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Category: particle physics

Another example proving the importance of quantum is core to bio. Quantum is a core component in all things (bio, environmental, geo & minerals, vegetation, energy, etc.).

By Lance Schuttler, contributor for TheMindUnleashed.com

One strand of DNA from one single cell contains enough information to clone an entire organism. Obviously, understanding DNA allows us to understand much about life and the universe around us. A deeper understanding of the new science tell us that DNA beings not as a molecule, but as a wave form. Even more interestingly, this wave form exists as a pattern within time and space and is coded throughout the entire universe.

We are surrounded by pulsating waves of invisible genetic information, whose waves create microscopic gravitational forces that pull in atoms and molecules from their surrounding environment to construct DNA.

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In Brief Research by Russian scientists has revealed the efficacy of cold plasma as a treatment for non-healing wounds. Their study conclusions could lead to much-needed relief for the millions of people suffering from chronic open wounds.

Non-healing wounds are troublesome to treat, with current methods teetering between extremely difficult and impossible, but cold plasma might be able to change all that.

Researchers have attempted to use cold atmospheric-pressure plasma — a partially ionized gas with a proportion of charged particles close to 1 percent and a temperature of 99,726°C (179,540ºF) — for medical treatment before, but never specifically for non-healing wounds. Apart from confirming the bactericidal properties of cold plasma and showing that cells and tissues have a high resistance to it, those earlier studies yielded non-conclusive results.

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We all love graphene — the one-atom-thick sheets of carbon aren’t just super flexible, harder than diamond, and stronger than steel, they’ve also recently become superconductors in their own right.

But it’s not the only over-achieving nanomaterial out there. Researchers have just simulated a stretched out, one-dimensional (1D) chain of boron, predicting that the material could have even weirder properties than graphene.

To be clear, 1D boron chains haven’t been created as yet — so far, this research is purely based on detailed computer simulations of the new material.

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Graphene cooking oil?

In Brief

  • Researchers have discovered a way to make soybean oil into the super-strong material graphene. The material has a wide variety of potential uses and can revolutionize electronics.
  • The material could be used to make cell phone batteries last 25 percent longer, make more effective solar cells, and even filter fuel out of air.

Researchers have found a way to turn cheap, everyday cooking oil into the wonder material graphene – a technique that could greatly reduce the cost of making the much-touted nanomaterial.

Graphene is a single sheet of carbon atoms with incredible properties – it’s 200 times stronger than steel, harder than diamond, and incredibly flexible. Under certain conditions, it can even be turned into a superconductor that carries electricity with zero resistance.

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Graphene is known as the world’s thinnest material due to its 2-D structure, in which each sheet is only one carbon atom thick, allowing each atom to engage in a chemical reaction from two sides. Graphene flakes can have a very large proportion of edge atoms, all of which have a particular chemical reactivity. In addition, chemically active voids created by missing atoms are a surface defect of graphene sheets. These structural defects and edges play a vital role in carbon chemistry and physics, as they alter the chemical reactivity of graphene. In fact, chemical reactions have repeatedly been shown to be favoured at these defect sites.

Interstellar molecular clouds are predominantly composed of hydrogen in molecular form (H2), but also contain a small percentage of dust particles mostly in the form of carbon nanostructures, called polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). These clouds are often referred to as ‘star nurseries’ as their low temperature and high density allows gravity to locally condense matter in such a way that it initiates H fusion, the nuclear reaction at the heart of each star. Graphene-based materials, prepared from the exfoliation of graphite oxide, are used as a model of interstellar carbon dust as they contain a relatively large amount of , either at their edges or on their surface. These defects are thought to sustain the Eley-Rideal chemical reaction, which recombines two H into one H2 molecule.

The observation of interstellar clouds in inhospitable regions of space, including in the direct proximity of giant stars, poses the question of the origin of the stability of hydrogen in the molecular form (H2). This question stands because the clouds are constantly being washed out by intense radiation, hence cracking the hydrogen molecules into atoms. Astrochemists suggest that the chemical mechanism responsible for the recombination of atomic H into molecular H2 is catalysed by carbon flakes in interstellar clouds. Their theories are challenged by the need for a very efficient surface chemistry scenario to explain the observed equilibrium between dissociation and recombination. They had to introduce highly reactive sites into their models so that the capture of an atomic H nearby occurs without fail.

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To generate swarms of new viral particles, a virus hijacks a cell into producing masses of self-assembling cages that are then loaded with the genetic blueprint for the next infection. But the picture of how that DNA is loaded into those viral cages, or capsids, was blurry, especially for two of the most common types of DNA virus on earth, bacterial viruses and human herpesvirus. Jefferson researchers pieced together the three-dimensional atomic structure of a doughnut-shaped protein that acts like a door or ‘portal’ for the DNA to get in and out of the capsid, and have now discovered that this protein begins to transform its structure when it comes into contact with DNA. Their work published in Nature Communications.

“Researchers thought that the portal protein acts as an inert passageway for DNA,” says senior author Gino Cingolani, Ph.D., a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Thomas Jefferson University and researcher at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center. “We have shown that the portal is much more like a sensor that essentially helps measure out an appropriate length of DNA for each capsid particle, ensuring faithful production of new viral particles.”

The finding solves a longstanding puzzle in the field, and reveals a potential drug target for one of the most common human viral pathogens, herpesviruses, which is responsible for diseases such as chicken pox, mononucleosis, lymphomas and Kaposi sarcoma.

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Agree; math is a must. However, experimentation is when the rubber meets the road.

In the mid-1990s, I studied mathematics. I wasn’t really sure just what I wanted to do with my life, but I was awed by the power of mathematics to describe the natural world. After classes on differential geometry and Lie algebras, I attended a seminar series offered by the math department about the greatest problem in fundamental physics: how to quantize gravity and thereby bring all the forces of nature under one theoretical umbrella. The seminars focused on a new approach pioneered by Abhay Ashtekhar at Penn State University. It wasn’t research I had previously encountered, and I came away with the impression that the problem had been solved; the news just hadn’t yet spread.

It seemed a clear victory for pure thought. The requirement of mathematical consistency also led, for example, to the discovery of the Higgs boson. Without the Higgs, the Standard Model of particle physics would stop working for particles that are collided at energies above 1 teraelectron-volts, well within the range of the Large Hadron Collider. Probabilities would no longer add to 100 percent and would cease to make mathematical sense. Something new thus had to turn up once that energy was crossed. The Higgs was the simplest possibility that physicists could think of—and, sure enough, they found it.

In the ’20s and ’30s, the mathematical inconsistency between Einstein’s special theory of relativity and the original version of quantum mechanics gave rise to quantum field theory, on which the Standard Model was later based. The mathematical inconsistency between special relativity and Newtonian gravity gave rise to the general theory of relativity, our state-of-the-art theory of gravity. Now physicists are left with the inconsistency between the Standard Model and general relativity. Of course we expect its resolution, in the form of a quantum theory of gravity, to be as revelatory as the earlier cases.

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Nuclear fusion is premised on building technology that would replicate the reaction that naturally powers our Sun — two light atoms, in this case, hydrogen, are fused together under extreme temperatures to produce another element, helium.

The process would release vast amounts of clean energy drawn from an almost limitless fuel source, with nearly zero carbon emissions.

However, it has yet to be done on a scale that would make it usable. Canadian scientists are hoping to change that, announcing plans to harness and develop nuclear fusion technology so they can deliver a working nuclear fusion plant prototype by 2030.

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Nice.

When you think of diamonds, rings and anniversaries generally come to mind. But one day, the first thing that will come to mind may be bone surgery. By carefully designing modified diamonds at the nano-scale level, a Missouri University of Science and Technology researcher hopes to create multifunctional diamond-based materials for applications ranging from advanced composites to drug delivery platforms and biomedical imaging agents.

Dr. Vadym Mochalin, an associate professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at Missouri S&T, is characterizing and modifying 5-nanometer nanodiamond particles produced from expired military grade explosives so that they can be developed to perform specific tasks. His current research studies their use as a filler in various types of composites.

Mochalin hopes to develop a way to uniformly incorporate the nanodiamonds and form strong chemical bonds between them to help design composite structures that can be used in medical applications, oil drilling bits, polishing and lubricating compositions, and even energy storage systems. Nanodiamonds are the ideal choice for such applications because they are mechanically strong, chemically stable and non-toxic. They can also form bonds with many other materials due to their tailorable surface chemistry.

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Nice read.

The results demonstrate that the positions of tens of thousands of atoms can be precisely identified and then fed into quantum mechanics calculations to correlate imperfections and defects with material properties at the single-atom level. This research will be published Feb 2. in the journal Nature.

Jianwei (John) Miao, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a member of UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute, led the international team in mapping the atomic-level details of the bimetallic nanoparticle, more than a trillion of which could fit within a grain of sand.

“No one has seen this kind of three-dimensional structural complexity with such detail before,” said Miao, who is also a deputy director of the Science and Technology Center on Real-Time Functional Imaging. This new National Science Foundation-funded consortium consists of scientists at UCLA and five other colleges and universities who are using high-resolution imaging to address questions in the physical sciences, life sciences and engineering.

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