Key Advance for Printing Circuitry on Wearable Fabrics

Perovskite crystal structure
Image:e Perovskite crystal structure

Electronic shirts that keep the wearer comfortably warm or cool, as well as medical fabrics that deliver drugs, monitor the condition of a wound and perform other tasks, may one day be manufactured more efficiently thanks to a key advance by Oregon State University researchers.

The breakthrough involves inkjet printing and materials with a crystal structure discovered nearly two centuries ago. The upshot is the ability to apply circuitry, with precision and at low processing temperatures, directly onto cloth — a promising potential solution to the longstanding tradeoff between performance and fabrication costs.

“Much effort has gone into integrating sensors, displays, power sources and logic circuits into various fabrics for the creation of we...

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Birth of Magnetar from Colossal Collision potentially spotted for first time

Neutron star merger results in magnetar with brightest kilonova ever observed. Researchers spotted a short gamma ray burst, GRB, 10 times brighter than predicted. The mysterious brightness might signal the birth of a rare magnetar, formed from two neutron stars merging, which has never before been observed.

Long ago and far across the universe, an enormous burst of gamma rays unleashed more energy in a half-second than the sun will produce over its entire 10-billion-year lifetime.

After examining the incredibly bright burst with optical, X-ray, near-infrared and radio wavelengths, a Northwestern University-led astrophysics team believes it potentially spotted the birth of a magnetar.

Researchers believe the magnetar was formed by two neutron stars merging, which has never bef...

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Gene Signature predicts whether Localized Prostate Cancer is likely to Spread

META-16 is correlated with MYC and RAS pathway activation and enriched in prostate cancer metastasis.

Researchers have identified a genetic signature in localized prostate cancer that can predict whether the cancer is likely to metastasize, early in the course of the disease and whether it will respond to anti-androgen therapy, a common treatment for advanced disease. The new gene signature may also be useful for evaluating responses to treatment and for developing new therapies to prevent or treat advanced prostate cancer.

“If we could know in advance which patients will develop metastases, we could start treatments earlier and treat the cancer more aggressively,” says the study’s senior author, Cory Abate-Shen, PhD, chair of the Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutic...

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Making 3D Nanosuperconductors with DNA

illustration
An illustration showing how highly nanostructured 3-D superconducting materials can be created based on DNA self-assembly.An illustration showing how highly nanostructured 3-D superconducting materials can be created based on DNA self-assembly.

A platform for making 3D superconducting nano-architectures with a prescribed organization could find application in quantum computing and sensing.

3-D nanostructured materials — those with complex shapes at a size scale of billionths of a meter — that can conduct electricity without resistance could be used in a range of quantum devices...

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