Aurelia Butler

Rare earth metals, when linked, can act as a conduit for energy flow, and show promise for the development of novel materials.
Scientists have connected two soft crystals and observed energy transfer between them — a finding that could lead to the development of sophisticated, responsive materials. The study, by scientists at Hokkaido University in Japan, was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Soft crystals are flexible molecular solids with highly ordered structures. When they are subjected to external stimuli, such as vapour or rubbing, their molecular structures get reordered and they respond by changing shape, colour or luminescence.
“We wanted to know what would happen if we merged soft crystals at the molecular level to connect them,” says Yasuchika Hasegawa, a materials chemist at Hokkaido University and lead author of the study. Hasegawa and his team used rare earth metals called lanthanides, whose ions have similarly large radii and therefore form similar structures. Lanthanide compounds, of which there are 15, are interesting because they can luminesce.
The team studied the structures of crystals made from the lanthanides terbium (Tb), which luminesces green, and dysprosium (Dy), which luminesces yellow. The team first linked the crystals of each lanthanide separately and observed the structures and energy transfer within the compounds. They then used this information to merge Tb(III) and Dy(III) crystals together through a pyridine bond and examined the molecular structure of an energy transfer within the merged ‘molecular train’.
When they excited the dysprosium end of the train using blue light, they observed green luminescence at the opposite terbium end. Their calculations revealed energy was transferred from one crystal to the other over a distance of 150 micrometres. “This energy migration distance is the longest reported for lanthanide coordination polymers or complex systems,” says Hasegawa. The terbium end continued to luminescence for 0.60 milliseconds.
Connecting soft crystals could lead to the formation of novel crystal structures that could have applications in semiconductors, lasers, optical fibres and printing.
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In the American action movie “Pacific Rim,” giant robots called “Jaegers” fight against unknown monsters to save humankind. These robots are equipped with artificial muscles that mimic real living bodies and defeat monsters with power and speed. Recently research is being conducted on equipping real robots with artificial muscles like the ones shows in the movie. However, the powerful strength and high speed in artificial muscles cannot be actualized since the mechanical strength (force) and conductivity (speed) of polymer electrolyte — the key materials driving the actuator — have conflicting characteristics.
A POSTECH research team led by Professor Moon Jeong Park, Professor Chang Yun Son, and Research Professor Rui-Yang Wang from the Department of Chemistry has developed a new concept of polymer electrolyte with different functional groups located at a distance of 2Å. This polymer electrolyte is capable of both ionic and hydrogen bonding interactions, thereby opening the possibility of resolving these contradictions. The findings from this study have been recently published in the international academic journal Advanced Materials.
Artificial muscles are used to make robots move their limbs naturally as humans can. To drive these artificial muscles, an actuator that exhibits mechanical transformation under low voltage conditions is required. However, due to the nature of the polymer electrolyte used in the actuator, strength and speed could not be achieved simultaneously because increasing muscle strength slows down the switching speed and increasing speed reduces the strength.
To overcome the limitations presented so far, the research introduced the innovative concept of bifunctional polymer. By forming a one-dimensional ion channel several nanometers wide inside the polymer matrix, which is hard as glass, a superionic polymer electrolyte with both high ionic conductivity and mechanical strength was achieved.
The findings from this study have the potential to create innovations in soft robotics and wearable technology as they can be applied to development of an unprecedented artificial muscle that connects a portable battery (1.5 V), produces fast switching of several milliseconds (thousandths of a second), and great strength. Furthermore, these results are expected to be applied in next-generation all-solid-state electrochemical devices and highly stable lithium metal batteries.
This study was conducted with the support from the Samsung Science and Technology Foundation.
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Materials provided by Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH). Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

A research team led by Professor Seo Dae-ha of the Department of Physics and Chemistry at DGIST (President Kuk Yang) developed an optical microscopy that can control and observe electron transfer and transfer in complex chemical reactions occurring in nano-catalysts. This technology is expected to provide an experiment strategy based on system chemistry, a new experiment strategy for precisely studying photocatalysts at the single particle level.
Plasmonic metals at the nanometer level, such as gold, exhibit high light absorption rate in a wide place within the range of visible light. They are combined with semiconductor photocatalysts to act as a medium to increase light absorption. Excitation occurs in which electrons gain energy and move as a reaction to light absorption, and it appears through various paths depending on the size of the metal and the wavelength of the light. There are various hypotheses on the effect of this electron movement as a catalyst. The research team was able to test the hypotheses and reveal how electrons transfer by developing a new microscope that is experimentally simpler and more sophisticated than the conventional method of observing chemical reactions.
Professor Seo Dae-ha’s research team developed hybrid nanoparticles (for example, ‘gold/copper oxides’, a combination of gold and copper oxides), and lasers of different wavelengths (colors) (i.e., lasers A, B, and C are A+B, A+C … A+B+C) were combined into a new form, respectively, to investigate the reaction between them to test various hypotheses on the electron excitation phenomenon through experiments and verify them one by one. Through this process, the team was able to selectively induce electron excitation in gold nanoparticles, and quantitatively analyze their contributions by evaluating the increase in the reactivity of the catalyst. In addition, the team confirmed that these excited electrons were transferred to the semiconductor to increase stability and reactivity at the same time.
“The observational technology reported here is a technology that observes chemical reactions with high precision, efficiency, and low cost,” said Professor Seo Dae-ha of the Department of Physics and Chemistry at DGIST, while adding, “It is expected that it will contribute to the sophisticated design of catalysts and will be applied as a sophisticated evaluation and control technology using nanoparticles for pharmaceuticals.”
Meanwhile, this research was carried out with support of the National Research Foundation’s Leading Researcher Support Project, Leading Research Center, Biomedical Technology Development Project, and DGIST’s Grand Challenge Research Innovation Project.
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Materials provided by DGIST (Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology). Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Topology and entanglement are two powerful principles for characterizing the structure of complex quantum states. In a new paper in the journal Physical Review X, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania establish a relationship between the two.
“Our work ties two big ideas together,” says Charles Kane, the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Physics in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences. “It’s a conceptual link between topology, which is a way of characterizing the universal features that quantum states have, and entanglement, which is a way in which quantum states can exhibit non-local correlations, where something that happens in one point in space is correlated with something that happens in another part in space. What we’ve found is a situation where those concepts are tightly intertwined.”
The seed for exploring this connection came during the long hours Kane spent in his home office during the pandemic, pondering new ideas. One train of thought had him envisioning the classic textbook image of the Fermi surface of copper, which represents the metal’s potential electron energies. It’s a picture every physics student sees, and one with which Kane was highly familiar.
“Of course, I learned about that picture back in the 1980s but had never thought about it as describing a topological surface,” Kane says.
A classic way of thinking about topological surfaces, says Kane, is to consider the difference between a donut and a sphere. What’s the difference? A single hole. Topology considers these generalizable properties of a surface, which are not changed by deformation. Under this principle, a coffee cup and a donut would have the same topological property.
Considering the Fermi surface of copper as a topological object, then, the associated number of holes it possesses is four, a figure also known as a genus. Once Kane began thinking of the Fermi surface in this way, he wondered whether a relationship could exist between the genus and quantum entanglement. More

Why do individuals from single cells to humans cooperate with each other and how do they form well-functioning networks? A research team led by Prof. Dr Thilo Gross from the University of Oldenburg has come a step closer to answering this question. According to their model, networks with a high level of cooperation can emerge if the cooperating individuals take a clear-cut position towards free riders. However, if the contributors leave an environment too quickly because others do not cooperate, this will ultimately lead to an overall lower level of cooperation. The six authors from the US, England and Germany present the results of their ecological model in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The paper focuses on a fundamental problem: How can individuals who contribute time and effort to create a cooperative environment survive in a system where they compete against free-riders who take advantage of their work?
The researchers used game theory to analyse cooperation in networks, focusing on the so-called “snowdrift game.” “This game is based on a situation in which two drivers are surprised by a snowstorm and get stuck in the snow,” explains Gross, a professor for biodiversity theory at the University of Oldenburg’s Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity. The drivers each have a snow shovel available and can choose between two options — to cooperate or not. A driver’s highest payoff comes from letting the opponent clear all the snow by themselves. Nevertheless, the opponent is still rewarded for his work because he gets home faster.
The authors added a new option to an abstract model of this game: the players were able to quit the scene and relocate. This power turned out to be an important piece of the puzzle. “If hard-working contributors can abandon the environment in which they are exploited it leaves free-riders to their own devices while the contributors may prosper elsewhere,” says Gross.
Always on the move
But now the new paper shows that there’s a twist: If contributors use their power to quit too liberally then they are creating an environment where contributors and free-riders alike are always on the move.
“It seems absurd, but we reach a state where everybody is constantly looking for a better place, but in fact all that moving around just means every place becomes the same,” says Ashkaan Fahimipour, a computational biologist at the University of California and lead author of the study. He completed the study as a PhD student supervised by Gross.
The author’s mathematical work reveals that the onset of this state happens in a sharp transition. On one side of this transition lies the world where everybody is always on the move only to discover that it is bad everywhere. But on the other side there is a completely different situation. Here people are more lenient with their environment, they endure just a little bit longer, but decisively quit when things become too bad. This creates enough departures to punish free-riders but not enough to make every place the same. Thus safe havens for cooperation can form where strong contributions to the common good create prosperous environments.
In the new paper the author’s focus is mainly on the onset of cooperation among animals and in early civilizations, but their mathematical framework is transferable to a broad variety of different settings. “Maybe our results also hold a message for the modern world,” says Gross.
The work was a collaboration of researchers from the University of California and Princeton University in the US and the University of Bristol in the UK. In Germany, researchers from the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity in Oldenburg, the University of Oldenburg, the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön and the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Marine and Polar Research in Bremerhaven contributed to the study.
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The COVID-19 pandemic, bigger and more frequent wildfires, devastating floods, and powerful storms have become unfortunate facts of life. With each disaster, people depend on the emergency response of governments, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector for aid when their lives are upended. However, a complicating factor in delivering that aid is that people tend to disperse with such disasters.
In research recently published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Jianxi Gao, assistant professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Qi “Ryan” Wang, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University, formulated a method to predict human movement during large-scale extreme events with the goal of enabling more effective emergency responses. The model also revealed great disparity in movement among different economic groups.
“Despite many possible variables, we found that changes in human mobility behavior during various extreme events exhibit a consistent hyperbolic decline,” said Gao. “We call it ‘spatiotemporal decay.'”
Typically, people’s movements follow predictable patterns. When an extreme event disrupts the pattern, scientists refer to it as a “mobility perturbation.” For example, people may stop commuting to work, or they may change their route, or even evacuate to a shelter. Not only do these mobility perturbations cause challenges when delivering aid, but they also lead to financial, medical, and quality of life repercussions. The nature, extent, and duration of mobility perturbations vary widely.
Gao’s team tracked the anonymous movements of 90 million people in the United States over the course of six large-scale disasters including wildfires, tropical storms, winter freezes, and pandemics in order to develop a unified model.
“Our model reveals the underlying uniformity across variables by incorporating heterogeneity across space and over time,” said Gao. “We found strong regularities in how much mobility behavior changes following extreme events and in how fast mobility behavior returns to normal, allowing us to predict complex human behaviors during large-scale crises.”
Gao’s team found that people living close to the nucleus of the crisis — ground zero, or where a storm hits — limit their mobility significantly and quickly. Those living further away do not alter their movement patterns as drastically. This is what is referred to as ‘spatial decay.’ Over time, mobility patterns either return to normal, inch towards normal, or become even more perturbed. The team accounted for these variables by considering ‘temporal decay,’ as well.
When the team applied the model to the COVID-19 pandemic, it revealed great differences in movement among economic groups, which may help to explain the different infection rates. People from wealthy areas were more able to immediately reduce their mobility and maintain that change longer. People living in lower income areas exhibited a faster and greater hyperbolic decay.
“In other words, wealthier people were able to socially distance,” Gao said. “Lower income people were forced to return to work.”
“If events of recent years have taught us anything, it is that we must do our best to prepare for crises,” said Curt Breneman, Dean of the Rensselaer School of Science. “This work by Dr. Gao and his team can inform enhanced and proactive emergency response planning to mitigate future extreme events. It also shines a light on persistent social inequities that we must find new ways to address.”
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Materials provided by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Original written by Katie Malatino. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Nature is full of patterns. Among them are tiling patterns, which mimic what you’d see on a tiled bathroom floor, characterized by both tiles and interfaces — such as grout — in between. In nature, a giraffe’s coloring is an example of a tiling pattern. But what makes these natural patterns form?
A new University of Arizona study uses bacteria to understand how tiles and interfaces come to be. The findings have implications for understanding how complex, multicellular life might have evolved on Earth and how new biomaterials might be created from biological sources.
In many biological systems, tiling patterns are functionally important. For example, a fly’s wings have tiles and interfaces. Veins, which provide stability and contain nerves, are interfaces, which break up a wing into smaller tiles. And the human retina at the back of the inner eye contains cells that are also arranged like a mosaic of tiles to process what’s in our field of view.
A great deal of research has looked at how such patterns can be established through biochemical interactions. However, patterns can also be established through mechanical interactions. That process is not as well understood.
A new paper published in Nature shines new light on mechanical pattern formation. It was led by former UArizona postdoctoral fellow Honesty Kim. Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, an associate professor in the UArizona Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, is the paper’s senior author.
The Riedel-Kruse lab, in partnership with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Applied Mathematics Department, used bacteria to model how tiling patterns can arise through mechanical interactions. More