A joint research team from Saitama University and the Institute of Microbial Chemistry (BIKAKEN) has developed a polymerizable monomer from 4-trehalosamine, a biologically stable and chemically modifiable analog of trehalose, and used it to prepare water-soluble polyacrylamides with tunable compositions. By taking advantage of the uniquely reactive amino group of 4-trehalosamine, the approach provides a new route for incorporating this sugar into synthetic polymers at controlled levels. Unlike conventional carbohydrate-containing polymers that often require complex protection and deprotection chemistry, the new approach exploits the naturally occurring amino group of 4-trehalosamine to introduce polymerizable functionality selectively and efficiently. The resulting platform may facilitate the design of carbohydrate-containing polymers for biotechnology and advanced functional materials.

Antibiotic residues in water are an emerging environmental concern because conventional treatment processes may not remove them completely. Now, researchers have shown that carefully tuning the balance of nitrogen and boron in biochar made from waste sawdust can greatly improve its ability to activate an oxidant and break down the widely used antibiotic sulfamethoxazole.

To bridge the gap between carbon monoxide's notorious toxicity and its hidden potential in biology, Dr. Matthew R. Dent, assistant professor of chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wayne State University, has received a prestigious U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. The five-year, $749,702 grant supports his project, "CAREER: Carbon Monoxide Sensing, Selectivity, and Signaling in Microbes."

A new 0.36-mm² photonic chip is set to advance industrial swept-source optical coherence tomography, according to a study in PhotoniX Synergy. The compact system demonstrated high-precision performance, including imaging a smartphone camera, measuring silica wafers with sub-2 µm absolute error, and gauging photoresist height with a relative error of less than 0.12%. Additionally, the integration of a ball-lens fiber probe allows for 3D imaging inside narrow, hard-to-reach industrial components

Researchers have demonstrated a fast, minimally invasive, optical-fiber-based imaging technique that combines dual-comb interferometry with a Transformer-based deep learning model to overcome the technical bottlenecks of traditional ghost imaging. By generating wavelength-multiplexed speckle patterns from a single-core fiber and detecting the target-encoded light with a single-pixel detector, the system achieves 2D imaging of dynamic targets at beyond-video rates. This experimental demonstration opens new frontiers for minimally invasive endomicroscopy and portable sensing in constrained environments.

A U.S. federal agency is investing $38 million in a provocative and potentially transformative project: AI-powered medical "digital twins" to help doctors personalize treatments for critical ill patients in hospitals. The project, led by a U. of Vermont surgeon and researcher, will help doctors treat the most challenging illnesses in the ICU—sepsis, burns, severe trauma, and disordered immune responses. The funding is from ARPA-H in the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services and is the largest research award in UVM's history.

A new piece of equipment has been added to the optics toolkit. Physicists at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, have succeeded in generating 3D light fields. Using this method, they have placed electrons into quantum states that were previously inaccessible through experimentation. In the journal Physical Review Research, the team writes that the method is particularly well-suited to studying molecules that exist in two mirror-image variants, so-called chiral molecules.