Printing transparent glass in 3-D

The technology behind 3-D printing—which initially grew out of work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—has exploded in recent years to encompass a wide variety of materials, including plastics and metals. Simultaneously, the cost of 3-D printers has fallen sufficiently to make them household consumer items.

Now, a team of MIT researchers has opened up a new frontier in 3-D printing: the ability to print optically transparent glass objects.

The new system, described in the Journal of 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing, was developed by Neri Oxman, an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab; Peter Houk, director of the MIT Glass Lab; MIT researchers John Klein and Michael Stern; and six others.

NOAA Shark Survey Shows East Coast Populations Improving

Lisa Natanson, a research fish biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been fascinated by sharks since she was seven years old. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, she says the marine environment plays an important role in residents’ lives.

“I just was interested in sharks from a young age and never lost interest,” says Natanson in an interview with R&D Magazine.

The Bay Area is known for its great white shark population. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, scientists have estimated the Bay Area population to number around 2,400, a staggering figure when estimates in the 1990s ranged from 200 to 400.

These days, Natanson’s focus is on shark populations along the east coast. For 29 years, NOAA has surveyed shark populations in order to monitor health and abundance in the Atlantic Ocean. This year, 2,835 sharks were captured, the most in the survey’s history and a good indicator of healthy shark populations. Seventy-seven percent of those sharks were tagged and released. Researchers record the length, sex and location of each animal caught.

Inexpensive new catalysts can be fine-tuned

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a new type of catalyst that can be tuned to promote desired chemical reactions, potentially enabling the replacement of expensive and rare metals in fuel cells.

The new catalyst is carbon-based, made of graphite with additional compounds bonded to the edges of 2-D sheets of graphene that make up the material. By adjusting the composition and amounts of these added compounds, the characteristics of the catalyst can be adjusted to favor specific chemical reactions.

The new catalytic material is described in a paper published in JACS by MIT assistant professor of chemistry Yogesh Surendranath and three collaborators.

Nano-trapped molecules are potential path to quantum devices

Single atoms or molecules imprisoned by laser light in a doughnut-shaped metal cage could unlock the key to advanced storage devices, computers and high-resolution instruments.

In a paper published in Physical Review A, a team composed of Ali Passian of the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE)'s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Marouane Salhi and George Siopsis of the Univ. of Tennessee describes conceptually how physicists may be able to exploit a molecule's energy to advance a number of fields.

"A single molecule has many degrees of freedom, or ways of expressing its energy and dynamics, including vibrations, rotations and translations," Passian said. "For years, physicists have searched for ways to take advantage of these molecular states, including how they could be used in high-precision instruments or as an information storage device for applications such as quantum computing."

The Microbial Cloud Left in Your Wake

Like an aura, a personal microbial cloud surrounds your body. A dash of particles from your breath and a helping from your skin, among other sources, coalesce to make something unique, an imprint of you.

“We expected that we would be able to detect the human microbiome in the air around a person, but we were surprised to find that we could identify most of the occupants just by sampling their microbial cloud,” said James F. Meadow, the lead author of the paper appearing in PeerJ.

Every hour, a human emits 10,000,000 biological particles, according to the researchers. To understand human contribution to bioaerosols in the environment, the researchers performed two separate experiments. The first experiment compared the bacterial assemblages emitted from a human subjects in a sanitized chamber. Air filters collected particles from bacterial clouds, and trays collected settled particles. A second experiment utilized only floor dishes, and lasted around 90 minutes, according to WIRED.

Within just four hours, the occupants could be identified by the unique bacterial assemblages present in the surrounding air, according to the researchers.

11,500-Year-Old Evidence of Salmon Fishing Found in Alaska

The Upward Sun River archaeological site, located in interior Alaska near the Tanana River, holds some of the earliest evidence of human remains in North America’s Arctic and Sub-Arctic areas. Excavated remains, human dwellings and tools date to the Pleistocene Epoch, which ended roughly 11,700 years ago.

Recently, Univ. of Alaska Fairbanks’ researchers uncovered 11,500-year-old salmon remains in a cooking hearth in an ancient residential structure, verifying the earliest known evidence of Paleoindians using salmon as a food source.

About 300 salmon bone fragments were found at the site, reports the New York Times

Using ancient DNA and stable isotope analysis, the researchers verified the remains as sea-run chum salmon, which migrated upriver some 1,400 km away from where the modern mouth of the Yukon River exists.

New clue to halting leukemia relapse

A protein domain once considered of little importance may be key to helping patients who are fighting acute myeloid leukemia (AML) avoid a relapse.

Researchers at Rice Univ., working with colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine and the Univ. of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, have made a small molecule that could deliver a one-two punch to proteins that resist chemotherapy in patients with AML.

The protein, called STAT3, interferes with chemotherapy by halting the death of cancerous cells and allowing them to proliferate. The molecule discovered at Rice locates and then attacks a previously unknown binding site on STAT3, disrupting its disease-promoting effects.

The new work led by Rice chemist Zachary Ball, Baylor pediatrician Michele Redell and MD Anderson oncologist David Tweardy appears in Angewandte Chemie.