A newly developed tool at Sandia National Laboratories may help American manufacturers make everything from mobile phones to aircraft bodies even stronger.
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Credit: Pusan National University
Rapid global urbanization has dramatically changed the face of our planet, polluting our atmosphere with greenhouse gases and causing global warming. It is the need of the hour to control our activities and find more sustainable alternatives to preserve what remains of our planet for the generations to come.
Carbon dioxide (CO
2) and carbon monoxide (CO) make up a large proportion of industrial flue gases. Recent research has shown that certain microorganisms are capable of metabolizing these gases into useful by-products. Thus, attempts are now being directed to using microbes to recycle these gases and convert them into useful chemicals in a process known as carbon capture and utilization (CCU). This is a step beyond the current widespread practice of carbon capture and storage (CCS). However, such CCU requires high energy input making the scaling up of this process difficult and expensive. How can this process then be optimized fo
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The new method works without extremely high temperatures, is therefore more energy-efficient and has a significantly higher recovery rate (approx. 96 per cent of the starting material) than established processes. These findings will be published on 17 February 2021 in the scientific journal
Nature.
Mechanical recycling vs. chemical recycling The direct re-utilization of plastics is often hampered by the fact that, in practice, mechanical recycling only functions to a limited degree - because the plastics are contaminated and mixed with additives, which impairs the properties of the recycled materials , Stefan Mecking explains. Chemical recycling is an alternative: Via a chemical process, used plastic is broken down into its molecular building blocks, which can then be converted into new plastic.
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Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines to prevent COVID-19 have made headlines around the world recently, but scientists have also been working on mRNA vaccines to treat or prevent other diseases, including some forms of cancer. Now, researchers reporting in ACS
Nano Letters have developed a hydrogel that, when injected into mice with melanoma, slowly released RNA nanovaccines that shrank tumors and kept them from metastasizing.
Cancer immunotherapy vaccines work similarly to mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, except they activate the immune system to attack tumors instead of a virus. These vaccines contain mRNA that encodes proteins made specifically by tumor cells. When the mRNA enters antigen-presenting cells, they begin making the tumor protein and displaying it on their surfaces, triggering other immune cells to seek and destroy tumors that also make this protein. However, mRNA is an unstable molecule that is quickly degraded by enzymes in the body. For cancer immunotherapy, rese
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IMAGE: Xiaohui Zhang, left, Andrew Smith, Kelly Swanson, Erik Nelson, Mark Anastasio and Junlong Geng are part of a team working to clarify the relationship between obesity and inflammation while on. view more
Credit: Photo by L. Brian Stauffer.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Researchers who focus on fat know that some adipose tissue is more prone to inflammation-related comorbidities than others, but the reasons why are not well understood. Thanks to a new analytical technique, scientists are getting a clearer view of the microenvironments found within adipose tissue associated with obesity. This advance may illuminate why some adipose tissues are more prone to inflammation - leading to diseases like type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disorders - and help direct future drug therapies to treat obesity.