A simple way to create flexible diamonds has been developed. Free Technical Library News

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Developed a simple way to create flexible diamonds

04.03.2022

Hard as diamond and flexible as plastic, the highly sought-after diamond nanofibers could revolutionize our world - if they weren't so difficult to manufacture. Scientists led by Carnegie's Samuel Dunning and Timothy Strobel have developed an ingenious technique that predicts and directs the orderly creation of strong yet flexible diamond nanofibers, overcoming a number of existing problems.

This innovation will make it easier for scientists to synthesize nanofibers, an important step towards future applications of the material.

Diamond nanofibers are ultra-thin one-dimensional carbon chains, tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair. They are often created by squeezing smaller carbon rings together, forming the same type of bond that makes diamonds the hardest mineral on our planet. However, instead of the three-dimensional carbon lattice found in a normal diamond, the edges of these strands are "capped" with carbon-hydrogen bonds, which make the entire structure flexible.

Since the nanofibers only have these bonds in one direction, they can bend and unbend in a way that normal diamonds cannot. Scientists predict that the unique properties of carbon nanotubes will find many useful applications, from creating sci-fi scaffolding for space elevators to creating ultra-strong fabrics. However, scientists have had difficulty creating enough nanites to test their supposed superpowers.

Dunning's team decided that adding nitrogen to the ring instead of carbon would help steer the reaction along a predictable path. They decided to start with pyridazine, a six-atom ring made up of four carbons and two nitrogens, and began working on a computer model.

Dunning, along with Bo Chen of the Donostia International Physics Center and Li Zhu, an assistant professor at Rutgers and Carnegie University, modeled the behavior of pyridazine molecules at high pressure. When they saw bonds being formed, they knew they had successfully predicted and created the first pyridazine diamond nanoparticle in the lab.

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Random news from the Archive

New neurons for your brain 27.10.2014

It has long been no secret that new nerve cells appear in the adult brain, that is, the well-known phrase "nerve cells do not regenerate" is not entirely true. Of course, neurogenesis in adult mammals is not very intensive, but at least two sites are occupied in it: one in the hippocampus, the memory center, the other in the wall of the brain ventricles, in the subventricular zone. At the same time, of course, many questions remain, in particular, how the newly formed cells behave, what they do, and why the brain needs them at all.

It is known that neurons formed in the subventricular zone migrate to the olfactory tract, where they connect with local cells. The sense of smell in the life of animals plays a big role, so the need from time to time to feed the olfactory pathways with new cells is beyond doubt. But how does the insertion of new neurons take place here? Do they form new neural circuits, or do they find "vacancies" in old ones? Researchers from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (USA) tried to answer this question.

Diana M. Cummings and her colleagues modified mice so that the animals in the olfactory tract could distinguish between old cells and new, resulting from the work of "adult" stem cells. The mice were then deprived of any odors. Olfactory deprivation was supposed to lead to a disorder of neural chains in the olfactory tract of animals: neurons began to connect at random, because in the new conditions they did not need to accurately and quickly process odor information and transmit it to the brain. The orderliness of neural circuits can be restored if the ability to smell smells is restored to mice. However, as the researchers write in the Journal of Neuroscience, this did not happen if the animals did not have nerve stem cells working.

Moreover, the olfactory neural circuits became disordered even when neurogenesis was simply turned off in mice, leaving the ability to smell. The degree of disorder in cell chains was directly proportional to the activity of stem cells: that is, the more new neurons formed, the more organized the olfactory tract remained.

It would seem that something opposite could be expected - that new neurons, integrating into the olfactory tract, would add variability to the scheme of information-cellular pathways. But in fact, they serve to strengthen already existing neural circuits. Moreover, it seems that the compounds that are formed in the olfactory tract are generally not very stable, even in adulthood. And because they need constant support from new cells.

Summarizing, we can say that the brain needs new neurons in order to maintain the current structural settings of neural circuits. The details of the process are yet to be seen. New nerve cells are also formed in the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, and here their supporting function seems even more natural - by preventing the destabilization of neural connections, new neurons can thereby prevent the memory itself from fading. However, it is unlikely that the role of newly formed neurons is reduced to any one function, even if it is such an important one. For example, earlier this year we wrote about the work of researchers from the University of Toronto (Canada), who found that new neurons affect memory in two ways: on the one hand, they improve the memorization of new information, on the other hand, they help to forget what the brain has remembered. before.

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