New device could cut costs on household products, pharmaceuticals By Michelle Ma Sometimes cost saving comes in nanoscale packages. A new procedure that thickens and thins fluid at the micron level could save consumers and manufacturers money, particularly for soap products that depend on certain molecules to effectively deal with grease and dirt. Researchers at the University of Washington published their findings online April 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read the back of most shampoos and dishwashing detergents and you'll find the word "surfactant" in the list of active ingredients. Read More
A paper in Science describes an organic crystal that shows promise as a cheap, flexible, nontoxic material for the working parts of memory chips, sensors and energy-harvesting devices.
The U.S. Department of Energy this month awarded $4 million to a team, led by UW chemical engineers, that aims to develop bacteria to turn the methane in natural gas into diesel fuel for transportation.
By Leila Gray, UW Health Sciences/UW Medicine
November 29, 2012
By following certain rules, scientists can prepare architectural plans for building ideal protein molecules not found in the real world. Based on these computer renditions, previously non-existent proteins can be produced from scratch in the lab. The principles to make this happen appear this month in Nature magazine.
The lead authors are Nobuyasu Koga and Rie Tatsumi-Koga, a husband-and-wife scientific team in David Baker's lab at the UW Protein Design Institute. Read More
Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers show promise as a cheap, versatile platform to simultaneously offer contraception and prevent HIV. New funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will help MolES faculty member Kim Woodrow further test the system's versatility and feasibility.
Global health researchers, including MolES faculty member Dan Ratner, are working on cheap systems like a home-based pregnancy test that might work for malaria, diabetes or other diseases. A new chemical technique makes medically interesting molecules stick to regular paper "” a possible route to building such paper-based diagnostics from paper you could buy at an office-supply store.