Discovery opens up new routes for photodynamic therapy and drug development. Columbia University scientists, in collaboration with researchers from Harvard, have succeeded in developing a chemical process to convert visible light into infrared energy, allowing innocuous radiation to penetrate living tissue and other materials without the damage caused by high-intensity light exposure.

“The findings are exciting because we were able to perform a series of complex chemical transformations that usually require high-energy, visible light using a noninvasive, infrared light source,” said Tomislav Rovis, professor of chemistry at Columbia and co-author of the study...

For the first time, researchers have documented the long-predicted occurrence of ‘walls bound by strings’ in superfluid helium-3. The existence of such an object, originally foreseen by cosmology theorists, may help explaining how the universe cooled down after the Big Bang. With the newfound ability to recreate these structures in the lab, earth-based scientists finally have a way to study some of the possible scenarios that might have taken place in the early universe more closely. The findings, to be published 16th January in Nature Communications, came after two successive symmetry-breaking phase transitions at Aalto University’s Low Temperature Laboratory.

Helium stays a liquid at atmospheric pressure even wh...

Findings set stage for first clinical trial of stem cell-based therapeutic approach for AMD. Using a novel patient-specific stem cell-based therapy, researchers at the National Eye Institute (NEI) prevented blindness in animal models of geographic atrophy, the advanced “dry” form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), which is a leading cause of vision loss among people age 65 and older. The protocols established by the animal study, published Jan...

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a simple new tweak that could double the efficiency of organic electronics. OLED-displays, plastic-based solar cells and bioelectronics are just some of the technologies that could benefit from their new discovery, which deals with “double-doped” polymers.

The majority of our everyday ele...