Futurehead.com

This week in Paris, the world's leading Aids scientists will gather to mark the 30th anniversary of the discovery of HIV. At least one of them, who won the Nobel Prize for her work, is quietly confident that very soon something approaching a cure for HIV will be possible.

Françoise Barré-Sinoussi believes that HIV is no longer the invincible agent she and her colleagues had once imagined. In fact, she speaks openly of the "C" word, which for years was taboo among HIV researchers.

"Normally when you say 'cure', you mean eradication of the virus from the body," she says. "But this is going to be very difficult, not to say impossible. However, there is another definition of cure, which is a 'functional cure'. This means people can be treated with drugs or whatever, and they will be able to stop their treatment and continue to control the virus without treatment. It is like remission in cancer. As part of this control we will limit the capacity of patients to transmit HIV to others, so there is a double benefit."

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists have developed the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis,  in which solar energy is directly converted into chemical fuels.

“Similar to the chloroplasts in green plants that carry out photosynthesis, our artificial photosynthetic system is composed of two semiconductor light absorbers, an interfacial layer for charge transport, and spatially separated co-catalysts,” says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, who led this research.

“To facilitate solar water- splitting in our system, we synthesized tree-like nanowire  heterostructures, consisting of silicon trunks and titanium oxide branches. Visually, arrays of these nanostructures very much resemble an artificial forest.

“In natural photosynthesis, the energy of absorbed sunlight produces energized charge-carriers that execute chemical reactions in separate regions of the chloroplast,” Yang says. “We’ve integrated our nanowire nanoscale heterostructure into a functional system that mimics the integration in chloroplasts and provides a conceptual blueprint for better solar-to-fuel conversion efficiencies in the future.”

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From powerful computers to super-sensitive medical and environmental detectors that are faster, smaller and use less energy — yes, we want them, but how do we get them?

In research that is helping to lay the groundwork for the electronics of the future, University of Delaware scientists have confirmed the presence of a magnetic field generated by electrons which scientists had theorized existed, but that had never been proven until now.

The finding, which is reported in the journal Nature Communications, expands the potential for harnessing the "spin" or magnetic properties of electrons — adding a fundamental new building block to the pioneering field of spintronics.

John Xiao, Unidel Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UD, is the lead author of the study. His co-authors include research associate Xin Fan, graduate students Jun Wu and Yunpeng Chen, and undergraduate student Matthew Jerry from UD, and Huaiwu Zhang from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

Today's semiconductors, which are essential to the operation of a broad array of electronics, carry along the electrical charge of electrons, but make no use of the magnetic or "spin" properties of these subatomic particles. Xiao and his team are working to unveil those properties in UD's Center for Spintronics and Biodetection.

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