STROBE in the News

Professor Shimon Weiss leads team to develop nanosensors that can be directly inserted into a cell’s lipid membrane and be used to measure membrane potential.

The devices, which are based on inorganic semiconductor nanoparticles, could potentially record action potentials from multiple neurons as well as electrical signals on the nanoscale – for example, across just one synapse. Their paper, “Membrane insertion of—and membrane potential sensing by—semiconductor voltage nanosensors: Feasibility demonstration” was published in the January, 12, 2018 issue of Science Advances.

UCLA researchers have provided the first description of the structure of the herpes virus associated with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a type of cancer.

Researchers in the US have developed nanosensors that can be directly inserted into a cell’s lipid membrane and be used to measure membrane potential. The devices, which are based on inorganic semiconductor nanoparticles, could potentially record action potentials from multiple neurons as well as electrical signals on the nanoscale – for example, across just one synapse.

Image Courtesy: Y Kuo and S Sasaki / University of California, Los Angeles

Electron oscillations in silicon may be used to map, with nanometer resolution, the temperatures across a silicon device. Chris Regan of the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-workers have now developed a thermometry technique that, using a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), could eventually map temperature in a silicon device with a resolution down to 10 nm.

The U.S. is losing ground in a second laser revolution of highly intense, ultrafast lasers that have broad applications in manufacturing, medicine, and national security, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.  Currently, 80 percent to 90 percent of the high-intensity laser systems are overseas, and all of the highest power research lasers currently in construction or already built are overseas as well.  The report makes five recommendations that would improve the nation’s position in the field, including for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to create a broad network to support science, applications, and technology of these lasers, as well as for DOE to plan for at least one large-scale, open-access high-intensity laser facility that leverages other major science infrastructures in the DOE complex.

NSF, which has supported national centers of excellence, such as the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan (1991-2002),52 appears to no longer be directly involved in the development of high-powered or high-intensity lasers, except for some spin-off applications such as the new NSF STROBE Science and Technology Center at University of Colorado.

“From the start, the project has been about giving a platform to voices usually not heard in science class — Latinx voices,” said Hernandez Charpak, who is now the assistant director of research and knowledge transfer at CU’s STROBE, a National Science Foundation science and technology center on real-time functional imaging.

Tabletop coherent EUV/SXR beams are now possible using high-harmonic generation (HHG).1,2 In addition, a new generation of powerful coherent-diff ractiveimaging (CDI) techniques is removing the resolution limits imposed by traditional X-ray microscopy, by replacing lossy and imperfect X-ray optics with powerful iterative phase retrieval algorithms.

In her Symposium X talk on Monday, Margaret Murnane of the University of Colorado Boulder described methods to create coherent sources with extremely short wavelengths, with excellent spectral, temporal, and polarization control. “Thirty years ago,” she said, “we never thought that we could achieve the same kind of control—and perhaps better control—over light in extreme UV and soft x-ray region as we could in the visible region of the spectrum.”

From life-saving advances in medicine to life-changing opportunities in renewable energy, imaging technology offers a window into worlds that can’t otherwise be seen by the human eye. That makes it an essential tool across a broad range of scientific disciplines, from engineering to biosciences. But despite their widespread use, today’s imaging techniques remain limited. Finding a solution to this problem will require collaborating with other institutions and developing new ways to educate up and-coming scientists. Based at CU Boulder, the Science and Technology Center on Real-Time Functional Imaging—known as STROBE—is designed to do exactly that.

In a new study, appearing in the November 2017 issue of Nature Materials, a research team led by UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics, Naomi S. Ginsberg, has announced the development and implementation of the most direct method to-date to track the nanoscale process of energy flow that punctuates the initial picoseconds after light absorption in some natural and artificial light harvesting systems. The research results are also available online at the Nature Materials website.