Overcoming hurdles

To push through this challenge, the researchers discussed the various hurdles they needed to overcome. At the CFN and Columbia, the team had to figure out how they could build the structures with desired organization and how to convert them into an inorganic replica that can withstand powerful x-ray beams, while at NSLS-II the researchers had to tune the beamline by improving the resolution, data acquisition, and many other technical details.

“I think the best way to describe our progress is in terms of performance. When we first tried to take data at HXN, it took us three days and we got part of a data set. The second time we did this, it took us two days, and we got most of a whole data set, but our sample got destroyed in the process. By the third time it took a little over 24 hours, and we got a full data set. Each of these steps was about six months apart,” said Michelson.

Yan added: “Now we can finish it in a single day. The technique is mature enough that we also offer it to other users who would want to use our beamline to investigate their sample. Seeing into samples on this scale is interesting for fields such as microelectronics and battery research.”

The team leveraged the beamline’s abilities in two ways. They not only measured the phase contrast of the x-rays passing through the samples, but they also collected the x-ray fluorescence—the emitted light—from the sample. By measuring the phase contrast, the researchers could better distinguish the foreground from the background of their sample.

“Measuring the data was only half the battle; now we needed to translate the data into meaningful information about order and imperfection of self-assembled systems. We wanted to understand what type of defects can occur in these systems and what is their origin. Until this point, this information was only available through computation. Now we can really see this experimentally, which is super exciting and, literally, eye-opening for the future development of complex designed nanomaterials,” said Gang.

New software to better manage data

Together, the researchers developed new software tools to help untangle the large amount of data into chunks that could be processed and understood. One major challenge was being able to validate the resolution they achieved. The iterative process that finally led to the groundbreaking new resolution stretched over several months before the team had verified the resolution through both standard analysis and machine-learning approaches.

“It took my whole PhD to get here but I personally feel very gratified for being part of this collaboration. I was able to get involved in every step of the way from making the samples to running the beamline. All the new skills I have learned on this journey will be useful for everything that lies ahead,” said Michelson.

Pushing the boundaries

Even though the team has reached this impressive milestone, they are far from done. They already set their sights on the next steps to further push the boundaries of the possible.

“Now that we have gone through the data analysis process, we plan to make this part easier and faster for future projects, especially when further beamline improvements enable us to collect data even faster. The analysis is currently the bottleneck when doing high-resolution tomography work at HXN,” said Yan.

Gang added, “Aside from continuing to push the performance of the beamline, we also plan to use this new technique to dive deeper into the relationships between defects and properties of our materials. We plan to design more complex nanomaterials using DNA self-assembly that can be studied using HXN. In this way we can see how well the structure is built internally and connect this to the process of the assembly. We are developing a new bottom-up fabrication platform that we would not be able to image without this new capability.”

By understanding this connection between material’s properties and the assembly process, the researchers hope to unlock the path to fine-tuning these materials for future applications in designed nanomaterials for batteries and catalysis, for light manipulation, and for desired mechanical responses.

About the Study

Journal: Science

Title: Three-Dimensional Visualization of Nanoparticles Lattices and Multimaterial Frameworks

Authors: Aaron Michelson1 , Brian Minevich2 , Hamed Emamy2 , Xiaojing Huang3 , Yong S. Chu3 , Yan Hanfei3 , and Oleg Gang1,2,4

1. Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia Engineering
2. Department of Chemical Engineering, Columbia Engineering
3. National Light Source II Brookhaven National Laboratory
4. Center for Functional Nanomaterials, Brookhaven National Laboratory

The research to understand defects in DNA-assembled structures was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Grant DE-SC0008772. Conversion of the DNA structures into inorganic replicas and structural analysis work was supported by the US Department of Defense, Army Research Office, W911NF-19-1-0395. Research to establish methods of tomography sample preparation, data collection, and data analysis was conducted at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials and the National Synchrotron Light Source II, which are U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facilities at Brookhaven National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-SC0012704.

COI: The authors claim no competing interests.

About the Study

Journal: Optica

Title: Picosecond-resolution single-photon time lens for temporal mode quantum processing

Authors: Chaitali Joshi 1,2, Ben M. Sparkes 3, Alessandro Farsi 1, Thomas Gerrits 4, Varun Verma 5, Sven Ramelow 6, Sae Woo Nam 5, and Alexander Gaeta 1

1. Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA
2. Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14850, USA
3. Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing (IPAS) and School of Physical Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
4. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Maryland 20899, USA
5. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado 80305, USA
6. Institut für Physik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (PHY-1707918, OMA-1936345) and the Australian Research Council (DE170100752)

B.M.S. acknowledges support from the Fulbright Future Scholarship (funded by the Kinghorn Foundation). Certain commercial equipment and instruments are identified in this paper for completeness. Such identification does not imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, nor does it imply that the materials or equipment identified are necessarily the best available for the purpose.

Addressing food printing challenges

Food printing technology has existed since Lipson’s lab first introduced it in 2005, but to date the technology has been limited to a small number of uncooked ingredients, resulting in what many perceive as less than appetizing dishes. Blutinger’s team broke away from this limitation by printing a dish comprising seven ingredients, cooked in situ using a laser. For the paper, the researchers designed a 3D-printing system that constructs cheesecake from edible food inks — including peanut butter, Nutella, and strawberry jam. The authors note that precision printing of multi-layered food items could produce more customizable foods, improve food safety, and enable users to control the nutrient content of meals more easily. 

“Because 3D food printing is still a nascent technology, it needs an ecosystem of supporting industries such as food cartridge manufacturers, downloadable recipe files, and an environment in which to create and share these recipes. Its customizability makes it particularly practical for the plant-based meat market, where texture and flavor need to be carefully formulated to mimic real meats,” Blutinger said.

To demonstrate the potential of 3D food printing, the team tested various cheesecake designs, consisting of seven key ingredients: graham cracker, peanut butter, Nutella, banana puree, strawberry jam, cherry drizzle, and frosting. They found that the most successful design used a graham cracker as the foundational ingredient for each layer of the cake. Peanut butter and Nutella proved to be best used as supporting layers that formed “pools” to hold the softer ingredients: banana and jam. Multi-ingredient designs evolved into multi-tiered structures that followed similar principles to building architectures; more structural elements were needed to support softer substrates for a successful multi-ingredient layered print.

Image

Is 3D food printing healthy?

“We have an enormous problem with the low-nutrient value of processed foods,” Cooper said. “3D food printing will still turn out processed foods, but perhaps the silver lining will be, for some people, better control and tailoring of nutrition--personalized nutrition. It may also be useful in making food more appealing to those with swallowing disorders by mimicking the shapes of real foods with the pureed texture foods that these patients--millions in the U.S. alone--require.”

The potential of 3D food-printing

Laser cooking and 3D food printing could allow chefs to localize flavors and textures on a millimeter scale to create new food experiences. People with dietary restrictions, parents of young children, nursing home dieticians, and athletes alike could find these personalized techniques very useful and convenient in planning meals. And, because the system uses high-energy targeted light for high-resolution tailored heating, cooking could become more cost-effective and more sustainable. 

“The study also highlights that printed food dishes will likely require novel ingredient compositions and structures, due to the different way by which the food is ‘assembled,’ ” said Lipson. “Much work is still needed to collect data, model, and optimize these processes.”

Blutinger added, “And, with more emphasis on food safety following the COVID-19 pandemic, food prepared with less human handling could lower the risk of foodborne illness and disease transmission. This seems like a win-win concept for all of us.”

About the Study

JOURNAL: npj Science of Food

STUDY: “The Future of Software-Controlled Cooking”

AUTHORS: Jonathan David Blutinger (1, Christen Cupples Cooper (2), Shravan Karthik(1), Alissa Tsai (1), Noa Samarelli (1), Erika Storvick (1), Gabriel Seymour (1), Elise Liu (1), Yoran Meijers (1,3) and Hod Lipson (1)

1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia Engineering
2. Department of Nutrition and Dietetics, Pace University
3. Department of Food Technology, Wageningen University, Netherlands.
    

FUNDING:  The study was supported by NSF AI Institute for Dynamical Systems, grant 2112085, and by a grant from the Redefine Meat Ltd.

The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Université de Bourgogne report that they have developed a new kind of "camera" that can see the local disorder. Its key feature is a variable shutter speed: because the disordered atomic clusters are moving, when the team used a slow shutter, the dynamic disorder blurred out, but when they used a fast shutter, they could see it. The new method, which they call variable shutter PDF or vsPDF (for atomic pair distribution function), doesn't work like a conventional camera--it uses neutrons from a source at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to measure atomic positions with a shutter speed of around one picosecond, or a million million (a trillion) times faster than normal camera shutters. The study was published February 20, 2023, by Nature Materials.

“It’s only with this new vsPDF tool that we can really see this side of materials,” said Simon Billinge, professor of materials science and applied physics and applied mathematics. “It gives us a whole new way to untangle the complexities of what is going on in complex materials, hidden effects that can supercharge their properties. With this technique, we’ll be able to watch a material and see which atoms are in the dance and which are sitting it out.”

New theory on stabilizing local fluctuations and converting waste heat to electricity

The vsPDF tool enabled the researchers to find atomic symmetries being broken in GeTe, an important material for thermoelectricity that converts waste heat to electricity (or electricity into cooling). They hadn’t previously been able to see the displacements, or to show the dynamic fluctuations and how quickly they fluctuated. As a result of the insights from vsPDF, the team developed a new theory that shows just how such local fluctuations can form in GeTe and related materials. Such a mechanistic understanding of the dance will help researchers to look for new materials with these effects and to apply external forces to influence the effect, leading to even better materials.

Research team

Billlinge’s co-lead on this work with Simon Kimber, who was at the University of Bourgogne in France at the time of the study. Billinge and Kimber worked with colleagues at ORNL and the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), also funded by the DOE. The Inelastic neutron scattering measurements for the vsPDF camera were made at ORNL; the theory was done at ANL.

Next steps

Billinge is now working on making his technique easier to use for the research community and applying it to other systems with dynamic disorder. At the moment, the technique is not turn-key, but with further development, it should become a much more standard measurement that could be used on many material systems where atomic dynamics are important, from watching lithium moving around in battery electrodes to studying dynamic processes during water-splitting with sunlight.

About the Study

JOURNAL: Nature Materials

STUDY: “Dynamic crystallography reveals spontaneous anisotropy in cubic GeTe”

AUTHORS: Simon A. J. Kimber, Batiment Sciences Mirande; Jiayong Zhang, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Charles H. Liang, University of Chicago; Gian G. Guzman-Verri, Universidad de Costa Rica; Peter B. Littlewood, University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory; Yongqiang Cheng, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Douglas L. Abernathy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Jessica M. Hudspeth, ESRF, The European Synchrotron; Zhong-Zhen Luo, Northwestern University; Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Northwestern University; Tapan Chatterji, Institut Laue-Langevin; Anibal J. Ramirez-Cuesta, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Simon J. L. Billinge, Columbia Engineering, Columbia University, Brookhaven National Laboratory.

FUNDING: S.J.L.B. acknowledges support from the US DOE, Office of Science, Ofice of Basic Energy Sciences, under contract no. DE- SC0012704. C.H.L. acknowledges support from NSF GRFP DGE-1746045. G.G.G.-V. acknowledges support from the Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Costa Rica (project no. 816-C1-601). Work at Argonne (P.B.L.) is supported by the US DOE, Ofice of Science, Ofice of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering, under contract no. DE-AC02-06CH11357. At Northwestern University (M.G.K.), work on thermoelectric materials is primarily supported by the US DOE, Ofice of Science, Ofice of Basic Energy Sciences, under award no. DE-SC0014520. This work was supported by the Programme of Investments for the Future, an ISITE-BFC project (contract no. ANR[1]15-IDEX-0003) (S.A.J.K.).

The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.

“Understanding whether tissues are staying healthy and getting good blood supply during surgical procedures is really important,” says Hillman. “We also realized that if we don’t have to remove (and kill) tissues to look at them, we can find many more uses for MediSCAPE, even to answer simple questions such as ‘what tissue is this?’ or to navigate around precious nerves. Both of these applications are really important for robotic and laparoscopic surgeries where surgeons are more limited in their ability to identify and interact with tissues directly.”

A critical final step for the team was to reduce the large format of the standard SCAPE microscopes in Hillman’s lab to something that would fit into an operating room and could be used by a surgeon in the human body. Post-doctoral fellow Wenxuan Liang worked with the team to develop a smaller version of the system with a better form factor, and a sterile imaging cap. PhD candidate Malte Casper helped to acquire the team’s first demonstration of MediSCAPE in a living human, collecting images of a range of tissues in and around the mouth. These results included rapidly imaging while a volunteer literally licked the end of the imaging probe, producing detailed 3D views of the papillae of the tongue.

Eager to take this technology to the next level with a larger clinical trial, the team is currently working on commercialization and FDA approval. Hillman adds, “We are just so amazed to see what MediSCAPE reveals every time we use it on a new tissue, and especially that we barely ever even needed to add dyes or stains to see structures that pathologists can recognize.”

Hillman and her team hope that MediSCAPE will make standard histology a thing of the past, putting the power of real-time histology and decision making into the surgeon’s hands.

About the Study

Journal: Nature Biomedical Engineering

Title: High-speed light-sheet microscopy for the in-situ acquisition of volumetric histological images of living tissue

Authors: Kripa B. Patel 1, Wenxuan Liang 1, Malte J. Casper 1, Venkatakaushik Voleti1, Wenze Li1, Alexis J. Yagielski1, Hanzhi T. Zhao 1, Citlali Perez-Campos 1, Joyce M. Liu1, Elizabeth Philipone2, Angela J. Yoon 2, Kenneth P. Olive3, Shana M. Coley 4 and Elizabeth M. C. Hillman 1  1Laboratory for Functional Optical Imaging, Department of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology and the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Columbia University 2Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, Columbia University Irving Medical Center 3Division of Digestive and Liver Disease, Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center, Columbia University Irving Medical Center 4Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University Medical Center

Funding for this work was provided by the Columbia-Coulter Translational Research Partnership and the Coulter Foundation Early Career programme to E.M.C.H; the National Institutes of Health BRAIN initiative grants U01NS09429, UF1NS108213 to E.M.C.H and U19NS104649 to Costa; NCI grant U01CA236554 to E.M.C.H. and Brenner; the National Science Foundation NSF-GRFP DGE - 1644869 to K.B.P., IGERT 0801530 to V.V. and CAREER CBET-0954796 to E.M.C.H.; the Simons Foundation Collaboration on the Global Brain 542951 to E.M.C.H.; the Department of Defense MURI W911NF-12-1-0594 to E.M.C.H.; and the Kavli Institute for Brain Science to E.M.C.H.

COI: Intellectual property related to SCAPE microscopy is held by Columbia University and is licensed to Leica Microsystems for certain applications. The authors of this study could benefit financially from commercial development of this technology.