As an industry leader, you are undoubtedly thinking about sustaining and growing company assets. You are probably equally concerned about potential disruptors and ways to integrate emerging technologies into your business models. 

By plugging yourself into various networks, you can mitigate these challenges through hiring top talent, tapping into deep and broad expertise, and being a part of the ecosystem. You are invited to explore the ecosystem around the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago at the PME’s 10 year anniversary events. To help you navigate the event, a brief overview of the events are below.

Industry day (Friday, Sept 17th, 2021) will have a morning session focused on industry and graduate students with three parallel tracks in the themes of Quantum Engineering, ImmunoEngineering, and Materials Systems for Sustainability and Health; and a afternoon session focused on alumni and faculty discussions with industry participation. These morning tracks will include a variety of panels, chats, faculty TED talks and separate grand challenge keynote addresses by leaders in the field - Drs. Jeff Bluestone from UCSF and the Parker Institute for Cancer ImmunoTherapy, and George Crabtree from Argonne National Laboratory and the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR).

Right after lunch (where industry leaders will have a separate lunch with faculty), there will be a plenary discussion with PME founding Dean, Matt Tirrell, and the CEO and founder of Valor Equity Partners, and PME advisory board member, Antonio Gracias. They will discuss their thoughts on where PME started and where it is headed and why they think this is especially significant with the world changing as rapidly as it is.

The afternoon session will include concurrent panel discussions

Industry day will bridge the scientific conference with a cocktail celebration of the 10 year anniversary in the Rubenstein University room, and the start of the scientific conference featuring many high profile speakers.

Editor’s note: This message was sent Sept. 1 from President Paul Alivisatos to members of the University community.

I am thrilled today to be back on the University of Chicago campus on my first day as president. Over these past few months, I’ve deeply appreciated the opportunity to renew my relationship with the University community through visits and a series of wide-ranging conversations.

Today, I’m writing to share some initial impressions and set the stage for what I hope will be a series of engaging and informative listening sessions over Autumn Quarter, leading in turn to a set of actions and initiatives.

But first, I want to thank Bob Zimmer, whose 15-year tenure as president, and impact on the University, has been extraordinary. I’m very much looking forward to working with Bob in his role as chancellor.

I want to acknowledge the resilience and creativity that the UChicago community has exhibited during the pandemic. Despite the many challenges, UChicago is every bit as vibrant as I recall from my student years. The University has grown and gained in capacity and impact in remarkable ways, and there are many opportunities to explore and develop for the future.

Manipulating RNA can allow plants to yield dramatically more crops, as well as increasing drought tolerance, announced a group of scientists from the University of Chicago, Peking University and Guizhou University.

In initial tests, adding a gene encoding for a protein called FTO to both rice and potato plants increased their yield by 50% in field tests. The plants grew significantly larger, produced longer root systems and were better able to tolerate drought stress. Analysis also showed that the plants had increased their rate of photosynthesis.

Polymer semiconductors — materials that have been made soft and stretchy but still able to conduct electricity — hold promise for future electronics that can be integrated within the body, including disease detectors and health monitors.

Yet until now, scientists and engineers have been unable to give these polymers certain advanced features, like the ability to sense biochemicals, without disrupting their functionality altogether.

Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have developed a new strategy to overcome that limitation. Called “click-to-polymer” or CLIP, this approach uses a chemical reaction to attach new functional units onto polymer semiconductors.

Using the new technique, researchers developed a polymer glucose monitoring device, demonstrating the possible applications of CLIP in human-integrated electronics. The results were published August 4 in the journal Matter.

Fermilab is America’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory.

So, you might be surprised to discover what exists on the second floor of Wilson Hall on the University of Chicago-affiliated lab’s 6,800-acre campus in Batavia, Illinois: a formal art gallery.

The Fermilab Gallery serves as the site of the annual culmination of the laboratory’s artist-in-residence program, now in its seventh year. Mark Hirsch, who uses computer models and coding for his art, was recently selected as the 2021-22 artist-in-residence, joining guest composer David Biedenbender, who plans to explore questions such as: What might particles colliding sound like?

The connection between art and science has always been part of Fermilab’s framework, instilled by its founding director, the late physicist-artist-sculptor-writer Robert R. Wilson. The creation of Fermilab’s artist-in-residence program in 2014 then, only made sense to help increase the public understanding of its scientist’s work.

Researchers at the University of Chicago have patented a new approach for developing carbon-based bioelectronic devices, which have a variety of applications in drug delivery, substance detection, and organ modulation.

Among the first bioelectronic devices that have seen widespread clinical application are pacemakers and cochlear implants. However, these devices have historically been bulky, rigid, and mechanically invasive to cells and tissues. A need exists for smaller, more flexible devices in order to improve the performance of these and future devices.

Bozhi Tian, an associate professor in the department of chemistry and the University of Chicago, has been exploring this issue from various standpoints and in his lab works on imitating cellular behavior using semiconductor nanomaterials and augmenting existing biological systems with semiconductor components. The lab also is always working toward developing new biophysical tools to understand subcellular dynamics—particularity, the ability to control living cells in real-time.

PME ImmunoEngineering Laboratories

Quantum Engineering News

Many small animals grow their teeth, claws and other “tools” out of materials that are filled with zinc, bromine and manganese, reaching up to 20% of the material’s weight. My colleagues and I call these “heavy element biomaterials,” and in a new paper, we suggest that these materials make it possible for animals to grow scalpel-sharp and precisely shaped tools that are resistant to breaking, deformation and wear.

Because of the small size of things like ant teeth, it has been hard for biologists to test how well the materials they are made of resist fractures, impacts and abrasions. My research group developed machines and methods to test these and other properties, and along with our collaborators, we studied their composition and molecular structure.

We examined ant mandible teeth and found that they are a smooth mix of proteins and zinc, with single zinc atoms attached to about a quarter of the amino acid units that make up the proteins forming the teeth. In contrast, calcified tools – like human teeth – are made of relatively large chunks of calcium minerals. We think the lack of chunkiness in heavy element biomaterials makes them better than calcified materials at forming smooth, precisely shaped and extremely sharp tools.

In a warming world it helps to stay cool. But doing so also threatens the planet. Most air conditioners use refrigerant gases called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

Though these do not deplete Earth’s ozone layer in the way the chlorofluorocarbons they replaced back in the mid-1990s did, they are hundreds of times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide is. Less-potent greenhouse gases are now being phased in as refrigerants, but these are not without problems of their own. They can be expensive, and some are inflammable.

Researchers have long sought ways to produce cooling systems that do without these troublesome gases, but none has come close to being a direct replacement. A small Irish company, however, now claims to have come up with an answer. Exergyn, based in Dublin, has developed a new type of air conditioning which not only avoids HFCs, but also has the benefit of having few moving parts at its core.

Exergyn’s system uses a substance called a shape-memory alloy. SMAs, as they are known for short, are a group of materials with the unusual ability to return to a predetermined shape when heated. They are sometimes employed to make spectacle frames, and also in medical implants such as stents. Nitinol, the SMA chosen by Exergyn, is a blend of nickel and titanium.

All SMAs release heat when deformed by compression, and then absorb it when the pressure is released and they return to their original shape. But Exergyn’s version of nitinol displays this property to a remarkable degree. For its prototype, the company produced 4cm-square plates of the alloy, each pierced by holes intended to permit the passage of a heat-carrying liquid or gaseous medium. A range of benign substances can be employed in that role. The firm’s engineers have tested water, brine, glycol and air, all with success.

To split water into hydrogen on a large scale, we need technologies that are sustainable, efficient, scalable and durable. Using solar energy (or other renewable energy sources) to split water delivers sustainability, while recent research has made key inroads toward efficiency and scalability.

Now Japanese researchers say they’ve made an important step toward durability.

Hydrogen today comes primarily from natural gas, which pumps out a lot of carbon and methane pollution into the atmosphere. By contrast, the sustainable solar-to-hydrogen approach has concentrated on photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. In PEC systems, which nominally generate no greenhouse gases, special catalyst materials absorb sunlight to directly split water into hydrogen and oxygen. But these devices have also been limited by low efficiencies and lifetime. While previous PEC technologies have typically only lasted about a week, the new system is dramatically longer-lived.

In recent decades the cost of wind and solar power generation has dropped dramatically. This is one reason that the U.S. Department of Energy projects that renewable energy will be the fastest-growing U.S. energy source through 2050.

However, it’s still relatively expensive to store energy. And since renewable energy generation isn’t available all the time – it happens when the wind blows or the sun shines – storage is essential.

As a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, I work with the federal government and private industry to develop renewable energy storage technologies. In a recent report, researchers at NREL estimated that the potential exists to increase U.S. renewable energy storage capacity by as much as 3,000% percent by 2050.

Here are three emerging technologies that could help make this happen.

Scientists at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital are studying liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), a biophysical process through which proteins and nucleic acids in a cell are compartmentalized without a membrane. The work provides new insight into how the strength of the forces that drive phase separation are linked to the speed at which it occurs. The findings were published today in Nature Communications.

Cells need to sort and organize proteins and other components. One way they do so is through LLPS, a process similar to the way oil forms droplets in water. Membraneless organelles, bodies in a cell that behave like liquid droplets, organize certain proteins without enclosing them with a membrane. Instead, the proteins are held together by the biophysical forces that drive LLPS.

A coronavirus infection can mow down the forests of hairlike cilia that coat our airways, destroying a crucial barrier to keeping the virus from lodging deep in the lungs.

Normally, those cilia move in synchronized waves to push mucus out of the airway and into the throat. To protect the lungs, objects that don’t belong — including viral invaders like the coronavirus — get stuck in mucus, which is then swallowed (SN: 9/15/20).

But the coronavirus throws that system out of whack. When it infects respiratory tract cells, the virus appears to clear tracts of cilia, and without the hairlike structures, the cells stop moving mucus, researchers report July 16 in Nature Communications.

There is no denying the need for nuclear power in a world that hungers for clean, carbon-free energy. At the same time, there's a need for safer technologies that bear less proliferation risk. Molten salt nuclear reactors (MSRs) fit the bill—and, according to at least one source, China may be well on their way to developing MSR technology.

Government researchers there unveiled a design for a commercial molten salt reactor (MSR) that uses thorium as fuel, the South China Morning Post reported recently. A prototype reactor, the paper said, should be ready this month for tests starting in September. Construction of the first commercial reactor being built in the Gansu province should be complete, they noted, by 2030.

If all goes well with the prototype, says a report in Live Science, the Chinese government plans to build several large MSRs. According to the World Nuclear Association, the country is eyeing thorium MSRs as a source of energy especially for the northwestern portion of the country, which has lower population density and an arid climate.

Summary:   Digital computing has limitations in regards to an important category of calculation called combinatorics, in which the order of data is important to the optimal solution. These complex, iterative calculations can take even the fastest computers a long time to process. Computers and software that are predicated on the assumptions of quantum mechanics have the potential to perform combinatorics and other calculations much faster, and as a result many firms are already exploring the technology, whose known and probable applications already include cybersecurity, bio-engineering, AI, finance, and complex manufacturing.

Quantum technology is approaching the mainstream. Goldman Sachs recently announced that they could introduce quantum algorithms to price financial instruments in as soon as five years. Honeywell anticipates that quantum will form a $1 trillion industry in the decades ahead. But why are firms like Goldman taking this leap — especially with commercial quantum computers being possibly years away?

To understand what’s going on, it’s useful to take a step back and examine what exactly it is that computers do.