When two materials come into contact, charged entities on their surfaces get a little nudge. This is how rubbing a balloon on the skin creates static electricity. Likewise, water flowing over some surfaces can gain or lose charge. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have harnessed the phenomenon to generate electricity from rain-like droplets moving through a tube. They demonstrate a new kind of flow that makes enough power to light 12 LEDs.

Proteins are fundamental biomolecules that perform a broad range of vital functions within the human body. They serve as an essential structural and functional component of cells, tissues and organs participating in processes ranging from basic cellular mechanisms such as DNA replication to complex physiological functions, including those involved in visual perception. In the visual system, proteins are important and crucial for light detection, the biosynthesis of photopigments in photoreceptor cells and intracellular signal transduction. Dysregulation or any kind of mutation in these proteins can disrupt the normal vision process and lead to various vision-related diseases. Recently, researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry Polish Academy of Sciences – International Centre for Translational Eye Research (ICTER) described the structural insight into the RBP3 protein improving our understanding of the visual cycle and its connection to retinal diseases.

Multicolored optical switching is essential for potential advancements in telecommunication and optical computing. However, most materials typically exhibit only single-colored optical nonlinearity under intense laser illumination. To address this, researchers have demonstrated that exciting the multivalley semiconductor germanium with a single-color pulse laser enables ultrafast transparency switching across multiple wavelengths. This breakthrough could drive the development of ultrafast optical switches for future multiband communication and optical computing.