How plantains and carbon nanotubes can improve cars

A luxury automobile is not really a place to look for something like sisal, hemp, or wood. Yet automakers have been using natural fibers for decades. Some high-end sedans and coupes use these in composite materials for interior ...

How a protein's small change leads to big trouble for cells

In molecular biology, chaperones are a class of proteins that help regulate how other proteins fold. Folding is an important step in the manufacturing process for proteins. When they don't fold the way they're supposed to, ...

Study analyzes contamination in drug manufacturing plants

Over the past few decades, there have been a handful of incidents in which manufacturing processes for making protein drugs became contaminated with viruses at manufacturing plants. These were all discovered before the drugs ...

Bacteria help make low-calorie sugar

Imagine a sugar that has only 38 percent of the calories of traditional table sugar, is safe for diabetics, and will not cause cavities. Now add that this dream sweetener is not an artificial substitute but a real sugar found ...

Light-based 'tractor beam' assembles materials at the nanoscale

Modern construction is a precision endeavor. Builders must use components manufactured to meet specific standards—such as beams of a desired composition or rivets of a specific size. The building industry relies on manufacturers ...

Topological nanoelectronics

Topological insulators are materials with astonishing properties: Electric current flows only along their surfaces or edges, whereas the interior of the material behaves as an insulator. In 2007, Professor Laurens Molenkamp ...

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