Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

It may offer an inexpensive new way to generate a freely movable microplasma, as well as yield insights into fundamental physics questions. It surprisingly also creates a mini light show, with the droplet sparking as it floats above a faint blue glowing gap. It is similar to Leidenfrost levitation — in which droplets dance on a hot vapor cushion. But by creating the vapor with a strong jolt of electricity instead of heat, the researchers found they could ionize the gas into a plasma that glowed a soft blue light.

“This method is probably an easy and original way to make a plasma,” said Cedric Poulain, a physicist at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission...

Experimental setup. The IR probe beam (CO2/FEL, red) is divided into two branches using a geometrical beam splitter (BS) (Au-evaporated Si wafer), which redirects part of the beam towards the s-SNOM Credit: http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150728/srep12582/full/srep12582.html

Computer-assisted technology developed especially for this purpose combines the advantages of both methods and suppresses unwanted noise. This makes highly precise filming of dynamic processes at the nanometer scale possible eg photosynthesis or high-temperature superconductivity.

The new camera from Dresden enables unaltered optical measurements of extremely small, dynamic changes in biological, chemical or physical processes...

VitB3 3D model

It will allow for novel drug development for obesity, diabetes type II and related metabolic diseases. A small molecule N1-methylnicotinamide prevents metabolic complications caused by a high-fat diet.

“Our laboratory investigates the metabolic effects of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide [NAD+], a metabolite derived from a form of vitamin B3 called nicotinamide,” explained assistant Prof Pavlos Pissios. NAD+ is central to intermediary metabolism, the intracellular process by which food is converted into cellular components in the body.

“Like reservatrol, which is found in red wine, NAD+ boosts the effects of the protein sirtuin 1 [Sirt1], which is known to provide many health benefits,” said Pissios...

A rock fulgurite revealed that lightning strikes alter quartz’s crystal structure on the atomic level.

Researchers once believed only meteorites could do so. At a rock outcropping in southern France, a jagged fracture runs along the granite. The surface in and around the crevice is discolored black, as if wet or covered in algae. But the real explanation for the rock’s unusual features is more dramatic: a powerful bolt of lightning.

Using extremely high-resolution microscopy, Prof Gieré et al found that not only had the lightning melted the rock’s surface, resulting in a distinctive black “glaze,” but had transferred enough pressure to deform a thin layer of quartz crystals beneath the surface, resulting in distinct atomic-level structures called shock lamellae...