#nanotechnology

But nope. Hes in a new universe that has completely different heroes, and more importantly, completely different memes (what the hell is "do the butts match"??) And this place has a distinct lack of one Tony Stark

So Peter basically starts up Stark Enterprises in NY again bc he poor and its what Tony (probably) wouldve wanted. He had to pay for this metabolism somehow

But obviously peter needed an investor or twenty, but who needs more than one when Brucie Wayne exists?? Hes like a hunkier yet still bimbo Tony, and practically throws his money at any sad looking teen

But Brucie wayne ends up taking him under his wing, bc hes like. An 18/19 year old CEO and he is Very Concerned abt how this kid not only invented a new type of metal (vibranium) and a very powerful form of energy (arc reactors), so he pays extra attention bc he does NOT need a villain running around with that kind of power and intelligence to back it

"When bloodstream infections set in, fast treatment is crucial — but it can take several days to identify the bacteria responsible. A new, rapid-diagnosis sepsis test could cut down on the wait, reducing testing time from as much as a few days to about 13 hours by cutting out a lengthy blood culturing step, researchers report July 24 [2024] in Nature.

“They are pushing the limits of rapid diagnostics for bloodstream infections,” says Pak Kin Wong, a biomedical engineer at Penn State who was not involved in the research. “They are driving toward a direction that will dramatically improve the clinical management of bloodstream infections and sepsis.”

Sepsis — an immune system overreaction to an infection — is a life-threatening condition that strikes nearly 2 million people per year in the United States, killing more than 250,000 (SN: 5/18/08). The condition can also progress to septic shock, a steep drop in blood pressure that damages the kidneys, lungs, liver and other organs. It can be caused by a broad range of different bacteria, making species identification key for personalized treatment of each patient.

In conventional sepsis testing, the blood collected from the patient must first go through a daylong blood culturing step to grow more bacteria for detection. The sample then goes through a second culture for purification before undergoing testing to find the best treatment. During the two to three days required for testing, patients are placed on broad-spectrum antibiotics — a blunt tool designed to stave off a mystery infection that’s better treated by targeted antibiotics after figuring out the specific bacteria causing the infection.

Nanoengineer Tae Hyun Kim and colleagues found a way around the initial 24-hour blood culture.

The workaround starts by injecting a blood sample with nanoparticles decorated with a peptide designed to bind to a wide range of blood-borne pathogens. Magnets then pull out the nanoparticles, and the bound pathogens come with them. Those bacteria are sent directly to the pure culture. Thanks to this binding and sorting process, the bacteria can grow faster without extraneous components in the sample, like blood cells and the previously given broad-spectrum antibiotics, says Kim, of Seoul National University in South Korea.

Cutting out the initial blood culturing step also relies on a new imaging algorithm, Kim says. To test bacteria’s susceptibility to antibiotics, both are placed in the same environment, and scientists observe if and how the antibiotics stunt the bacteria’s growth or kill them. The team’s image detection algorithm can detect subtler changes than the human eye can. So it can identify the species and antibiotic susceptibility with far fewer bacteria cells than the conventional method, thereby reducing the need for long culture times to produce larger colonies.

Though the new method shows promise, Wong says, any new test carries a risk of false negatives, missing bacteria that are actually present in the bloodstream. That in turn can lead to not treating an active infection, and “undertreatment of bloodstream infection can be fatal,” he says. “While the classical blood culture technique is extremely slow, it is very effective in avoiding false negatives.”

Following their laboratory-based experiments, Kim and colleagues tested their new method clinically, running it in parallel with conventional sepsis testing on 190 hospital patients with suspected infections. The testing obtained a 100 percent match on correct bacterial species identification, the team reports. Though more clinical tests are needed, these accuracy results are encouraging so far, Kim says.

The team is continuing to refine their design in hopes of developing a fully automated sepsis blood test that can quickly produce results, even when hospital laboratories are closed overnight. “We really wanted to commercialize this and really make it happen so that we could make impacts to the patients,” Kim says."

Some bacterial species possess an astonishing ability: They use Earth's magnetic field to orient themselves. To better understand this mechanism, the team led by Argovia-Professor Martino Poggio from the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the Department of Physics at the University of Basel took a closer look at the "magnetotactic" bacterium Magnetospirillum gryphiswaldense. Inside this bacterium is a chain of magnetic nanoparticles known as magnetosomes. These act like a biological compass and allow the bacterium to align with Earth's magnetic field.

Scientists put a tiny lump of metal in two places at once in record-breaking quantum experiment

Scientists just proved that tiny metal “lumps” can exist in multiple places at once, pushing quantum weirdness to a whole new scale.

Physicists have demonstrated that even tiny chunks of metal can behave according to the strange rules of quantum mechanics, existing in states that spread across multiple locations at once. In a new study published in Nature, researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Duisburg-Essen showed that metallic nanoparticles made of thousands of sodium atoms still display quantum behavior despite being far larger and heavier than particles typically used in such experiments. The achievement represents one of the strongest tests yet of quantum mechanics on scales approaching the macroscopic world.

This is a pad (though they’re going to try to expand to tampons) that collects menstrual blood and would take the DNA and cells and stuff that they need while disposing of the rest of the things in the blood that they don’t need, like the haemoglobin.

I stumbled upon this material by pure chance, since I was heavily interested in the idea of a primitive Walrider showing up in The Outlast Trials. I just cross referenced “nanobots” with “1959”, and came across the lecture “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”, by Richard Feynman.

🔬 Physicists finally observe magnetic vortices predicted 50 years ago

An international team of researchers has experimentally observed magnetic vortices in an atomically thin material — a phenomenon predicted by theory in the 1970s.

The study, led by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, confirms key predictions of two-dimensional magnetism.

The experiment used an ultrathin crystal of nickel phosphorus trisulfide (NiPS₃) only one atomic layer thick.

When cooled to about –150 °C, the material entered the Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless (BKT) phase.

In this state:

• atomic magnetic moments form tiny vortex structures • vortices appear in pairs rotating in opposite directions • the structures remain surprisingly stable despite being only a few nanometers across

When the temperature was lowered even further, the researchers observed another transition — the six-state clock phase, where magnetic moments can point in only six symmetric directions.

For the first time, scientists captured the full sequence of predicted phase transitions in a single material system.

This discovery could have important technological implications.

Magnetic vortices may enable:

• ultra-dense data storage • nanoscale electronics • quantum technologies • next-generation magnetic sensors

The next challenge is to find materials where similar effects occur closer to room temperature, which could bring vortex-based technologies into real devices.