Graphene is an extraordinary material – a sheet of interlocking carbon atoms just one atom thick that is stable and extremely conductive. This makes it useful in a range of areas, such as flexible electronic displays, highly precise sensors, powerful batteries, and efficient solar cells. A new study – led by the University of Göttingen, working together with colleagues from Braunschweig and Bremen in Germany, and Fribourg in Switzerland – now takes graphene’s potential to a whole new level. Researchers have directly observed “Floquet effects” in graphene for the first time. This resolves a long-standing debate: Floquet engineering – a method in which the properties of a material are very precisely altered using pulses of light – also works in metallic and semi-metallic quantum materials such as graphene. The study was published in Nature Physics.

Genetically engineered cell lines used in biomedical research have long been prone to misidentification and unauthorized use, wasting billions of dollars each year and jeopardizing critical scientific discoveries. These problems not only undermine reproducibility of research results, but also put valuable intellectual property at risk.

Now, researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have developed a novel method to embed unique genetic identifiers in engineered cell lines, eliminating identification errors and safeguarding innovations with tamper-proof genomic tags.

Researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo improve the accuracy of land surface models in capturing terrestrial water and energy budgets. Their combined hillslope water dynamic and vegetation model predicts the division of precipitation into soil moisture, evapotranspiration and runoff with improved accuracy. This new approach to land surface modeling is hoped to inform sustainable land and water management.

The team of Riccardo Levato at UMC Utrecht and Utrecht University is now taking an important step toward printing implantable tissues. Using computer vision, a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), they’ve developed a 3D printer that doesn’t just print, it also sees and even co-designs. Their innovation was published today in Nature. With this innovation, they tackle one of the biggest challenges in 3D bioprinting: improving both the survival and functionality of cells in printed living tissue. But how exactly does that work?