A group of the world’s most prominent researchers in quantum information technologies and materials science from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) and the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) met with industry leaders in Paris to discuss partnerships and collaborations to develop solutions to some of humanity’s biggest global challenges.

The three-day event, held April 27-29 at the UChicago Center in Paris, aimed to build upon UChicago’s longstanding and numerous relationships with the European research community.

“It is clear that our most urgent global challenges are too big for any one scientist or institution to tackle alone,” said Juan de Pablo, executive vice president for national laboratories, science strategy, innovation, and global initiatives; Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering at Pritzker Molecular Engineering; and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. “Challenges like climate change and the rapidly growing opportunities provided by quantum engineering require robust international collaboration, which these workshops are intended to nucleate.”

A one-stop shop for quantum sensing materials

The brilliant blue of the Hope Diamond is caused by small impurities in its crystal structure. Similar diamond impurities are also giving hope to scientists looking to create materials that can be used for quantum computing and quantum sensing.

In new research from the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, researchers have created extremely thin membranes of pure diamond. In a few locations in the crystal structure of the membrane, however, the team substituted carbon atoms with other atoms, notably nitrogen. These defects connect to neighboring atomic vacancies—regions where an atom is missing—creating unusual quantum systems known as ​“color centers.” Such color centers are sites for storing and processing quantum information.

Two faculty members from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Chong Liu, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Molecular Engineering, and Shuolong Yang, assistant professor of molecular engineering, have been selected to receive the Department of Energy’s (DOE) prestigious Early Career Research Program award.

Raman followed Ranganathan’s lead, drawn to the study of systems in the natural world. Sometimes these systems are incredibly complex. Sometimes they are remarkably simple. Sometimes they do things in curiously convoluted ways that defy explanation. But they often rival or exceed the abilities of any kind of system that humans could engineer.

Published in Science on May 5, the results shed light on a previously unknown pathway of genetic regulation, indicating new research directions to understand the fundamental processes of mammalian development—and could suggest avenues of treatments for disease or other biotechnology.

Many cancer treatments are notoriously savage on the body. Drugs often attack both healthy cells and tumor cells, causing a plethora of side effects. Immunotherapies that help the immune system recognize and attack cancer cells are no different. Though they have prolonged the lives of countless patients, they work in only a subset of patients. One study found that fewer than 30% of breast cancer patients respond to one of the most common forms of immunotherapy.

But what if drugs could be engineered to attack only tumor cells and spare the rest of the body? To that end, my colleagues and I at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have designed a method to keep one promising cancer drug from wreaking havoc by “masking” it until it reaches a tumor.

Researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have discovered that the type of macrophages present in a person’s body might determine how likely they are to develop severe inflammation in response to COVID-19. Their study has been published in Nature Communications.

“Clinicians know that COVID-19 can cause a spectrum of disease severity from mild to severe symptoms. Why some people, and not others, develop very severe disease has been a mystery,” said Asst. Prof. Huanhuan Joyce Chen, who led the research with Qizhou Lian of the University of Hong Kong. “This is the first time anyone has linked the variation in symptoms to macrophages.”

PME ImmunoEngineering Laboratories

Quantum Engineering News

Researchers at universities around the world have been leading quantum development. In the United States, the Chicago Quantum Exchange (CQE) is one example of how assertive the U.S. government and academics have been working hand in hand to identify future quantum experts.

Based at the University of Chicago, the CQE is built around the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University. Its members also include more than 130 researchers at universities, laboratories and even in business research sites around the world focused on quantum sensing, communications, computing, materials, optics, nanomechanics as well as topological and device physics.

Yet, in addition to it also being in the early stages of building a quantum internet testbed, the CQE is also focused on expanding the educational opportunities in quantum fields to attract young people.

In a new study from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, researchers performed quantum simulations of spin defects, which are specific impurities in materials that could offer a promising basis for new quantum technologies. The study improved the accuracy of calculations on quantum computers by correcting for noise introduced by quantum hardware.

The research was conducted as part of the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials (MICCoM), a DOE computational materials science program headquartered at Argonne, as well as Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center.

"The reasons we do these kinds of simulations is to gain a fundamental understanding of materials properties and also to tell experimentalists how to eventually better design materials for new technologies," said Giulia Galli, a professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, Q-NEXT collaborator and director of MICCoM. "Experimental results obtained for quantum systems are often rather intricate and may be hard to interpret. Having a simulation is important to help interpret experimental results and then put forward new predictions."

Chibueze Amanchukwu, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME), has been named a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar for his work to address energy challenges related to climate change.

After spending two decades pioneering longer-lasting batteries, Professor Shirley Meng is building the dream cryo-EM to take her energy research to new levels.

Professor Shirley Meng, leader in energy storage research at the University of Chicago, and Argonne chief scientist, originally wanted to study law or politics. Her father had different ideas. As she points out, he was a civil engineer working in China, and like many at the time, was disillusioned with Chinese politics.

“He really discouraged me from politics and believed that an engineering discipline would teach me how truth matters the most,” says Meng. “You know, engineers stick to the truth, speak the truth and you have to be real to build something that works. I was also very good at chemistry and mathematics, so switching to engineering was easy for me.”

Meng's family was pro-democracy, so come 1996, she moved from China to Singapore to study Materials Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University. By 2000, she'd graduated with a first class honours and become a Singapore citizen, but her undergraduate journey hadn't been all plain sailing.

Argonne recently launched a ten-year strategy to address water security called Water Science and Engineering empowered by Artificial Intelligence. One goal of the program is to develop a smart system for monitoring and recycling water, and sensors developed by Chen are one piece of that puzzle.

Chen’s sensors – developed from the 2-D material graphene – can detect a wide range of contaminants in water. His company, NanoAffix, has commercialized these real-time sensors, and the company recently launched a handheld device that allows homeowners to test their tap water for lead.

With more than a trillion tons of carbon dioxide now circulating in the atmosphere and global temperatures projected to rise anywhere from two to nine and a half degrees Fahrenheit in the next eighty years, switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy is a subject of critical attention. To make that switch, humanity will need entirely new methods for storing energy.

To Chibueze Amanchukwu, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME), such thorny chemistry boils down to one flawed and often overlooked process—modern electrolyte design.

When carbon atoms stack into a perfectly repeating three-dimensional crystal, they can form precious diamonds. Arranged another way, in repetitive flat sheets, carbon makes the shiny gray graphite found in pencils. But there are other forms of carbon that are less well understood. Amorphous carbon—usually a sooty black material—has no repetitive molecular structure, making it challenging to study.

Now, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have utilized a new framework for understanding the electronic properties of amorphous carbon. Their findings let scientists better predict how the material conducts electricity and absorbs light, and were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“We need to understand how disordered carbon works at a molecular level to be able to engineer this material for applications like solar energy conversion,” said Giulia Galli, the Liew Family Professor of Molecular Engineering and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago. Galli also holds a senior scientist appointment at Argonne National Laboratory, where she is the director of the MICCoM center.

Imagine sensors that can detect the magnetic fields of thoughts, help lunar rovers detect oxygen in moon rocks, or listen to radio waves from dark matter. Just as quantum computers can theoretically find the answers to problems no classical computer could ever solve, so too can an emerging generation of quantum sensors lead to new levels of sensitivity, new kinds of applications, and new opportunities to advance a range of fields, technologies, and scientific pursuits.

Quantum technology relies on quantum effects that can arise because the universe can become a fuzzy place at its very smallest levels. For example, the quantum effect known as superposition allows atoms and other building blocks of the cosmos to essentially exist in two or more places at the same time, while another quantum effect known as entanglement can link particles so they can influence each other instantly regardless of how far apart they are.

Booming electric vehicle sales have spurred a growing demand for lithium. But the light metal, which is essential for making power-packed rechargeable batteries, isn't abundant. Now, researchers report a major step toward tapping a virtually limitless lithium supply: pulling it straight out of seawater.

"This represents substantial progress" for the field, says Jang Wook Choi, a chemical engineer at Seoul National University who was not involved with the work. He adds that the approach might also prove useful for reclaiming lithium from used batteries.

Lithium is prized for rechargeables because it stores more energy by weight than other battery materials. Manufacturers use more than 160,000 tons of the material every year, a number expected to grow nearly 10-fold over the next decade. But lithium supplies are limited and concentrated in a handful of countries, where the metal is either mined or extracted from briny water.

Put simply, it’s just easier to interfere with the many pieces of a living organism than it is to directly make them work better. Enzymes, for example, have all had long evolutionary histories that have optimised their activity to extraordinary degrees. The chances, therefore, of making one more selective or faster-acting through the binding of an outside drug molecule are very small indeed. The true ‘direct enzyme activator’ stories can be counted on fingers. But clogging up an enzyme’s active site with an extraneous molecule that’s hard to dislodge? There you have better chances.

By using advanced 3D printing techniques that provide a high level of control over the design of printed structures, they were able to create a series of intricate designs with mesoscale porous architecture, which helps to reduce each design's overall weight and maximize mechanical performance.

The team's cellular designs are similar to porous materials found in the natural world, like beehives, sponge and bone, which are lightweight but robust.

The researchers believe that their cellular materials could find new applications in medicine, prosthetics and automobile and aerospace design, where low-density, tough materials with the ability too self-sense are in demand.

Plastic bottles, punnets, wrap—lightweight packaging made of PET plastic becomes a problem if it is not recycled. Scientists at Leipzig University have now discovered a highly efficient enzyme that degrades PET in record time. The enzyme PHL7, which the researchers found in a compost heap in Leipzig, could make biological PET recycling possible much faster than previously thought. The findings have now been published in the scientific journal ChemSusChem and selected as the cover topic.

One way in which enzymes are used in nature is by bacteria to decompose plant parts. It has been known for some time that some enzymes, so-called polyester-cleaving hydrolases, can also degrade PET. For example, the enzyme LCC, which was discovered in Japan in 2012, is considered to be a particularly effective "plastic eater." The team led by Dr. Christian Sonnendecker, an early career researcher from Leipzig University, is searching for previously undiscovered examples of these biological helpers as part of the EU-funded projects MIPLACE and ENZYCLE. They found what they were looking for in the Südfriedhof, a cemetery in Leipzig: in a sample from a compost heap, the researchers came across the blueprint of an enzyme that decomposed PET at record speed in the laboratory.

Americans support recycling. We do too. But although some materials can be effectively recycled and safely made from recycled content, plastics cannot. Plastic recycling does not work and will never work. The United States in 2021 had a dismal recycling rate of about 5 percent for post-consumer plastic waste, down from a high of 9.5 percent in 2014, when the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled—even though much of it wasn’t.

Recycling in general can be an effective way to reclaim natural material resources. The U.S.’s high recycling rate of paper, 68 percent, proves this point. The problem with recycling plastic lies not with the concept or process but with the material itself.

As ecommerce continues to boom, Caroline Hughes, Global Senior Manager, Packaging, Avery Dennison RBIS discusses how an investment in more sustainable packaging can help elevate brands

Green consumerism is here to stay, and fashion knows it. Brands now accept they must address their carbon footprint and reduce textile and packaging waste as high importance. For instance, an overwhelming majority of British consumers (90%) are conscious of social responsibility and environmental issues, and plan to increase buying from brands with ethical credentials, revealed a survey in August 2021. Similarly, a Chartered Institute of Marketing report (December 2021) found that 82% of UK adults believe companies use too much packaging when delivering online orders, or selling in-store products, with 78% wanting to see more done by large companies to mitigate packaging waste.

With climate change writ large, yet ecommerce booming, what are fashion brands doing to tackle the packaging problem, and how can industry innovations help?

Creating new chemical compounds, such as new drugs, is not as simple as assembling one of those models with colored balls and sticks you might have seen in a beginning chemistry class. No, it's often a complex process with many steps and many chemical participants, some of which are toxic and environmentally hazardous.

One technique used in chemical synthesis is called hydrogen atom transfer, or HAT. It's a potentially powerful and versatile chemical tool, but technical constraints have limited its use. Now chemists at the University of Utah, Scripps Research, and their colleagues have borrowed a technique from the chemistry of energy storage to accomplish HAT with fewer chemicals and less cost.

Modern societies would be impossible without mass-scale production of many man-made materials. We could have an affluent civilization that provides plenty of food, material comforts, and access to good education and health care without any microchips or personal computers: we had one until the 1970s, and we managed, until the 1990s, to expand economies, build requisite infrastructures and connect the world by jetliners without any smartphones and social media. But we could not enjoy our quality of life without the provision of many materials required to embody the myriad of our inventions.

Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.

Although they are built to last for decades, bridges, dams, nuclear plants and other concrete structures are far from indestructible. One culprit is the alkali-silica reaction (ASR), often referred to as the ​“cancer” of concrete.

ASR is a reaction between alkali ions found in cement and silica — the two main components of concrete. The reaction creates a gel that absorbs water and expands, causing internal pressures to build up within the concrete. Over time, this pressure can cause concrete structures to crack and deteriorate. There is currently no effective cure for ASR in concrete, and it is both destructive and time-consuming to identify it in existing structures.

Slashing emissions of carbon dioxide, by itself, cannot prevent catastrophic global warming. But a new study concludes that a strategy that simultaneously reduces emissions of other largely neglected climate pollutants would cut the rate of global warming in half and give the world a fighting chance to keep the climate safe for humanity.

Published this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study is the first to analyze the importance of cutting non-carbon dioxide climate pollutants vis-à-vis merely reducing fossil fuel emissions, in both the near-term and mid-term to 2050. It confirms increasing fears that the present almost exclusive focus on carbon dioxide cannot by itself prevent global temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the internationally accepted guardrail beyond which the world's climate is expected to pass irreversible tipping points.

Yet despite this promise, apart from a few niche uses in electronics, water filtration and some specialist sports equipment, graphene remains largely unemployed. Certainly, no killer application of the sort predicted when the stuff was discovered has emerged. But that could be about to change. Concrete is as far from superconductivity on the technological sexiness spectrum as it is possible to get. Yet it is an important material and of great concern to those attempting to slow down global warming, because the process of making it inevitably releases carbon dioxide. And graphene may hold the key to reducing that contribution considerably.

When you’re baking a cake, it’s hard to know when the inside is in the state you want it to be. The same is true—with much higher stakes—for microelectronic chips: How can engineers confirm that what’s inside has truly met the intent of the designers? How can a semiconductor design company tell whether its intellectual property was stolen? Much more worrisome, how can anyone be sure a kill switch or some other hardware trojan hasn’t been secretly inserted?

In Brussels, major chemical maker Solvay has declared renewable materials and biotechnology a major pillar of future growth. The company, which reported $10.6 billion in sales last year and is among Europe’s largest chemical producers, says the platform will build on its already leading position in biobased products that includes guar, solvents, and vanillin. Its other growth platforms are battery materials, green hydrogen, and thermoplastic composites.

This is the first study to systematically review the data on PFAS exposure and damage to the liver, synthesizing the results of 111 peer-reviewed studies involving both humans and rodents. The researchers evaluated whether PFAS exposure was associated with elevated levels of alanine aminotransferase, or ALT, which is a liver enzyme that is a biomarker for liver damage when elevated. They concluded that three of the most commonly detected PFAS in humans — perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA)—are all connected with elevated levels of ALT in the blood of both humans and rodents. Authors also noted some differences in the effects of PFAS on liver injury between females and males, suggesting a potential mechanism through hormone dysregulation.

Startups to participate in the Chicago-based program are developing technologies across sectors such as renewable energy, energy storage, carbon capture, and hydrogen.

CHICAGO - (June 9, 2022) mHUB, one of the nation’s leading independent HardTech and manufacturing innovation centers, has selected eight ClimateTech and EnergyTech startups for investment through its Product Impact Fund I and to participate in its 6-month, hands-on accelerator. Teams will move from around the world to participate in the program and access mHUB’s state-of-the-art facilities for prototyping and product development.

We already have one kind of renewable energy storage: more than ninety per cent of the world’s energy-storage capacity is in reservoirs, as part of a remarkable but unsung technology called pumped-storage hydropower. Among other things, “pumped hydro” is used to smooth out spikes in electricity demand. Motors pump water uphill from a river or a reservoir to a higher reservoir; when the water is released downhill, it spins a turbine, generating power again. A pumped-hydro installation is like a giant, permanent battery, charged when water is pumped uphill and depleted as it flows down. The facilities can be awe-inspiring: the Bath County Pumped Storage Station, in Virginia, consists of two sprawling lakes, about a quarter of a mile apart in elevation, among tree-covered slopes; at times of high demand, thirteen million gallons of water can flow every minute through the system, which supplies power to hundreds of thousands of homes. Some countries are expanding their use of pumped hydro, but the construction of new facilities in the United States peaked decades ago. The right geography is hard to find, permits are difficult to obtain, and construction is slow and expensive. The hunt is on for new approaches to energy storage.

This chemical energy takes the form of redox potentials: seawater is around 3.5w/w% salt, which is present in the water as Na⁺ and Cl^– ions. In reducing these Na⁺ ions to Na metal, seawater batteries store energy by harvesting this metal from the sea, oxidising it back to Na⁺ ions when energy is required from the cell.

Lithium and several other metals that make up these batteries are incredibly valuable. The cost of raw lithium is roughly seven times what you'd pay for the same weight in lead, but unlike lithium batteries, almost all lead-acid batteries get recycled. So there’s something beyond pure economics at play.

It turns out that there are good reasons why lithium battery recycling hasn’t happened yet. But some companies expect to change that, which is a good thing since recycling lithium batteries will be an essential part of the renewable energy transition.

How extreme is the disparity between lithium and lead batteries? In 2021, the average price of one metric ton of battery-grade lithium carbonate was $17,000 compared to $2,425 for lead North American markets, and raw materials now account for over half of battery cost, according to a 2021 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The imbalance of recycling is counterintuitive in terms of fresh material supply as well. Global sources of lithium amount to 89 million tons, most of which originate in South America, according to a recent United States Geological Survey report. In contrast, the global lead supply at 2 billion tons was 22 times higher than lithium.

Hydrogen’s versatility as a decarbonization solution has created a lack of consensus and clarity as to where it is truly needed. Hydrogen is sometimes described as the “Swiss Army knife” of decarbonization, with a role to play in nearly every sector, as it can be burned to generate electricity or heat, serve as a carbon-free input to produce “green” steel and fertilizer, and power everything from passenger vehicles to deep-sea cargo ships.

When people talk about clean energy, they don’t often realize that more than half of the emissions-free electricity generated in the United States comes from nuclear power.

Nuclear is an essential tool for tackling climate change and it’s starting to become more versatile than you might think.

Commercial reactors offer various applications beyond providing electricity for homes and businesses. They can also be used to power desalination plants, provide heat for metal refining, and even generate hydrogen as a clean burning alternative fuel for vehicles.

Here are three surprising ways industries could leverage nuclear energy to further help decarbonize our society.

In a laboratory study and a field experiment across five countries (in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia), we show that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas.

By contrast, when it comes to selecting which idea to pursue, we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective (and preliminary evidence that they may be more effective) than in-person groups. Departing from previous theories that focus on how oral and written technologies limit the synchronicity and extent of information exchanged, we find that our effects are driven by differences in the physical nature of videoconferencing and in-person interactions. Specifically, using eye-gaze and recall measures, as well as latent semantic analysis, we demonstrate that videoconferencing hampers idea generation because it focuses communicators on a screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus. Our results suggest that virtual interaction comes with a cognitive cost for creative idea generation.

Flaws fixed in venerable 84-year-old method of measuring porosity

The error-prone estimation that is the current gold standard for characterising a material’s porosity could be replaced by a new piece of software that is far more accurate. The method, already tested by 61 leading laboratories, increases reliability and reproducibility, and redefines the gold-standard of adsorption measurements – surface area calculations.

Surface area provides a good estimate of how much fluid fits into the pores of activated carbons, zeolites, metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) and other porous materials. Traditionally, scientists estimated these values by inputting experimental data into the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (Bet) equation, which dates back to 1938. However, the team of David Fairén Jiménez at the University of Cambridge, UK, discovered some disparities.

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.

In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations,” wrote the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. “If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” No violation of this law has ever been observed, nor is any expected.

The healthy human body is home to an abundance of bacteria, viruses, and fungi that are acquired in early postnatal life. The bulk of the microbiome is in the gut, but distinct microbial communities exist on the skin and in the mouth, nose, lungs, and genital tract. The human microbiome has important roles in maintaining homeostasis, and disruption of microbial colonization of an infant has systemic effects that may influence health later in life, potentially promoting the development of autoimmunity, allergies, metabolic diseases, and even cancer.

A research group has revealed a cobalt-chromium-based biomaterial that mimics the flexibility of human bones and possesses excellent wear resistance. The new biomaterial could be used for implants such as hip or knee joint replacements and bone plates, alleviating problems associated with conventional implant materials.

Details of their research were published in the journal Advanced Materials on May 9, 2022.

With the elderly population increasing across the globe, the need for improved biomaterials that can replace or support damaged bones has risen. For this purpose, metals are widely used because of their strength and ductility. However, as a consequence of their strength, their flexibility diminishes.

IT IS A stealthy killer. When the heart’s chambers beat out of sync, blood pools and clots may form. Atrial fibrillation causes a quarter of more than 100,000 strokes in Britain each year. Most of those would never happen if the heart arrhythmia were treated, but first it has to be found. Tests are costly and inaccurate, but Apple Watches, and soon Fitbits, can detect it, are far cheaper and can save those whose lives are in danger.