“Tissue Papers” from Organ-Specific Decellularized Extracellular Matrices. Advanced Functional Materials, 2017; 1700992 DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201700992 Credit: Image courtesy of Northwestern University

Bioactive tissue paper made from organs is pliable enough to fold into origami structures. Northwestern Medicine scientists and engineers have invented a range of bioactive “tissue papers” made of materials derived from organs which potentially can be used to support natural hormone production in young cancer patients and aid wound healing. The tissue papers are made from structural proteins excreted by cells that give organs their form and structure. The proteins are combined with a polymer to make the material pliable.

In the study, individual types of tissue papers were made from ovarian,...

Confining metal-halide perovskites in nanoporous thin films. Science Advances, 2017; 3 (8): e1700738 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1700738 Foto: Foto Ruhrgebiet / fotolia.com

The color of the light emitted by an LED can be tuned by altering the size of their semiconductor crystals. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich researchers have now found a clever and economical way of doing just that, which lends itself to industrial-scale production. Unlike incandescent lightbulbs, light-emitting diodes produce light of a defined color within the spectral range from the infrared to the ultraviolet. The exact wavelength of the emission is determined by the chemical composition of the semiconductor, the crucial component...

Magnetic microbot capturing, dragging and releasing a live cell. Credit: Koohee Han and Dr. Wyatt Shields, provided by Prof. Orlin D. Velev, NC State University.

Researchers at North Carolina State University and Duke University have developed a way to assemble and pre-program tiny structures made from microscopic cubes – “microbot origami” – to change their shape when actuated by a magnetic field and then, using the magnetic energy from their environment, perform a variety of tasks – including capturing and transporting single cells.

The findings pave the way for microbots and micro-origami assemblies that can serve as cell characterization tools, fluid micromixers, and components of artificial muscles and soft biomimetic devices...

Map of dark matter made from gravitational lensing measurements of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey. The map covers about 1/30th of the entire sky and spans several billion light-years in extent. Red regions have more dark matter than average, blue regions less dark matter. Credit: Chihway Chang of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and the DES collaboration.

Imagine planting a single seed and, with great precision, being able to predict the exact height of the tree that grows from it. Now imagine traveling to the future and snapping photographic proof that you were right...