Dr. Lang and colleagues found that the presence of an enzyme isoform called α-tryptase, which is encoded by the TPSAB1 gene, correlates with increased prevalence of anaphylaxis or severe reaction to food as compared to subjects without any α-tryptase.

“Determining whether or not a patient with food allergies has α-tryptase can easily be done in clinical practice using a commercially available test to perform genetic sequencing from cheek swabs,” said lead author Abigail Lang, MD, MSc, attending physician and researcher at Lurie Children’s and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “If the biomarker is detected, this may help us understand that the child is at a higher risk for a severe reaction or anaphylaxis from their food allergy and should use their epinephrine auto-injector if exposed to the allergen. Our findings also open the door to developing an entirely new treatment strategy for food allergies that would target or block α-tryptase. This is an exciting first step and more research is needed.”

Tryptase is found mainly in mast cells, which are white blood cells that are part of the immune system. Mast cells become activated during allergic reactions. Increased TPSAB1 copy number which leads to increased α-tryptase is already known to be associated with severe reactions in adults with Hymenoptera venom allergy (or anaphylaxis following a bee sting).

Dr. Lang’s study included 119 participants who underwent TPSAB1 genotyping, 82 from an observational food allergy cohort at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and 37 from a cohort of children who reacted to peanut oral food challenge at Lurie Children’s.

“We need to validate our preliminary findings in a much larger study, but these initial results are promising,” says Dr. Lang. “We also still need a better understanding of why and how α-tryptase makes food allergy reactions more severe in order to pursue this avenue for potential treatment.”

Rajesh Kumar, MD, MSc, from Lurie Children’s is the co-senior author on the study. Dr. Kumar is the Interim Division Head of Allergy and Immunology and Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

This work was supported in part by the Midwest Allergy Research Institute (MARI) Food Allergy Pilot Research Award and NIAID-sponsored T32 grant AI083216. This project was funded in part with federal funds from the Division of Intramural Research of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, NIH. This project has also been funded in whole or in part with federal funds from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. 75N91019D00024.

In doing so, the method defines the scope of what scientists refer to as the northern Martian paleo-ocean in more detail.

The work was published in July in the journal Icarus, which is affiliated with the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences.

The research was led by Jaroslav Klokočník, professor emeritus at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Gunther Kletetschka, associate research professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, is among the three co-authors. Kletetschka is also affiliated with Charles University in the Czech Republic.

“A lot of people are excited about water on Mars because there may be life forms that once existed on Mars or maybe exist today in some bacterial form,” Kletetschka said. “We can use this gravity approach to look for water on Mars, because we have done it already on Earth.

“In an area of northern Africa, for example, this gravity approach found a shoreline of a long-ago lake, and its finding was consistent with the archaeological evidence indicating a shoreline of that lake,” he said.

The authors write that analyzing the gravity aspects of Mars to better understand the planet improves upon prior approaches. They note that it can “provide complete information with a better insight of the celestial body, applicable in geology, geophysics, hydrology, glaciology and other disciplines.”

The work by Kletetschka and colleagues differs from the traditional approach of mapping a surface based on gravity anomalies alone.

Gravity anomalies are areas of greater or weaker gravitational force exerted by a planetary body’s surface features. A mountain would exert a greater gravitational force because it has a higher concentration of mass than would be expected on a planet without surface features. Ocean basins and trenches would have less gravitational force.

In their Mars research, the authors used a process developed by Klokočník that analyzes gravity aspects calculated from gravity anomaly measurements. Gravity aspects are mathematical products that characterize the gravity anomalies.

They also used topographic data from the Mars Orbital Laser Altimeter instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, which launched in November 1996 and mapped the planet for 4 ½ years.

Klokočník used that approach to confirm earlier research about the existence of extensive paleolakes or paleoriver systems under the Saharan sands on Earth. His 2017 research paper also suggested a part of the Grand Egyptian Sand Sea as another candidate for a paleolake.

The gravity aspects method has also been used in a comparison of Earth’s geographic features to those of the cloud-shrouded Venus. That research is described in a July 2023 paper in the journal Scientific Reports in which Kletetschka is a co-author.

The results of this research, led by electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professor Joseph Lyding, along with ECE graduate student Pin-Chiao Huang and materials science and engineering graduate student Hongye Sun, were recently published in the journal ACS Nano.

“Graphene has been around for a while and it’s been thought of as something that could potentially be a high-speed electronic material, perhaps even a replacement for silicon,” explains Lyding. “But the problem with graphene itself is that it is not a semiconductor.” Graphene is a one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms and while it may be the thinnest known material, it is also incredibly strong. Semiconductor properties can be induced in graphene by making it very small or by fabricating it into specific shapes — like ribbons. For this project, atomically-precise GNRs were synthesized by co-author Alexander Sinitskii and his group at the University of Nebraska.

The process of making a transistor out of the GNRs includes putting them on a silicon substrate, connecting wires and running current through the wires to measure the transistor properties. The team has made the critical step of taking the GNRs, that are narrower in diameter than a DNA molecule, and wiring them up. They have developed a technique where the wires are also just a few nanometers wide.

Other researchers have worked on this problem by putting many GNRs on a silicon surface and putting down giant electrodes and hoping for the best. This method, however, introduces a lot of uncertainty. Lyding and his students used a more precise method for wiring up the GNRs. They used a scanning tunneling microscope (an atomic resolution imaging tool) to scan the surface looking for a GNR to use. In STM, a sharp tip is brought close to a surface — on the order of a nanometer — and scanned across the surface. There is a current flow between the tip and the surface, and when the tip comes across atoms on the surface, like driving over a speedbump, that current flow becomes modulated. This allows for the detection and imaging of the GNRs.

Once they find a GNR, they use the electron beam in the STM to trigger metal deposition from hafnium diboride precursor molecules to create the wires. Co-author Gregory Girolami and his group in the UIUC Chemistry Department synthesized the precursor for this process, called STM direct-write. “Our wiring method is very precise. When we see a GNR, we can just define a pattern that we want, and then we’ll connect it. It’s not just blindly throwing electrodes on the surface,” says Huang.

Another advantage of this method is that it is done in ultra-high vacuum (UHV). This ensures that the material stays clean from atmospheric water and other “junk” that degrades device performance.

The researchers also investigated the electronic character of the GNRs and found that it was changed by putting the metal contacts on. Semiconductor “doping” is the intentional introduction of impurities to change its electronic properties. Sun explains, “One way to dope GNRs is to use different chemical reactions to change the GNR properties. But that process is hard. The way we do it is by depositing metal. And we can actually choose the kind of metal that we want to put on the GNRs which could also tune the GNR characteristics. That’s one way to essentially dope our GNRs, without actually using dopants.”

Lyding says, “The next step, which we’re working on now, is to make a real transistor and actually measure the transistor characteristics. But we know that we can do this pristine process, using ultra-high vacuum, of making the electrodes that are absolutely necessary for device function.”

The Hintereisferner, located at the back of the Tyrolean Ötztal, has been closely monitored for more than 100 years, and there have been continuous records of its mass balance since 1952. This makes it one of the best-studied glaciers in the Alps and has been key to glacier and climate research at the University of Innsbruck for decades. Since 2016, the researchers have also been surveying the glacier with a worldwide unique system: the surface of the glacier is scanned daily with a terrestrial laser scanner returning the glacier surface elevation changes. This way, the change in the volume of the Hintereisferner is monitored in real time. Innsbruck glaciologist Annelies Voordendag led the measurement on site at the Hintereisferner, the results of the researchers’ investigations have now been published as highlighted article in the journal The Cryosphere.

“Already in the early summer of 2022, it became clear that the day when the ice the glacier gained during the winter starts melting away would be reached very soon. We call this day the ‘Glacier Loss Day’ or GLD for short. It can be compared to the Earth Overshoot Day, which marks the date when we use up more natural resources than the Earth can renew in a year,” explains Annelies Voordendag. Monitoring a glacier’s volume and mass alterations on a daily basis provides a quick assessment of its condition in a given year.

Observing glaciers’ health

When the GLD arrives, it means the glacier is no longer in balance with the natural conditions for that year. The earlier the GLD happens, the more time is left in the remaining summer that the glacier likely will lose volume and thus, mass. “We track the daily volume changes with the automated terrestrial laser scanninng setup overlooking the glacier and derive the day that the mass gained during winter has been lost,” says Voordendag. In 2022 the GLD was measured on the 23rd of June. In the two previous years, Glacier Loss Day was reached only in the middle of August.

Also in years with negative balance extremes — such as 2003 and 2018 — this day was not reached until the end of July. Even if not every summer in the future will necessarily be like the one in 2022, the trend is clear for the glaciologists, because the developments lie outside normal fluctuation ranges: “These are clear signals of anthropogenic climate change. The consequences of our greenhouse gas emissions are already hitting us hard today,” adds glaciologist Rainer Prinz from the “Ice and Climate” working group in Innsbruck. The future projections of development do not present an encouraging outlook either. Only half of the Hintereisferner will be left in 10 to 20 years,” the team summarizes in their study. These are clear climate change signals that are due to anthropogenic global warming and the consequences of our greenhouse gas emissions, which are already fully affecting us today.”

Led by Professor Dong Woog Lee from the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, the research team developed novel crosslinkers utilizing m-xylylene diisocyanate (XDI) or 1,3-bis(isocyanatomethyl)cyclohexane (H6XDI) as hard segments along with poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) groups serving as soft segments. By incorporating these newly synthesized materials into pressure-sensitive adhesives, they achieved significantly improved recoverability compared to traditional methods.

The PSA formulated with H6XDI-PEG diacrylate (HPD) demonstrated exceptional recovery properties while maintaining high adhesion strength (~25.5 N 25 mm?1). Through extensive folding tests totaling 100k folds and multi-directional stretching tests spanning 10k cycles, the PSA crosslinked with HPD exhibited remarkable stability under repeated deformation — showcasing its potential for applications requiring both flexibility and recoverability.

Furthermore, even after subjecting the adhesive to strains up to 20%, it displayed high optical transmittance (>90%), making it suitable for fields such as foldable displays that demand not only flexibility but also optical clarity.

“This breakthrough in adhesive technology offers promising possibilities for electronic products that require both high flexibility and rapid recovery characteristics,” said Professor Lee. “Our research addresses the long-standing challenge of balancing adhesion strength and resilience, opening up new avenues for the development of flexible electronic devices.”

Hyunok Park, a researcher involved in the study, emphasized the significance of this research by stating, “The introduction of this new crosslinking structure has led to an adhesive with exceptional adhesion and recovery properties. We believe it will drive future advancements in adhesive research while contributing to further developments in flexible electronics.”

The study findings have been published ahead of their official publication in the online version of Advanced Functional Materials on July 12, 2023. This work was supported through the 2023 Research Fund at UNIST and received additional support from organizations including the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea, Defense Acquisition Program Administration and Ministry of Trade.

To meet these demands, the industry must look beyond silicon to produce devices appropriate for the growing role of computing.

While unlikely to abandon the workhorse material anytime in the near or distant future, the technology sector will require creative enhancements in chip materials and architectures to produce devices appropriate for the growing role of computing.

One of the biggest shortcomings of silicon is that it can only be made so thin because its material properties are fundamentally limited to three dimensions [3D]. For this reason, two-dimensional [2D] semiconductors — so thin as to have almost no height — have become an object of interest to scientists, engineers and microelectronics manufacturers.

Thinner chip components would provide greater control and precision over the flow of electricity in a device, while lowering the amount of energy required to power it. A 2D semiconductor would also contribute to keeping the surface area of a chip to a minimum, lying in a thin film atop a supporting silicon device.

But until recently, attempts to create such a material have been unsuccessful.

Certain 2D semiconductors have performed well on their own, but required such high temperatures to deposit they destroyed the underlying silicon chip. Others could be deposited at silicon-compatible temperatures, but their electronic properties — energy usage, speed, precision — were lacking. Some fit the bill for temperature and performance but could not be grown to the requisite purity at industry-standard sizes.

Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science have grown a high-performing 2D semiconductor to a full-size, industrial-scale wafer. In addition, the semiconductor material, indium selenide (InSe), can be deposited at temperatures low enough to integrate with a silicon chip.

Deep Jariwala, Associate Professor and Peter and Susanne Armstrong Distinguished Scholar in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE), and Seunguk Song, postdoctoral fellow in ESE, led the study, published recently in Matter.

“Semiconductor manufacturing is an industrial-scale manufacturing process,” says Jariwala. “You aren’t going to have a viable material unless you can produce it on industrial-scale wafers. The more chips you can make in a batch, the lower the price. But the material must also be pure to ensure performance. This is why silicon is so prevalent — you can make it in large quantities without sacrificing purity.”

InSe has long shown promise as a 2D material for advanced computing chips because it carries electrical charge exceptionally well. But producing large enough films of InSe has proven tricky because the chemistry of indium and selenium tends to combine in a few different molecular proportions, taking on chemical structures with varying ratios of each element and thus compromising its purity.

The team’s success hinged on Song’s application of a growth technique that overcame the quirks of InSe’s atomic structure.

“For the purposes of an advanced computing technology, the chemical structure of 2D InSe needs to be exactly 50:50 between the two elements. The resulting material needs a uniform chemical structure over a large area to work,” says Song.

The team achieved this groundbreaking purity using a growth technique called “vertical metal-organic chemical vapor deposition” (MOCVD). Previous research had attempted to introduce the indium and selenium in equal quantities and at the same time. Song demonstrated, however, that this method was the source of undesirable chemical structures in the material, producing molecules with varying ratios of each element. MOCVD, by contrast, works by sending the indium in a continuous stream while introducing the selenium in pulses.

“By pulsing, you give the indium and selenium time to combine. In the moments between pulses, you deprive the environment of selenium, which prevents the ratio from getting too high. The benefit of the pulse is the pause. That’s how we get a uniform 50:50 ratio across our entire full-size wafer,” says Song.

In addition to chemical purity, the team was also able to control and align the direction of crystals in the material, enhancing the quality of their semiconductor even further by providing a seamless environment for electron transport.

“The two most important material qualities in a semiconductor are chemical purity and crystalline order. The most important industrial quality is scalability. This material checks every box,” says Jariwala.