Discovering the Secret Life of Solids: Catching Materials Evolution in Real Time

Metal halide perovskites are remarkable materials with the ability to convert sunlight into electricity, emit colorful light, and detect radiation. However, making them typically requires harmful solvents, and the process of their formation has remained largely invisible to scientists. To address this, researchers combined an old technique—mechanochemistry, which involves grinding solids to trigger chemical reactions—with modern optical spectroscopy. By replacing traditional milling jars with transparent quartz and using a Time-Lapsed In Situ (TLIS) spectrometer, they created a system that allows scientists to observe perovskite formation in real-time, capturing every millisecond of change. This new tool acts like a high-speed camera for materials, revealing how disordered solid precursors evolve into structured, functional crystals.

Figure 1: The TLIS Spectrometer and Its Applications, see description below.

Using the TLIS spectrometer, the team made several key discoveries. They observed how a promising solar cell material, formamidinium lead triiodide (FAPbI₃), quickly degrades from a stable black phase to an ineffective yellow phase, but adding methylammonium (MA⁺) helped slow this process significantly. In another case, a lead-free perovskite unexpectedly "self-healed" over the weekend, improving its ability to emit light due to the slow migration of chloride ions within the solid. They also enhanced tin-based perovskites, which are more environmentally friendly than lead-based ones but degrade quickly, by creating a protective chloride shell. This breakthrough not only improves stability but also opens new possibilities for biomedical imaging. The ability to observe materials evolving in real time allows scientists to develop and optimize new materials much faster, reducing research time from months to days while eliminating the need for hazardous solvents. This work paves the way for more sustainable, efficient material discovery across industries like solar energy, electronics, and even food science.

How Cancer Outsmarts Your Immune System: The Role of Mitochondrial Hijacking

Imagine your immune system trying to fight off cancer. Normally, your T cells are like soldiers, ready to attack and destroy cancer cells. But cancer cells have sneaky ways to avoid being attacked. They change the environment around them and disrupt the mitochondria—the energy factories—in your immune cells, particularly in tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). This makes it harder for your immune system to do its job.

Now picture this: the cancer cells’ mitochondria, which may carry harmful mutations in their DNA, can actually transfer to your T cells. Typically, your T cells can get rid of damaged mitochondria through a process called mitophagy, triggered by harmful byproducts called reactive oxygen species. But cancer mitochondria come equipped with special molecules that prevent this cleanup process. These molecules stick to the cancer mitochondria and hitch a ride into your T cells, replacing your healthy mitochondria.

When your T cells take on these faulty mitochondria, they start to malfunction. They lose energy, stop working properly, and can no longer "remember" how to fight the cancer effectively. This weakens your immune system’s ability to attack the tumor. If your tumor has these mitochondrial DNA mutations, treatments like immune checkpoint inhibitors might not work as well, especially if you have melanoma or non-small-cell lung cancer.

This discovery shows you how cancer can trick your immune system in ways scientists didn’t fully understand before. Knowing this could lead to new, better treatments that help your immune system fight back.

In the study linked below, researchers looked at tissue samples from patients and found that the mitochondria in TILs sometimes carry the same DNA mutations as the cancer cells. The researchers also found that if a patient’s tumor has these mitochondrial DNA mutations, treatments like immune checkpoint inhibitors may not work as well, especially for melanoma or non-small-cell lung cancer.

These findings uncover a new way that cancer tricks the immune system and could help scientists develop better cancer treatments in the future.

From text: Fig. 5: mtDNA-mutated mitochondrial transfer reduces antitumour immunity in vivo.

Ikeda, H., Kawase, K., Nishi, T. et al. Immune evasion through mitochondrial transfer in the tumour microenvironment. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08439-0

Health and the Built Environment

From Science Magazine

The second example is more contemporary. Public health leaders are asserting--as had leaders 150 years earlier--that the built environment profoundly influences health. The focus this time is not urban tenements, but rather the fragmented and sprawling communities that foster car dependency, inactivity, obesity, loneliness, fossil fuel and resource consumption, and environmental pollution. Concern about the built environment's effects on health has caught fire, with joint health and urban-planning conferences and strategy sessions, pending legislation, and an increasing number of new scientific studies. Disciplines long estranged from health issues--planners and architects, environmentalists, even builders and developers--are becoming engaged. It's a good time to spread ownership of health and environment challenges. The challenges of the 21st century will require leadership and collaboration. It worked in the 19th century; it can work today.

This is an interesting take on the impact of the modern social/built environment, how they are interrelated, and the impact that their current structure has on health.

Here is a resource (The Prevention Institute) on actions taken with regard to the built environment and health and what the impact has been

There is growing recognition that the built environment -- the man-made physical structures and infrastructure of communities -- has an impact on our health. Through a series of program profiles, this project highlights examples of neighborhood-level successes in altering elements of the built environment to improve health behaviors and outcomes. Because low-income communities are more likely to be sites of hazards and less likely to be conducive to physical activity and healthy eating, profiles focus on interventions that have occurred in low-income communities and are most likely to contribute to reducing health disparities in the United States.

This is a fascinating area of research and activity. The actions of citizens and government today could well transform the built infrastructure of the nation. Possibly improving our health and repairing what I consider the broken foundation of community involvement and local and national identity.

Sleep & Memory: When & What Type

Factual and experiential memory is reinforced during "slow-wave sleep".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarative_memory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_wave_sleep

clipped from www.sciencemag.org Sleep facilitates memory consolidation. A widely held model assumes that this is because newly encoded memories undergo covert reactivation during sleep. We cued new memories in humans during sleep by presenting an odor that had been presented as context during prior learning, and so showed that reactivation indeed causes memory consolidation during sleep. Re-exposure to the odor during slow-wave sleep (SWS) improved the retention of hippocampus-dependent declarative memories but not of hippocampus-independent procedural memories. Odor re-exposure was ineffective during rapid eye movement sleep or wakefulness or when the odor had been omitted during prior learning. Concurring with these findings, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed significant hippocampal activation in response to odor re-exposure during SWS.

More Pollution Less Rain for the Hills

As air moves over mountains it cools which can lead to rain or snow. With polluted air this tendency is decreased by up to 50%. As to why... ?

clipped from www.sciencemag.org Particulate air pollution has been suggested as the cause of the recently observed decreasing trends of 10 to 25% in the ratio between hilly and upwind lowland precipitation, downwind of urban and industrial areas. We quantified the dependence of this ratio of the orographic-precipitation enhancement factor on the amounts of aerosols composed mostly of pollution in the free troposphere, based on measurements at Mt. Hua near Xi'an, in central China. The hilly precipitation can be decreased by 30 to 50% during hazy conditions, with visibility of less than 8 kilometers at the mountaintop. This trend shows the role of air pollution in the loss of significant water resources in hilly areas, which is a major problem in China and many other areas of the world.

Determine the molar mass of an unknown compound by making asolution in which lauric acid is the solvent and the unknown is the solute.After you determine the freezing point of this solution, you’ll be able to applythe following equation:

D T = i x m x K_f , where

i = the number of solute particles (in this case i= 1; for molecular, nonionizing solutes i always =1);
m = the molality of the solution;
K_f = the freezing point depression constant for lauric acid ( 3.9 ^o C/m); and
D T = the difference in the freezing points of the solvent and the solution.

Extracted from Lab Practical: Determination of the Molar Mass of an Unknown Compound

D.C.'s Ban On Handguns In Homes Is Thrown Out

This should be an interesting experiment (that is if the ruling isn't reversed). Will having guns be legal decrease or increase gun violence? (Or maybe no change) There are lots of variables to account for such as the current prevalence of handguns (will changing the law increase the number of handguns?) etc.

clipped from www.washingtonpost.com A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that the District's longtime ban on keeping handguns in homes is unconstitutional. The 2 to 1 decision by an appellate panel outraged D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and other city leaders, who said that they will appeal and that gun-related crimes could rise if the ruling takes effect. The outcome elated opponents of strict gun controls because it knocked down one of the toughest laws in the country and vindicated their interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's language on the right to bear arms.

Grasslands as Alternative Energy

Alternative energy can be made from grasslands with yields up to 238% higher than using farmed biofuels (e.g. corn). Grasslands are "carbon negative" meaning that, considering the full cycle of growth and burning, they remove carbon dioxide form the atmosphere. Lastly grasslands can be grown on marginal and degraded lands and thus do not need to displace food production.

clipped from www.sciencemag.org Biofuels derived from low-input high-diversity (LIHD) mixtures of native grassland perennials can provide more usable energy, greater greenhouse gas reductions, and less agrichemical pollution per hectare than can corn grain ethanol or soybean biodiesel. High-diversity grasslands had increasingly higher bioenergy yields that were 238% greater than monoculture yields after a decade. LIHD biofuels are carbon negative because net ecosystem carbon dioxide sequestration (4.4 megagram hectare–1 year–1 of carbon dioxide in soil and roots) exceeds fossil carbon dioxide release during biofuel production (0.32 megagram hectare–1 year–1). Moreover, LIHD biofuels can be produced on agriculturally degraded lands and thus need to neither displace food production nor cause loss of biodiversity via habitat destruction.

Dodging a Warming Bullet

Some positive side effects of the Montreal protocol and the banning of CFCs.

clipped from sciencenow.sciencemag.org Double benefit. Earth has experienced far less radiative forcing, or atmospheric warming, thanks to a ban on CFCs, which so far has prevented the release of far more greenhouse gases (green and blue lines) than have the CO2 reduction targets imposed by the Kyoto Protocol (red line). a 20-year-old ban on ozone-depleting chemicals has been extremely effective at curbing greenhouse gases as well. In fact, it has already had more impact than a fully implemented Kyoto Protocol would have accomplished the class of compounds known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) traps 5000 to 14,000 times more heat, pound for pound, than carbon dioxide One group, hydrochlorofluorocarbons or HCFCs, is easier on the ozone layer, but its members are also powerful greenhouse gases. A third category, hydrofluorocarbons, are even worse atmospheric heat collectors than CFCs, but because they don't affect ozone, Sarma says, the Kyoto partners must address them.

Data sharing: the next generation

This is what I love about science and what, I feel, many of the anti-science people don't like about it. It is at its core, fundamentally democratic and non-hierarchical. Now I know that sounds funny to some (in fact it is hard for me to believe sometimes) since science is associated almost in lockstep with academe which is (at it core) hierarchical in nature (and thus suffers from lack of democratic principals I feel). This is true, and sites like these may well break some of the strangle hold that academe has had on the process of science. That last assertion needs follow-up so I should write more about that in the future.

What do others think about the influence of academe on science?

clipped from www.nature.com

The Internet has already become a place for people to share knowledge, opinions, music and videos. Now, in a slightly geekier aspect of the same trend, social software is allowing people to share data too. More than 1 million data sets have been uploaded to the data-sharing site Swivel since its launch in December. And on 23 January, IBM labs launched Many Eyes, which allows users to visualize their data with tools previously available only to experts.

The idea is to make data analysis more democratic, as tools such as Google Earth have done for geographic visualization

Making such tools available will not only empower individuals, Viégas predicts, the collective intelligence and expertise of users will result in new insights.

Links
Swivel
IBM's Many Eyes