as employees. To add to that, city and state agencies collect sensitive data that they are required by law to share with the public -- courtesy of Open Data movements and the Freedom of Information Act.

Data privacy laws require encryption and, in some cases, transforming the original data to "protected data" before it's released to external parties. But for researchers like Matthew Schneider, PhD, an assistant professor of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems at Drexel University's LeBow College of Business, this isn't adequate.

"Encryption definitely helps, but it does not prevent a data breach," he said. "It's similar to safeguarding your email password. An internal actor with access to the encryption key could easily cause a data breach. It's more conservative from a risk perspective to assume that all data will eventually get out and should be transformed prior to sharing anywhere within the organization."

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Marketing Analytics, Schneider and Dawn Iacobucci, PhD, of Vanderbilt University, proposed a new methodology that permanently alters survey datasets to protect consumers' privacy --when data is shared-- while still preserving a level of reasonable accuracy for these datasets.

According to the authors, survey data is often held within organizations and used for purposes beyond the original reason for collecting the data. "Databases and customer information have become a contemporary asset that makes one business attractive to another when forging alliances," Schneider said. "Even firms with high standards of data security can find it challenging to protect the privacy of consumer data."

Another less common, but all-too-real, threat, according to the authors, are cases where employees have illegally taken data from their former companies to a position with a new employer -- for reasons ranging from gaining a favorable impression with the new company, to harming the old company, to even having to provide the data as a condition of the job offer.

For Schneider, the solution to fulfilling data privacy promises turns out to be a technological one.

"Survey data are increasingly used for respondent-level analytics, such as in linkage to other proprietary datasets, and promises of privacy may not be guaranteed in the myriad of subsequent uses of the data," said Schneider. "Confidentiality does not guarantee anonymity. It takes about three or four carefully posed questions in a survey to uniquely identify anyone."

In the paper, the authors analyzed a survey data set that was collected in 2015 by the city of Austin, Texas and released to the public following an Open Data movement. Other cities have similar movements, including New York and Philadelphia.

"There are lots of privacy risks in Open Data since they don't do privacy as well as the federal government that has the large budget and resources to hire statisticians, economists or computer scientists to address this technological problem," said Schneider. "Protection often depends on how the data is used."

The city of Austin administered a survey to 2,614 Asian Americans living in the city to explore the health and service needs of one of the city's fastest growing populations aiming to create higher levels of community engagement, policies and to identify resources to address the needs of the Asian American community. Officials in Austin posted their data sets, as required, to make them readily available for users.

In one survey dataset, each respondent was asked their ethnic origin, which had 32 categories; age, which had 77 categories; zip code, which had 61 categories; and gender.

"Nearly everyone is identifiable with these four variables --some more so than others," said Schneider. "Once you identify them, this survey revealed other sensitive responses such as employment status, religious affiliation, household income, housing affordability and many attitudinal questions. "

Similarly, New York City experienced an Open Data problem with the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission where 124 million driving routes could be traced to a driver's home address.

One major challenge when considering methodologies to alter participant data effectively is to do this in a way that doesn't greatly change the accuracy of the survey results. The methodology proposed by the authors, was built upon a technique found in genomic sequencing applications that was able to disguise the identity of consumers while maintaining the accuracy of insights within 5%.

"Our method would essentially 'shuffle' the demographic data in a survey dataset," said Schneider. "But, unlike previous methods, ours only shuffles data when it maintains the correlations between important variables that are essential to analysts. The protected data is simulated on a consumer level but still valuable to the end user. If this dataset got out, then only the organization's insights would be known."

The paper, "Protecting Survey Data on a Consumer Level," was published in the Journal of Marketing Analytics and is available at this link. Details about the new methodology are included in the paper.

Scientists have theorized that organometallic halide perovskites-- a class of light harvesting "wonder" materials for applications in solar cells and quantum electronics-- are so promising due to an unseen yet highly controversial mechanism called the Rashba effect. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have now experimentally proven the existence of the effect in bulk perovskites, using short microwave bursts of light to both produce and then record a rhythm, much like music, of the quantum coupled motion of atoms and electrons in these materials.

Organometallic halide perovskites were first introduced in solar cells about a decade ago. Since then, they have been studied intensely for use in light-harvesting, photonics, and electronic transport devices, because they deliver highly sought-after optical and dielectric properties. They combine the high energy conversion performance of traditional inorganic photovoltaic devices, with the inexpensive material costs and fabrication methods of organic versions.

Research thus far hypothesized that the materials' extraordinary electronic, magnetic and optical properties are related to the Rashba effect, a mechanism that controls the magnetic and electronic structure and charge carrier lifetimes. But despite recent intense study and debate, conclusive evidence of Rashba effects in bulk organometallic halide perovskites, used in the most efficient perovskite solar cells, remained highly elusive.

Ames Laboratory scientists discovered that evidence by using terahertz light, extremely strong and powerful bursts of light firing at trillions of cycles per second, to switch on or synchronize a "beat" of quantum motion within a material sample; and a second burst of light to "listen" to the beats, triggering an ultrafast receiver to record images of the oscillating state of matter.
This approach overcame the limitations of conventional detection methods, which did not have the resolution or sensitivity to capture the evidence of the Rashba effect hidden in the material's atomic structure.

"Our discovery settles the debate of the presence of Rashba effects: They do exist in bulk metal halide perovskite materials." said Jigang Wang, senior scientist at Ames Laboratory and professor of physics at Iowa State University. "By steering quantum motions of atoms and electrons to engineer Rashba split bands, we achieve a significant leap forward for the fundamental discovery of the effect which had been hidden by random local fluctuations, and also open exciting opportunities for spintronic and photovoltaic applications based on quantum control of perovskite materials."

The research is further discussed in the paper, "Ultrafast Control of Excitonic Rashba Fine Structure by Phonon Coherence in the Metal Halide Perovskite CH3NH3PbI3," authored by Z. Liu, C. Vaswani, X. Yang, X. Zhao, Y. Yao, Z. Song, D. Cheng, Y. Shi , L. Luo, D.-H. Mudiyanselage, C. Huang, J.-M. Park, R.H.J. Kim, J. Zhao,Y. Yan, K.-M. Ho, and J. Wang; and published in Physical Review Letters.

Wang and his collaborators at Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University Department of Physics and Astronomy were responsible for terahertz quantum beat spectroscopy, model building, and density functional theoretical simulations. High quality perovskite materials were provided by the University of Toledo. Phonon spectra simulations were performed at the University of Science and Technology of China.

Engineering researchers developed a next-generation miniature lab device that uses magnetic nano-beads to isolate minute bacterial particles that cause diseases. Using this new technology improves how clinicians isolate drug-resistant strains of bacterial infections and difficult-to-detect micro-particles such as those making up Ebola and coronaviruses.

Ke Du and Blanca Lapizco-Encinas, both faculty-researchers in Rochester Institute of Technology's Kate Gleason College of Engineering, worked with an international team to collaborate on the design of the new system--a microfluidic device, essentially a lab-on-a-chip.

Drug-resistant bacterial infections are causing hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world every year, and this number is continuously increasing. Based on a report from the United Nations, the deaths caused by antibiotics resistance could reach to 10 million annually by 2050, Du explained.

"It is urgent for us to better detect, understand, and treat these diseases. To provide rapid and accurate detection, the sample purification and preparation is critical and essential, that is what we are trying to contribute. We are proposing to use this novel device for virus isolation and detection such as the coronavirus and Ebola," said Du, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering whose background is in development of novel biosensors and gene editing technology.

The lab team is interested in the detection of bacterial infection, especially in bodily fluids. One of the major problems for detection is how to better isolate higher concentrations of pathogens.

The device is a sophisticated lab environment that can be used in field hospitals or clinics and should be much faster at collecting and analyzing specimens than the commercially available membrane filters. Its wide, shallow channels trap small bacteria molecules that are attracted to packed, magnetic microparticles.

This combination of the deeper channels on the nano-device, increased flow rate of fluids where bacteria are suspended, and the inclusion of magnetic beads along the device channels improves upon the process of capturing/isolating bacterial samples. Researchers were able to successfully isolate bacteria from various fluids with a microparticle-based matrix filter. The filter trapped particles in small voids in the device, providing a larger concentration of bacteria for analysis. An added advantage of a smaller device such as this allows for multiple samples to be tested at the same time.

"We can bring this portable device to a lake which has been contaminated by E. coli. We will be able to take a few milliliters of the water sample and run it through our device so the bacteria can be trapped and concentrated. We can either quickly detect these bacteria in the device or release them into certain chemicals to analyze them," said Du, whose earlier work focused on devices that use the CRISPR gene-editing technology and the fundamental understanding of fluidic dynamics.

Teaming up with Lapizco-Encinas, a biomedical engineer with expertise in dielectrophoresis--a process that uses electrical current to separate biomolecules--their collaboration provided the increased capability toward better pathogen detection, specifically for bacteria and microalgae isolation and concentration.

"Our goal is not only isolating and detecting bacteria in water and human plasma, but also working with whole blood samples to understand and detect blood infection such as sepsis. We already have a concrete plan for that. The idea is to use a pair of the nano-sieve devices for sequential isolation," said Lapizco-Encinas, an associate professor in RIT's biomedical engineering department.

Du and Lapizco-Encinas were part of a team that consisted of mechanical and biomedical engineers from Rutgers, University of Alabama, SUNY Binghamton, and Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute in China to address the global challenges of disease pandemics. The new data is published in the article "Rapid Escherichia coli trapping and retrieval for bodily fluids via a three-dimensional bead-stacked nano-device," in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

The research team is RIT engineering doctoral and graduate students Xinye Chen, Abbi Miller and Qian He; University of Alabama assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering Yu Gan and undergraduate student Shengting Cao; Ruo-Qian Wang, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering from Rutgers University; Xin Yong, assistant professor of mechanical engineering from SUNY Binghamton; Peiwu Qin from the Center of Precision Medicine and Healthcare, Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, China; and Jie Zhang, Carollo Engineers Inc. in Seattle.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - New research from the University at Buffalo suggests that non-traditional social strategies, which can include so-called "guilty pleasures," are just as effective at fulfilling critical social needs as family connections, romantic relationships or strong social support systems.

The findings are particularly relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic as people struggle with direct social connections stunted by social distancing and other necessary precautions, according to Shira Gabriel, a professor of psychology in UB's College of Arts and Sciences and one of the paper's co-authors.

"I don't think people realize that these non-traditional connections are as beneficial as we found in our research," says Gabriel, an expert in social psychology. "Don't feel guilty, because we found that these strategies are fine as long as they work for you."

And these non-traditional strategies all predict positive outcomes, according to Elaine Paravati, a UB graduate and co-author of the paper.

"People can feel connected through all sorts of means. We found that more traditional strategies, like spending time with a friend in person, doesn't necessarily work better for people than non-traditional strategies, like listening to a favorite musician," says Paravati. "In fact, using a combination of both of these types of strategies predicted the best outcomes, so it might be especially helpful to have a variety of things you do in your life to help you feel connected to others."

For over a decade, Gabriel has studied in her lab the importance of non-traditional social strategies. These include everything from getting lost in pulp fiction page-turners to preparing and enjoying comfort foods. Volumes of research also exist on the importance of traditional social strategies, like interpersonal relationships or group memberships.

But no one had ever empirically combined the traditional and non-traditional for comparative purposes to simultaneously test their relative effectiveness.

The results published in the journal Self and Identity represent the first evidence that not only reinforces the utility of non-traditional social strategies, but also suggest that doing something like binge watching a favorite television drama is as useful as other traditional means of fulfillment.

The research team, which also included graduate student Esha Naidu, recruited 173 participants who were asked questions about their well-being and their social connections. Their responses provided a measurement inspired by previous research, which the team calls the "social fuel tank."

"There's a basic need for social connections, just as we have a basic need for food," says Gabriel. "The longer you go without those sorts of connections, the lower the fuel tank, and that's when people start to get anxious, nervous or depressed, because they lack needed resources.

"What's important is not how you're filling the social fuel tank, but that your social fuel tank is getting filled."

Participants filled their tanks as many as 17 different ways (with a median of seven), using a variety of strategies in their lives to fill their social needs, with a majority of participants reporting both traditional and non-traditional social strategies.

"This is especially relevant now, with social distancing guidelines changing the ways people connect with others," says Paravati. "We can utilize these non-traditional strategies to help us feel connected, fulfilled, and find more meaning in our lives, even as we safely practice social distancing."

At a time when pandemic-related restrictions have motivated questions about how to be social, Gabriel notes how these findings differ from cultural perceptions regarding the unwritten rules for what's appropriate for creating a sense of belonging.

"We live in a society where people are questioned if they're not in a romantic relationship, if they decide not to have children, or they don't like attending parties," says Gabriel. "There are implicit messages that these people are doing something wrong. That can be detrimental to them.

"The message we want to give to people, and that our data suggest, is that that's just not true."

And even before Gabriel had data to support these conclusions, her previous research had raised the very questions addressed in the current study.

"People had assumed these non-traditional connections weren't valuable. In fact, we used to call them 'social surrogates,' as if they were a surrogate for a real social connection," says Gabriel. "But after researching these connections for so long, we never found evidence that they weren't valuable. Nothing suggested that people using non-traditional strategies were lonelier, or less happy, less socially skilled, or feeling any less fulfilled.

"These aren't surrogates for real social connections; these are real ways of feeling connected that are very important to people."

"Symbolic social bonds don't function as a second-place option to traditional means.They are an effective way of reaping positive mental benefits," says Paravati. "It's not about only using them when you can't access 'better' options- these options are helpful to use any time."

So listen to music, follow the gossip column, pet the dog, or play a game.

"We have evidence that as long as you feel like you're fulfilling your belongingness needs, it doesn't really matter how you're doing it," says Paravati.

In the latest issue of Molecular Therapy, Skoltech and MIT researchers have published a new combinatorial therapy for the treatment of liver cancer. Using a siRNA approach, a field in which Dr Zatsepin (Skoltech) excels, coupled with lipid nanoparticle technology developed in the Anderson laboratory (MIT), the scientists targeted proteins that are involved in apoptosis, a regulated program for cell death. In combination with chemotherapy, this caused a significant decrease in tumor load in a mouse model of hepatocellular carcinoma.

Liver cancer is the fourth most common cancer worldwide, and incidence of the disease has more than tripled since 1980. Advanced stages of this cancer are very aggressive and resistant to all conventional chemotherapies. Only recently, multiple kinase-inhibitor regorafenib and two different check-point inhibitors were approved for patients who progress after sorafenib but this only increased the overall survival by 3 months, highlighting the need to develop novel treatments for this disease.

"What we do is simply turning off a mechanism which prevents cell death, specifically in liver cells", explains Dominique Leboeuf, Skoltech PhD student and first author of this publication. "Once the mechanism is turned off, the cells become more susceptible to dying. This allows for the chemotherapy to be more efficient, killing more cancer cells, and preventing them from dividing. And although our siRNA reaches all liver cells, the cancer cells are more sensitive, because they are dividing rapidly, so they will be more affected by the treatment whereas normal cells survive."

These impressive results are the fruit of a long-lasting collaboration between Skoltech and MIT, led by professors Konstantin Piatkov, Timofei Zatsepin and Daniel Anderson. Financed by the NGP program, research was conducted in Skoltech and MIT, exploiting the strengths of both teams, and maximizing the learning experience for the students and researchers involved. "This study started from a clear idea suggested by K. Piatkov, when we just started our external joint labs in Skoltech. This project combined Konstantin's knowledge in the N-degron pathway, my expertise in siRNA and Daniel Anderson's savoir-faire in oligonucleotide drug delivery, for the development of a new therapy against liver cancer. First, Dominique confirmed that the suggested molecular mechanisms allow selective killing of tumor cells while sparing normal cells, which is crucial for further drug development. Together with the lab of Dan Anderson in MIT, we were able to show perspectives of this combinatorial approach to treat liver cancer in animal models. We believe that siRNA combinations with other drugs should provide a solution for many diseases that are difficult to treat" stated Timofei Zatsepin.

"Because the proteins targeted by our therapy are expressed in all types of cells, the combinatorial treatment developed in this study has the potential to be applied to all types of cancer. Our approach is simple and universal, and we believe that it has the possibility of eventually improving the outcome for many cancer patients in the future", commented the study lead, professor Konstantin Piatkov.

Your phone's GPS, the WiFi in your house and communications on aircraft are all powered by radio-frequency waves, or RF waves, which carry information from a transmitter at one point to a sensor at another. The sensors interpret this information in different ways. For example, a GPS sensor determines its location by using the amount of time it takes to receive a signal from a satellite. For applications such as in-door localization and defeating spoofing GPS signals, a wireless sensor measures the angle at which it receives an RF wave. The more precisely the sensor can measure this time delay or angle of arrival, the more it can accurately determine location or enhance security.

In a paper published today in Physical Review Letters, University of Arizona engineering and optical sciences researchers, in collaboration with engineers from General Dynamics Mission Systems, demonstrate how a combination of two techniques -- radio frequency photonics sensing and quantum metrology -- can give sensor networks a previously unheard-of level of precision. The work involves transferring information from electrons to photons, then using quantum entanglement to increase the photons' sensing capabilities.

"This quantum sensing paradigm could create opportunities to improve GPS systems, astronomy laboratories and biomedical imaging capabilities," said Zheshen Zhang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and optical sciences, and principal investigator of the university's Quantum Information and Materials Group. "It could be used to improve the performance of any application that requires a network of sensors."

From Electrons to Photons

Traditional antenna sensors transform information from RF signals to an electrical current made up of moving electrons. However, optical sensing, which uses photons, or units of light, to carry information, is much more efficient. Not only can photons hold more data than electrons, giving the signal larger bandwidth, but photonics-based sensing can transmit that signal much farther than electronics-based sensing, and with less interference.

Because optical signals offer so many advantages, the researchers used an electro-optical transducer to convert RF waves into the optical domain in a method called RF-photonics sensing.

"We designed a bridge between an optical system and a physical quantity in a completely different domain," Zhang explained. "We demonstrated that with an RF domain in this experiment, but the idea could also be applied to other scenarios. For example, if you want to measure temperature using photons, you could use a thermo-optical transducer to convert the temperature into an optical property."

Entangled Sensors

After converting information to the optical domain, the researchers applied a technique called quantum metrology.

Usually, a sensor's precision is limited by something called the standard quantum limit. For example, smartphone GPS systems are usually accurate within a 16-foot radius. Quantum metrology uses entangled particles to break past the standard quantum limit and take ultrasensitive measurements.

How does it work? Entangled particles are tied together so anything that happens to one particle affects the particles it's entangled with as well, as long as appropriate measurements are taken.

Picture a supervisor and an employee working together on a project. Because it takes time for the employee to share information with his supervisor through methods like emails and meetings, the efficiency of their partnership is limited. But if the two could entangle their brains together, the employee and the supervisor would automatically have the same information -- saving time and allowing them to jointly tackle a common problem more efficiently.

Quantum metrology has been used to improve sensor precision in places like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which has opened up a new window for astronomers. However, almost all prior quantum metrology demonstrations, including LIGO, only involve a single sensor.

Connecting Sensor Networks

However, RF waves are usually received by a network of sensors, each of which processes information individually -- more like a group of independent employees working with their supervisors. Quntao Zhuang, UA assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, previously demonstrated a theoretical framework to boost performance by teaming up entangled sensors.

This new experiment demonstrated for the first time that a network of three sensors can be entangled with one another, meaning they all receive the information from probes and correlate it with one another simultaneously. It's more like if a group of employees could share information instantly with their bosses, and the bosses could instantly share that information with each other, making their workflow ultra-efficient.

"Typically, in a complex system -- for example, a wireless communications network or even our cellphones -- there's not just a single sensor, but a set of sensors that work together to undertake a task," Zhang said. "We've developed a technology to entangle these sensors, rather than having them operate individually. They can use their entanglement to 'talk' to each other during the sensing period, which can significantly improve sensing performance."

While the experiment only used three sensors, it opens the door to the possibility of applying the technique to networks of hundreds of sensors

"Imagine, for example, a network for biological sensing: You can entangle these biosensors so that they work together to identify the species of a biological molecule, or to detect neural activities more precisely than a classical sensor array," Zhang said. "Really, this technique could be applied to any application that requires an array or network of sensors."

One potential application is in the entangled photon network being built on the University of Arizona campus. In theory work published in Physical Review X in 2019, Zhuang presented how machine learning techniques can train sensors in a large-scale entangled sensor network like this one to take ultra-precise measurements.

"Entanglement allows sensors to more precisely extract features from the parameters being sensed, allowing for better performance in machine learning tasks such as sensor data classification and principal component analysis," Zhuang said. "Our previous work provides a theoretical design of an entanglement-enhanced machine learning system that outperforms classical systems."

A new aluminum-based metal-organic framework material achieves both high gravimetric and volumetric uptake and delivery of methane and hydrogen, researchers report. This paves the way for safe and efficient storage of these cleaner fuel alternatives on on-board vehicles. In 2017, U.S. transportation vehicles eclipsed power plants as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, and the trend is expected to continue. Methane and hydrogen gas are both potential cleaner alternatives to the gasoline that fuels these vehicles. Use of methane and hydrogen in vehicles, however, requires high-pressure gas compression, which can be difficult to achieve according to the recent U.S. Department of Energy specifications outlining safe on-board storage and delivery in automobiles. In general, the storage pressure for methane and hydrogen in vehicles is limited to 100 bar, significantly reducing the amount of gas that can be stored. However, one way to increase the amount of stored gas without increasing storage pressure is with the use of highly porous adsorbent materials with both high volumetric and gravimetric surfaces. Using molecular simulations to inform their design, Zhijie Chen and colleagues synthesized the ultraporous aluminum-based metal-organic framework, NU-1501-Al. According to Chen et al., in experimental analyses, the material demonstrated impressive gravimetric and volumetric storage performances for both hydrogen and methane. The material surpassed DOE targets for methane and had a deliverable capacity of 14% by weight for hydrogen. The combination of experimentally obtained results and molecular simulations reveals that NU-1501 achieves "outstanding" gravimetric uptake, volumetric uptake, and delivery capacities of methane and hydrogen simultaneously under practical operational conditions, say the authors. This makes this novel class of MOF a promising candidate as a "clean energy carrier."

April 16, 2020--ATLANTA--A new study finds JUUL sales recovered within weeks following a dip after the company withdrew some flavored products from stores, eventually surpassing sales from before the change as consumption shifted to the menthol/mint and tobacco flavors that remained on shelves. The finding comes from a new study of sales data by American Cancer Society researchers appearing in the American Journal of Public Health.

In November 2018, under pressure from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to curb rising youth vaping rates, JUUL removed most of their flavored products, excluding tobacco, menthol, and mint flavors, from retail stores. Using Scantrack data on e-cigarette sales in the United States from January 2015 to October 2019 provided by The Nielsen Company, investigators led by Alex Liber, MSPH, senior scientist, with the Economic & Health Policy Research program at the American Cancer Society, looked at sales trends to characterize the effects of JUUL removing mango, crème brûlée, fruit medley, and cucumber flavors from store shelves.

From 2017 through 2018, JUUL sales grew, with a concurrent increase in the share of fruit-flavored e-cigarettes sold in Nielsen-tracked retail channels. Fruit-flavors rose from 12.9% of sales ($10,161,000 per month) in January 2017 to 33.3% of sales ($96,486,000) in October 2018. Fruit briefly exceeded menthol/mint as the flavor category with the largest proportion of sales in October 2018. At the same time, tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes' share dropped from 39.7% of sales to 16.6% of sales.

JUUL's voluntary decision to remove fruit flavors in November 2018 led to a decline in sales of fruit-flavored products across Nielsen-tracked retailers to 9.1% ($30,494,000) by April 2019. During this period, the share of menthol/mint flavor spiked from 33.0% to 62.5% ($95,592,000 to $209,567,000), and the share of tobacco flavor rose from 16.6% to 22.3% ($48,038,000 to $74,789,000).

Fully 91% of the growth in tobacco and all of the growth in menthol/mint was captured by JUUL. JUUL sales surpassed their previous maximum within 12 weeks, as JUUL consumption shifted marginally toward the tobacco and heavily toward the menthol/mint flavors that remained on shelves. Fruit-flavor sales began to increase again to 15.8% ($60,594,000) by September 2019, driven by sales of the NJOY brand.

Notably, e-cigarette sales in the Nielsen data peaked in August 2019 at $441 million per month (including hardware). The authors say while it is too soon to determine why sales slowed after that peak, plausible explanations include consumers' reactions to media reports detailing the outbreak of vaping-related illnesses and announced government actions including forthcoming bans on the sales of all or some e-cigarettes by the governors of several states and the president of the United States.

"There are two lessons to take away from this study," said Liber. "First, companies' attempts to self-impose their own restrictions are unlikely to improve public health. JUUL's withdrawal of fruit-flavored products was quickly offset by a combination of increased fruit-flavored sales by JUUL's competitors and increased sales of other flavors--notably, mint/menthol--by JUUL. It is highly unlikely that overall youth use declined given the short-lived impact on sales trends for JUUL cartridges and the rapid recovery of flavored cartridge sales within the very retail channels that should have seen the largest declines from JUUL's actions.

"Second, our study shows when exceptions to regulatory policies are made, the market will fill the void. The growth of fruit-flavored sales experienced by NJOY once JUUL stopped selling mango-flavored e-cigarettes is a striking indication of that happening. If governments exempt some e-cigarettes from a flavor regulation and not others -for example if governments exempt disposable or "open system" e-cigarettes from prohibitions on selling flavored products--we might expect consumer demand for flavored products to migrate to those types of products."

A research team led by Northwestern University has designed and synthesized new materials with ultrahigh porosity and surface area for the storage of hydrogen and methane for fuel cell-powered vehicles. These gases are attractive clean energy alternatives to carbon dioxide-producing fossil fuels.

The designer materials, a type of a metal-organic framework (MOF), can store significantly more hydrogen and methane than conventional adsorbent materials at much safer pressures and at much lower costs.

"We've developed a better onboard storage method for hydrogen and methane gas for next-generation clean energy vehicles," said Omar K. Farha, who led the research. "To do this, we used chemical principles to design porous materials with precise atomic arrangement, thereby achieving ultrahigh porosity."

Adsorbents are porous solids which bind liquid or gaseous molecules to their surface. Thanks to its nanoscopic pores, a one-gram sample of the Northwestern material (with a volume of six M&Ms) has a surface area that would cover 1.3 football fields.

The new materials also could be a breakthrough for the gas storage industry at large, Farha said, because many industries and applications require the use of compressed gases such as oxygen, hydrogen, methane and others.

Farha is an associate professor of chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He also is a member of Northwestern's International Institute for Nanotechnology.

The study, combining experiment and molecular simulation, will be published on April 17 by the journal Science.

Farha is the lead and corresponding author. Zhijie Chen, a postdoctoral fellow in Farha's group, is co-first author. Penghao Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Sir Fraser Stoddart, Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern, also is a co-first author. Stoddart is an author on the paper.

The ultraporous MOFs, named NU-1501, are built from organic molecules and metal ions or clusters which self-assemble to form multidimensional, highly crystalline, porous frameworks. To picture the structure of a MOF, Farha said, envision a set of Tinkertoys in which the metal ions or clusters are the circular or square nodes and the organic molecules are the rods holding the nodes together.

Hydrogen- and methane-powered vehicles currently require high-pressure compression to operate. The pressure of a hydrogen tank is 300 times greater than the pressure in car tires. Because of hydrogen's low density, it is expensive to accomplish this pressure, and it also can be unsafe because the gas is highly flammable.

Developing new adsorbent materials that can store hydrogen and methane gas onboard vehicles at much lower pressures can help scientists and engineers reach U.S. Department of Energy targets for developing the next generation of clean energy automobiles.

To meet these goals, both the size and weight of the onboard fuel tank need to be optimized. The highly porous materials in this study balance both the volumetric (size) and gravimetric (mass) deliverable capacities of hydrogen and methane, bringing researchers one step closer to attaining these targets.

"We can store tremendous amounts of hydrogen and methane within the pores of the MOFs and deliver them to the engine of the vehicle at lower pressures than needed for current fuel cell vehicles," Farha said.

The Northwestern researchers conceived the idea of their MOFs and, in collaboration with computational modelers at the Colorado School of Mines, confirmed that this class of materials is very intriguing. Farha and his team then designed, synthesized and characterized the materials. They also collaborated with scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to conduct high-pressure gas sorption experiments.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- For more than 40 years, scientists have hypothesized the existence of enzyme clusters, or "metabolons," in facilitating various processes within cells. Using a novel imaging technology combined with mass spectrometry, researchers at Penn State, for the first time, have directly observed functional metabolons involved in generating purines, the most abundant cellular metabolites. The findings could lead to the development of novel therapeutic strategies that disrupt the progression of cancer.

"Our study suggests that enzymes are not haphazardly located throughout cells, but instead occur in discrete clusters, or metabolons, that carry out specific metabolic pathways," said Stephen Benkovic, Evan Pugh University Professor and Eberly Chair in Chemistry. "Not only did we find proof that metabolons exist, but we also found that this metabolon occurs near mitochondria in cancer cells."

The findings appear today (April 17) in the journal Science.

In the study, the team searched for a specific kind of metabolon, called a "purinosome," that was thought to carry out "de novo purine biosynthesis," the process by which new purines -- building blocks of DNA and RNA -- are synthesized. The researchers investigated these purinosomes within HeLa cells, a cervical cancer cell line commonly used in scientific research.

"We have shown that the de novo purine biosynthetic [DNPB] pathway is carried out by purinosomes consisting of at least nine enzymes acting together synergistically to increase their overall activity by at least by seven-fold," said Vidhi Pareek, assistant research professor, Department of Chemistry and the Huck Institutes of Life Sciences.

The researchers identified the purinosomes, which were less than a micrometer in diameter, using a novel imaging system developed by Nicholas Winograd, Evan Pugh University Professor of Chemistry, and colleagues. "The technique utilizes gas cluster ion beam secondary ion mass spectrometry [GCIB-SIMS] to detect intact biomolecules with high sensitivity and allow in situ chemical imaging in single cells," said Hua Tian, assistant research professor, Department of Chemistry and the Materials Research Institute. This was vital for the study since we are dealing with very low concentration of molecules in individual cancer cells."

Nicholas Winograd, Evan Pugh University Professor of Chemistry, has worked for 35 years to develop new techniques, including high-resolution GCIB-SIMS, that can provide sub-cellular chemical information.

"Now, at the end of my career, I am finally seeing this imaging approach reveal the presence of purinosomes, and perhaps next, observe that a cancer drug actually makes it into a purinosome where it can be most effective," he said.

Importantly, the team found that the DNPB pathway occurs in a channeled manner and the juxtaposition of purinosomes to the mitochondria facilitates uptake of substrates generated by the mitochondria for utilization in the pathway. Channeling occurs when enzymes are located close together so that the molecules produced are quickly transferred and processed along the enzymatic pathway, restricting equilibration with the bulk cytosol.

"Our experiment allowed us to show that the efficiency of the de novo purine biosynthetic pathway is increased by channeling and that the proximity of purinosomes near mitochondria is consequential for the pathway," said Benkovic. "These findings open the door to the study of a new class of cancer therapeutics; for example the design of a molecule that can disrupt purinosomes' juxtaposition with mitochondria."

Researchers from Aarhus University have discovered the function of a special group of nerve cells which are found in the eye and which sense visual movement. The findings give us a completely new understanding of how conscious sensory impressions occur in the brain. This knowledge is necessary to be able to develop targeted and specific forms of treatment in the future for diseases which impact the nervous system and its sensory apparatus, such as dementia and schizophrenia.

According to the researcher, the study contributes with new and specific knowledge in a number of areas. It has been known for decades that the eye contains nerve cells that sense and signal the direction of movement when an object moves in our field of vision. However, how these nerve cells contribute to the nerve cells found in the cerebral cortex remained a mystery.

According to the researcher, the study contributes with new and specific knowledge in a number of areas. It has been known for decades that the eye contains nerve cells that sense and signal the direction of movement when an object moves in our field of vision. However, how these nerve cells contribute to the nerve cells found in the cerebral cortex remained a mystery.

The brain is without doubt the most complicated organ in our body, and knowledge about how the brain carries out all of its functions is still inadequate. One of the brain's most important functions is its ability to track and perceive sensory impressions from our surroundings.

In a recently published study, researchers from Aarhus University have mapped the function of a special group of nerve cells that are found in the eye. The results - which have been presented in Nature Communications - may in the longer term enable researchers to understand and treat diseases where the sensory perceptions of the brain are dysfunctional, as is the case for people with dementia or schizophrenia who experience hallucinations.

"We've described a specialised neural circuit which sends information about visual movement from the nerve cells in the eye and up to the nerve cells in the cerebral cortex. This is important so we can begin to understand the mechanisms for how conscious sensory impressions arise in the brain," explains Rune Nguyen Rasmussen, who is behind the study.

Perceiving the world as still images

"Without the ability to perceive visual movement, we'd perceive the world as still images, leading to major behavioural consequences such as those seen in people who have the disease akinetopsia and have lost the ability to sense the movement of objects."

By combining a range of advanced experimental methods and using a mouse as an animal model in which special nerve cells in the eye are affected, the researchers were able to answer the question of how the eye's nerve cells contribute to the cerebral cortex's nerve cells.

In the study, the researchers demonstrated that a special group of nerve cells in the eye ensure that the nerve cells in the visual cerebral cortex are capable of sensing and responding to visual movement which moves at high speed. According to the researcher, this is interesting because it indicates that what has previously been believed to arise in the cerebral cortex actually already arises in the earliest stage of vision, i.e. the eye.

Vision mitigates hazards

Of all of our senses, vision is particularly important because it enables us to discover and avoid hazards. For example, vision ensures that we quickly and precisely can determine where cars and bicycles are approaching from and how quickly they are moving when we cross a busy road during the rush hour.

"One important remaining question after our study is how and when this neural circuit is involved in different aspects of behaviour. So the next step in our research will be to begin a research project with aim of understanding whether this neural circuit is involved in sensing visual movement when mice move around and need to navigate in their surroundings," says the researcher.

Coal-fired power plants in Korea have been considered as one of the main sources of air pollutants, CO2 and the other precursor materials to ultra fine dusts such as nitrogen oxide, sulfur oxide. Therefore, FEPCRC is developing key technologies for eco-friendly coal-fired stackless power generation without emissions in flue gas.

FEP Convergence Research Center(FEPCRC) led by Director Lee Jae-goo in Korea Institute of Energy Research(KIER, President: Kim Jong-nam) successfully developed 'Oxy-Circulating Fluidized Bed Combustion (Oxy-CFBC)' technology that reduces air pollution over 80% and separates over 90% of CO2 emissions compared to existing power plant with air mode combustion.

Oxy-CFBC is a promising and advanced combustion technology that makes it possible to separate CO2 efficiently, utilize low grade fuels and remove SOx and NOx by oxy-combustion process combined with CFBC technology.

This process operates below 950 ? and does not produce thermal NOx compared to other types of thermal power generation that requires a high operating temperature. In addition, it allows to remove NOx and SOx with injecting the reducing agents such as urea/ammonia solutions and the limestone particles inside combustor. As a results, the burdens of installing flue gas treatment system can be reduced.

Since Oxy-CFBC uses oxygen mixed with recirculating CO2 instead of air as an oxidant and requires only air separation unit and flue gas recirculation system, it is easier to obtain highly concentrated CO2 compared to other carbon capture technologies. Moreover, this process can reduce about 80% of the amount of air pollutants generating ultra fine dust as well as the amount of flue gas compared to air mode combustion.*

* The effects of air pollutants reduction during oxy-combustion is as follows; sulfur dioxide: 80%, nitric oxide: 85%, carbon monoxide: 76%

FEPCRC developed Oxy-CFBC technology with flue gas recirculation system for the first time in Korea. This Oxy-CFBC process is one of the most advanced technologies that can be operated at 60% of O2 as an oxidant for oxy-combustion.

The higher oxygen concentration for Oxy-CFBC plays a critical role to improve the system efficiency. Developed technologies until now use oxygen concentration at the level of 40%, but if oxygen concentration increases over 60%, the size of CFBC and down stream facilities can be reduced significantly, resulting in the reduction of capital cost and operating expenses.

It was shown from Oxy-CFBC test-rig that thermal input can increase from 100 kWth to 200 kWth when oxygen concentration increases from 21% to 60%. This means that thermal power can be doubled in constant plant size or the plant size can be reduced for the constant thermal power.

FEPCRC also developed stable oxidants switching technology from air mode combustion to oxy mode combustion or vice versa for combustion and could obtain high concentration CO2 over 90% within one hour after oxidant switching from air to oxy mode.

Dr. Mun of FEPCRC who participating in this R&D said,"It is urgent to develop breakthrough technologies for CO2 and fine dust reduction. Our research team will continue to make an effort to develop basic design, engineering, and operating techniques related to Oxy-CFBC process with our own technologies, contributing to demonstration for advanced power generation technology that can separate CO2 during combustion process."

Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGAs for short, are flexibly programmable computer chips that are considered very secure components in many applications. In a joint research project, scientists from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and from Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy have now discovered that a critical vulnerability is hidden in these chips. They called the security bug "Starbleed". Attackers can gain complete control over the chips and their functionalities via the vulnerability. Since the bug is integrated into the hardware, the security risk can only be removed by replacing the chips. The manufacturer of the FPGAs has been informed by the researchers and has already reacted.

The security researchers will present the results of their work at the 29th Usenix Security Symposium to be held in August 2020 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. The scientific paper has been available for download on the Usenix website since April 15, 2020 (https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/ender).

Focus on the bitstream

FPGA chips can be found in many safety-critical applications today, from cloud data centers and mobile phone base stations to encrypted USB-sticks and industrial control systems. Their decisive advantage lies in their reprogrammability compared to conventional hardware chips with their fixed functionalities.

This reprogrammability is possible because the basic components of FPGAs and their interconnections can be freely programmed. In contrast, conventional computer chips are hard-wired and, therefore, dedicated to a single purpose. The linchpin of FPGAs is the bitstream, a file that is used to program the FPGA. In order to protect it adequately against attacks, the bitstream is secured by encryption methods. Dr. Amir Moradi and Maik Ender from Horst Görtz Institute, in cooperation with Professor Christof Paar from the Max Planck Institute in Bochum, Germany, succeeded in decrypting this protected bitstream, gaining access to the file content and modifying it.

Market leader affected

As part of their research, the scientists analysed FPGAs from Xilinx, one of the two market leaders in field-programmable gate arrays. The Starbleed vulnerability affects Xilinx's 7-series FPGAs with the four FPGA families Spartan, Artix, Kintex and Virtex as well as the previous version Virtex-6, which form a large part of Xilinx FPGAs used today. "We informed Xilinx about this vulnerability and subsequently worked closely together during the vulnerability disclosure process. Furthermore, it appears highly unlikely that this vulnerability will occur in the manufacturer's latest series," reports Amir Moradi. Xilinx will also publish information on its website for affected customers.

Advantage of the chips turns into disadvantage

To overcome the encryption, the research team took advantage of the central property of the FPGAs: the possibility of reprogramming. This is done by an update and fallback feature in the FPGA itself, which revealed itself as a weakness and gateway. The scientists were able to manipulate the encrypted bitstream during the configuration process to redirect its decrypted content to the WBSTAR configuration register, which can be read out after a reset.

Thus, the advantage of individually reprogramming the chips turns into a disadvantage, as the scientists show in their research work - with severe consequences: "If an attacker gains access to the bitstream, he also gains complete control over the FPGA. Intellectual properties included in the bitstream can be stolen. It is also possible to insert hardware Trojans into the FPGA by manipulating the bitstream. Since the security gap is located in the hardware itself, it can only be closed by replacing the chip," explains Christof Paar, adding: "Although detailed knowledge is required, an attack can eventually be carried out remotely, the attacker does not even have to have physical access to the FPGA."

When used correctly, both alcohol-based hand disinfectants recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) are effective against the novel coronavirus Sars-Cov-2, as confirmed by an international research team headed by Professor Stephanie Pfänder from the Department of Molecular and Medical Virology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB). The journal Emerging Infectious Diseases published the relevant article in its online edition on 13 April 2020.

30 seconds for disinfection

The researchers exposed Sars-Cov-2 viruses for 30 seconds to the WHO-recommended disinfectant formulations. "This time frame was chosen based on recommendations for hand disinfectants," says Stephanie Pfänder.

Subsequently, the team tested the viruses in cell culture assays and analysed how many viruses remained infectious. "We showed that both WHO-recommended formulations sufficiently inactivate the virus after 30 seconds," as Stephanie Pfänder sums up the results. Plus, this does not merely apply to the WHO solutions; rather, their main components, the alcohols ethanol and isopropanol, also showed adequate inactivation of the virus.

WHO-recommended formulations

The disinfectant I recommended by the WHO consists of 80 volume percent ethanol, 1.45 volume percent glycerine and 0.125 volume percent hydrogen peroxide. Disinfectant II consists of 75 volume percent isopropanol, 1.45 volume percent glycerine and 0.125 volume percent hydrogen peroxide.

German Pharmacies allowed to sell WHO-II formulation

Following the amendments to the German Drug Law by the German government on Wednesday, March 4, 2020, that will remain in effect for six months, the formulation WHO II, which is based on isopropanol, has been approved for this period. As a result, pharmacies are permitted to produce and sell this formulation in order to alleviate the current shortage of disinfectants.