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The Telecommunications Engineer Aitor Urrutia-Azcona has designed some humidity sensors with anti-bacterial properties that combat the proliferation of micro-organisms in environments where the humidity level is very high, such as hospitals and industrial premises for foodstuffs or pharmaceutical products. These devices combining nanotechnology and fibre optics are part of his PhD thesis read at the Public University of Navarre (NUP/UPNA).

Novel photo-bioelectrochemical cells point to a new method to photonically drive biocatalytic fuel cells while generating electrical power from solar energy.

Visualization of the structure of the created quantum knot. Each colorful band represents a set of nearby directions of the quantum field that is knotted. Note that each band is twisted and linked with the others once. Untying the knot requires the bands to separate, which is not possible without breaking them.

Some of the most promising solar cells today use light-harvesting films made from perovskites - a group of materials that share a characteristic molecular structure. However, perovskite-based solar cells use expensive "hole-transporting" materials, whose function is to move the positive charges that are generated when light hits the perovskite film. EPFL scientists have now engineered a considerably cheaper hole-transporting material that costs only a fifth of existing ones while keeping the efficiency of the solar cell above 20%.

Salmonella bacteria under a microscope.

Successful self-assembly is an elaborately choreographed dance, in which the attractive and repulsive forces within molecules, between each molecule and its neighbors, and between molecules and the surface that supports them, have to all be taken into account. To better understand the self-assembly process, researchers at the Technical University of Munich have characterized the contributions of all interaction components, such as covalent bonding and van der Waals interactions between molecules and between molecules and a surface.

Drug-resistant lung cancer cells are in red. Paclitaxel-loaded exosomes (green) swarm the cancer cells and bypass their drug resistance.

Researchers at The Ohio State University have found a way to light up a common cancer drug so they can see where the chemo goes and how long it takes to get there.