Our widespread use of natural antibiotics has led to the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria and an urgent need to develop some new molecular weapons of our own. New research provides important new information that will facilitate the design of new enzymes to make novel antibiotics that can overcome antibiotic resistance.

Characterizing polaron behavior is important to scientists because they can play an important role in solid-state phenomena. Scientists probed flakes of tellurene with thicknesses of less than 20 nanometers, using a technique called extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) spectroscopy.

98% of the potassium ions in our body are inside our cells. Neurons use this gradient to generate electric currents by allowing potassium to rapidly flow down the gradient, causing, in turn, a voltage pulse to travel along their membranes. Researchers have used electric-field-stimulated time resolved X-ray crystallography (EFX) to capture potassium ions hopping down the channel’s electrochemical gradient in real time. 

Two objects of opposite chirality appear the same as each other in a mirror, but no amount of geometrical manipulation will cause them to occupy the identical space and shape. Achiral crystals should not exhibit behavior that arises from chiral symmetry. Recent work by a team of international collaborators investigated 150-year-old scientific assumptions about symmetry and demonstrated how a particular material produces a chiral charge density wave despite its apparently achiral lattice.

The ability to store and convert thermal energy in various ways makes phase-change materials very handy for everything from heating pads to medical applications to heating and cooling equipment.

One example is germanium telluride (GeTe), a semiconductor which also has potential for thermoelectric and phase-change memory applications. Researchers used GeTe as a research model to gain deeper insight into phonon dynamics and thermal conductivity in phase-change materials.