Research Highlights

Researchers at the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences have developed a long-lasting spray that disinfects surfaces for extended periods, even in heavy use, and is less likely to transmit infectious diseases.

The spray was developed by a team that includes professor Jamie Hestekin and doctoral student John Moore, both in chemical engineering at the U of A, as well as professor Peter Crooks and postdoctoral fellow Soma Shekar Dachavaram, both from UAMS. The original development of this work came from an NSF Epscor Track 1 project led by Min Zou, professor of mechanical engineering, and Steve Stanley from the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.

Hestekin said the product is unique because the application happens in one spray step and uses a process known as “click chemistry” to combine nano-sized cellulose and antiseptic agents. Those agents create compounds with antibacterial and antiviral properties that attach on to the surface and develop into films through an auto-assembly process.

The technology is patent-pending, and researchers were recently awarded a $194,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the work. In that project, researchers work with Christa Hestekin, an associate professor who holds the Ansel and Virginia Condray Endowed Professorship in Chemical Engineering, on virus identification and destruction. The project has also been supported by the University of Arkansas Chancellor’s Commercialization Fund.

Researchers plan to use green dye in the spray material, so a person would know, for example, that it was safe to touch a doorknob as long as it appeared green. When the knob returns to its original color, it would be an indication to reapply.

The spray could also be sprayed over the top of packages in distribution centers, without damaging them, to better protect employees and consumers, researchers said.

The research represents an important step in the COVID-19 recovery process, Hestekin said.

“When the current lockdowns end, there will be a need for the public to feel safe going out again,” he said. “Since it is known that COVID-19 can survive a significant amount of time on surfaces, a surface coating that works on doorknobs, countertops, etc., is needed to make the public feel safe touching these surfaces without risk of being infected.”

Read the full story from University of Arkansas here.

The end of spring is usually the time to assess the annual Mount Everest climbing season, but this year, because of COVID-19, the mountain was unusually quiet. Nepal banned all expeditions on its side. China banned foreign mountaineers but allowed Chinese nationals to climb from the Tibet side, including a team of surveyors attempting to remeasure the mountain’s height in the wake of the 2015 earthquake.

But while most of the climbing world took a break from Everest, a group of scientists in labs spread across Europe, the U.S., and Nepal have been working on the mountain “remotely”—analyzing a trove of ice, snow, water, and sediment samples they collected last spring as part of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition. The project's goal was to turn the world’s highest mountain into a giant climate laboratory.

During April and May last year, a multi-disciplinary team of more than 30 biologists, glaciologists, geologists, meteorologists, and geographers fanned out across Everest’s southern flank, conducting fieldwork high on the mountain, as well as across the Khumbu Valley.“We believe the best way to do science on Everest isn’t just to do one kind of science, but do many kinds of science,” says Paul Mayewski of the University of Maine, the leader of the effort, which saw the National Geographic Society partner with Tribhuvan University and the Government of Nepal.

Each individual study promises a unique snapshot of the mountain’s climate—past, present, and future. Ice cores and lake sediment cores will provide a record of what the environment was like going back thousands of years. Snow and water samples give a look at what’s happening on the mountain, today, including the future of the glaciers, which serve as crucial water sources for large downstream populations. The team also installed a network of automated weather stations, which will document upcoming weather trends for years to come.

Read the full article from National Geographic here.

A team lead by MSU scientist Blake Wiedenheft was able to detect the novel coronavirus in samples taken at Bozeman's Water Reclamation Facility, which handles millions of gallons of wastewater produced each day by the city's roughly 50,000 residents. Seven sewage samples, taken during a 17-day period in March and April, revealed levels of the virus that tracked with a rise in the number of COVID-19 cases reported in the Bozeman area and then declined after state-mandated social distancing. That suggests that the wastewater measurements are a reliable indicator of the local prevalence of the disease, Wiedenheft said.

Because it's thought that individuals can be sick with COVID-19 and spread the disease for up to two weeks before showing symptoms, being able to detect increased levels of the virus in wastewater could help health officials make decisions about social distancing and other containment measures before a tide of sickened patients arrive at hospitals seeking testing and medical treatment, Wiedenheft noted.

At the end of April, Gallatin County — including Bozeman — had reported a total of 146 COVID-19 cases, suggesting that the MSU team's tests detected virus molecules from a relatively small number of infected individuals.

Read the full story from MSU here.

Given the present-day rate of global sea-level rise, remaining marshes in the Mississippi Delta are likely to drown, according to a new Tulane University study. A key finding of the study, published in Science Advances is that coastal marshes experience tipping points, where a small increase in the rate of sea-level rise leads to widespread submergence.

The loss of 2,000 square miles (5,000 km2) of wetlands in coastal Louisiana over the past century is well documented, but it has been more challenging to predict the fate of the remaining 6,000 square miles (15,000 km2) of marshland. The study used hundreds of sediment cores collected since the early 1990s to examine how marshes responded to a range of rates of sea-level rise during the past 8,500 years.

Renewable technologies are a promising solution for addressing global energy needs in a sustainable way. However, widespread adoption of renewable energy resources from solar, wind, biomass and more have lagged, in part because they are difficult to store and transport. As the search for materials to efficiently address these storage and transport needs continues, University of Delaware researchers from the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) report new techniques for characterizing complex materials with the potential to overcome these challenges.

Currently technologies exist for characterizing highly ordered surfaces with specific repeating patterns, such as crystals. Describing surfaces with no repeating pattern is a harder problem. UD doctoral candidate and 2019-2020 Blue Waters Graduate Fellow Josh Lansford and Dion Vlachos, who directs both CCEI and the Delaware Energy Institute and is the Allan and Myra Ferguson Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, have developed a method to observe the local surface structure of atomic-scale particles in detail while simultaneously keeping the entire system in view.

The approach, which leverages machine learning, data science techniques and models grounded in physics, enables the researchers to visualize the actual three-dimensional structure of a material they are interested in up close, but also in context. This means they can study specific particles on the material’s surface, but also watch how the particle’s structure evolves — over time — in the presence of other molecules and under different conditions, such as temperature and pressure.

Put to use, the research team’s technique will help engineers and scientists identify materials that can improve storage technologies, such as fuel cells and batteries, which power our lives. Such improvements are necessary to help these important technologies reach their full potential and become more widespread.

Read the full story from University of Delaware here.

A new chemical compound created by researchers at West Virginia University is lighting the way for renewable energy. The compound is a photosensitizer, meaning it promotes chemical reactions in the presence of light. It has many potential applications for improving the efficiency of modern technologies ranging from electricity-producing solar panels to cell phones. The study, published March 16 in Nature Chemistry , was conducted by researchers in Assistant Professor of Chemistry Carsten Milsmann’s lab with support from his National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

These technologies currently rely on precious metals, like iridium and ruthenium, to function. However, only limited supplies of these materials remain in the world, making them nonrenewable, difficult to access and expensive. Milsmann’s compound is made from zirconium, which is much more abundant and easier to access, making it a more sustainable and cost-effective option. The compound is also stable in a variety of conditions, such as air, water and changes in temperature, making it easy to work with in a variety of environments.

Since the compound can convert light into electrical energy, it could be used in the creation of more efficient solar panels. Solar panels are typically made using silicon and require a minimum threshold of light to collect and store energy. Instead of using silicon, researchers have long been exploring the alternative of dye-sensitized devices, in which colored molecules collect light and function in low-light conditions. As an added benefit, this also allows the production of semitransparent components. To date, the necessary dyes rely heavily on the precious material ruthenium, but Milsmann’s new compound could potentially replace it in the future.

Read the full story from West Virginia University here.

University of Hawaii researcher Axel Lehrer is working with New Jersey-based biopharmaceutical company Soligenix, Inc., to develop a vaccine against COVID-19, the team announced Monday.

Lehrer, an assistant professor at the UH Medical School, and his partners at Soligenix previously helped develop a vaccine to combat the Ebola virus that was heat stable and could be produced in mass quantities.

The researchers are now applying the same “technology platform” they used for Ebola to tackle coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, according to announcements from Soligenix and the John A. Burns School of Medicine.

Two University of Delaware researchers have been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to study the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, using the kinds of high-tech supercomputing tools that previously led them to new insights into other viruses that harm human health. Juan Perilla and Jodi Hadden-Perilla, both assistant professors in UD’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, received the one-year, $200,000 grant this week through the NSF’s Rapid Response Research (RAPID) program. The NSF says RAPID proposals are used in cases of “severe urgency,” including quick responses to natural disasters. The UD researchers are collaborating with investigator Tyler Reddy, also a computational virologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who has collaborated with them on previous studies.

Honeybees have complex social lives, with their queens and workers cooperating to produce honey. But the majority of bee species are solitary: One female mates, gathers provisions, lays eggs and walls them up with food in a secure spot. Recent UNH research into a mostly solitary species that has some social behaviors, the North American carpenter bee, advances understanding of the evolutionary shift from honeybees’ loner ancestors to the social beings they are now.

For the better part of a decade, engineers have been crafting and testing recipes for so-called van der Waals heterostructures: stacks of atomically thin crystal layers that can be sequenced just so. Compared with a homostructure — the nanoscopic equivalent of a slab of ham — a heterostructure might feature slices of pastrami, pepperoni and pepper jack, all held together by the weak van der Waals forces among neighboring atomic layers.

Engineers soon discovered that the diversity could cultivate technologically interesting properties, often in the regions where two different materials meet, that are otherwise difficult or impossible to recreate. Then, a few years ago, researchers began exploring the effects of rotating the layers within van der Waals stacks. That misalignment of layers, they found, could also yield interesting results — turning a material into a superconductor, for instance, or changing how a semiconductor emits light.

Yet the achievement came in the face of a considerable challenge: Despite the weakness of van der Waals forces, adjacent layers strongly prefer to remain aligned. Manually stacking layers one by one can overcome the issue but demands extreme precision and, more importantly, time that large-scale manufacturers of small-scale technology just don’t have.