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A Band-Aid for the heart?

Jason Burdick

In the quest to develop lifelike materials to replace and repair human body parts, scientists face a formidable challenge: Real tissues often are both strong and stretchable and vary in shape and size.

A CU Boulder team led by Jason Burdick of chemical and biological engineering, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, has taken a critical step toward cracking that code. They’ve developed a new way to 3D print material that is at once elastic enough to withstand a heart’s persistent beating, tough enough to endure the crushing load placed on joints, and easily shapeable to fit a patient’s unique defects. Better yet, it sticks easily to wet tissue.

Their breakthrough, described in the journal Science, helps pave the way toward a new generation of biomaterials, from internal bandages that deliver drugs directly to the heart to cartilage patches and needle-free sutures.

“Game-changer” for osteoarthritis patients

Imagine a day when joints can heal themselves. At the first inkling of a creaky knee, patients could get a single shot in the joint that would not only stop their cartilage and bone from eroding, but kick-start its regrowth.

Stephanie Bryant

This may seem like a dream to the 32.5 million people who suffer from osteoarthritis. But the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health has awarded up to $39 million to a ������Ƶ-led team of scientists to work toward making it a reality.

The Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis (NITRO) program was the first created under ARPA-H, a new federal agency to support “high-impact solutions to society’s most challenging health problems.”

“Within five years, our goal is to develop a suite of noninvasive therapies that can end osteoarthritis,” said project leader Stephanie Bryant, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering Program, and the BioFrontiers Institute at CU Boulder. “It could be an absolute game-changer for patients.”

Post-quantum problem-solving

Huck Bennett is working to keep our data safe from hackers when the quantum computing revolution comes.

Huck Bennett

Bennett, an assistant professor of computer science, has been funded by the National Science Foundation to investigate the feasibility of lattice-based cryptography to protect against the threat of quantum computers.

The security of cryptography derives from challenging math problems that take computers a long time to solve — or at least we hope they do. But because quantum computers can quickly solve some of those problems, researchers are exploring new classes of problems that are both suitable for use in cryptography and secure against quantum computers.

Bennett’s work is to pressure-test one of the suggested new post-quantum cryptography methods, lattice-based cryptography. Problems built from these multidimensional geometric objects can be quick to solve if you have the right information, but without it, they take a huge amount of time and computing power.

Defying the laws of thermal physics

A team of engineers and material scientists in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering has developed a new technology to turn thermal radiation into electricity in a way that literally teases the basic law of thermal physics.

The breakthrough was discovered by the Cui Research Group, led by Assistant Professor Longji Cui. Their work, in collaboration with researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was published in the journal Energy & Environmental Sciences.

The group says their research has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing industries by increasing power generation without the need for high-temperature heat sources or expensive materials. They can store clean energy, lower carbon emissions and harvest heat from geothermal, nuclear and solar radiation plants across the globe.

By designing a unique and compact thermophotovoltaic device that can fit in a human hand, the team was able to overcome the vacuum limit defined by Planck’s law and double the yielded power density previously achieved by conventional TPV designs.

Studying space with smartphones

In a new study, researchers at Google and CU Boulder have transformed millions of Android phones across the globe into a fleet of nimble scientific instruments — generating one of the most detailed maps to date of the uppermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere.

The group’s findings, published in the journal Nature, may help to improve the accuracy of GPS technology worldwide several-fold. The research was led by Brian Williams of Google Research and included Jade Morton, professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at CU Boulder.

Morton and her colleagues used the GPS sensors that come standard in every smartphone to collect data on how Earth’s atmosphere warps signals coming from satellites. In the process, they were able to view phenomena in the atmosphere, such as blobs high above the planet known as “plasma bubbles,” in never-before-seen detail.

Stephen Kissler

A mathematical model of COVID-19

Changing people’s behavior until a vaccine could be developed prevented roughly 800,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S., far more than many scientists predicted was possible, according to research from CU Boulder and UCLA.

But interventions like lockdowns and school closures came at great cost — one that could be reduced in future pandemics if the country had a better infrastructure for gathering public health data.

For the study, CU Boulder’s Stephen Kissler, an assistant professor of computer science and a mathematical epidemiologist, teamed up with a professor of economics at UCLA to answer a fundamental but unanswered question: How many deaths from COVID-19 were prevented by behavioral interventions like masking and social distancing, combined with vaccines?

Kissler and his colleague gathered national serology data from blood samples to estimate how many people had been infected or vaccinated at various points from February 2020 to February 2024 and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control. Then, they used computer models to mathematically re-create the pandemic as it happened, factoring in the role of behavioral changes.

By tinkering with the model inputs to simulate different scenarios, they were able to ask questions like: How many people would have died if no one had done things like wear masks or practice social distancing? And how many people would have died if the vaccines never came?

DIY machine spins dissolvable textiles

Researchers at the ATLAS Institute have developed a DIY machine that spins textile fibers made of materials like sustainably sourced gelatin. The group’s “biofibers” feel a bit like flax fiber and dissolve in hot water in minutes to an hour.

“When you don’t want these textiles anymore, you can dissolve them and recycle the gelatin to make more fibers,” said Michael Rivera, a co-author of the new research and assistant professor in the ATLAS Institute and Department of Computer Science.

The study tackles a growing problem around the world: In 2018 alone, people in the United States added more than 11 million tons of textiles to landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency—nearly 8% of all municipal solid waste produced that year.

The team’s machine is small enough to fit on a desk and cost just $560 to build. Eldy Lázaro Vásquez, a PhD student who is leading the research, hopes the device will help designers around the world experiment with making their own biofibers.

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Better gas sensors with ‘quantum squeezing’

For the first time ever, scientists have used a technique called “quantum squeezing” to improve the gas sensing performance of devices known as optical frequency comb lasers. These ultra-precise sensors are like fingerprint scanners for molecules of gas. Scientists have used them to spot methane leaks in the air above oil and gas operations and signs of COVID-19 infections in breath samples from humans.

Scott Diddams

Now, in a series of lab experiments, researchers have laid out a path for making those kinds of measurements even more sensitive and faster—doubling the speed of frequency comb detectors. The work is a collaboration between Scott Diddams at CU Boulder and Jérôme Genest at Université Laval in Canada.

“Say you were in a situation where you needed to detect minute quantities of a dangerous gas leak in a factory setting,” said Diddams, professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering. “Requiring only 10 minutes versus 20 minutes can make a big difference in keeping people safe.”

Sharing atmospheric science tech, expertise

Drone technology and atmospheric science instruments developed by CU Boulder will soon be available to researchers nationwide through a National Science Foundation grant to establish a Community Instruments and Facilities program.

Brian Argrow, a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, and his colleagues have spent decades developing fixed-wing and quad-copter-style drone systems to study weather and other atmospheric conditions.

The new grant will provide the larger scientific community access to CU Boulder’s instrumentation and know-how.

“We’re bringing aerospace to the atmospheric sciences community,” Argrow said. “We have the expertise, the drones, the deployment systems, and regulatory approval to fly in the national airspace system.”