Collage of products containing zinc. Credit: © Africa Studio / Fotolia

Research results present a new strategy for measuring the impact of zinc on health. The study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, was led by CHORI Senior Scientist Janet King, PhD. King and her team are the first to show that a modest increase in dietary zinc reduces oxidative stress and damage to DNA. Zinc is ubiquitous in our body and facilitates many functions that are essential for preserving life. It plays a vital role in maintaining optimal childhood growth, and in ensuring a healthy immune system. Zinc also helps limit inflammation and oxidative stress in our body, which are associated with the onset of chronic cardiovascular diseases and cancers.

Around much of the world, many households e...

Credit: Jian Yang, Yixue Su Artist’s conception of nanoparticle-carrying immune cells that target tumors and release drug-loaded nanoparticles for cancer treatment.

Penn State engineers have conjugating biodegradable polymer nanoparticles encapsulated with chosen cancer-fighting drugs into immune cells to create a smart, targeted system to attack cancers of specific types. “The traditional way to deliver drugs to tumors is to put the drug inside some type of nanoparticle and inject those particles into the bloodstream,” said Jian Yang, professor of biomedical engineering, Penn State. “Because the particles are so small, if they happen to reach the tumor site they have a chance of penetrating through the blood vessel wall because the vasculature of tumors is usually leaky.”

The odds of in...

The researchers at Aalto University have made an array of nanoparticles combined with dye molecules to act as a tiny laser. The lasing occurs in a dark mode and the laser light leaks out from the edges of array. Credit: Antti Paraoanu

Researchers at Aalto University, Finland are the first to develop a plasmonic nanolaser that operates at visible light frequencies and uses so-called dark lattice modes. The laser works at length scales 1000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair. The lifetimes of light captured in such small dimensions are so short that the light wave has time to wiggle up and down only a few tens or hundreds of times. The results open new prospects for on-chip coherent light sources, such as lasers, that are extremely small and ultrafast.

The laser operation in th...

This image shows levitating a 3cm diameter expanded polysterine sphere with a DIY portable tractor beam. Credit: Asier Marzo

Last year Asier Marzo, then a doctoral student at the Public University of Navarre, helped develop the first single-sided acoustic tractor beam – that is, the first realization of trapping and pulling an object using sound waves from only one direction. Now a research assistant at the University of Bristol, Marzo has lead a team that adapted the technology to be, for all intents and purposes, 3-D printable by anyone (with some assembly required, of course)...