Technology Offers

Metal-insulator-metal (MIM) diodes are very promising for application as rectennas for solar energy harvesting, photo-detectors and high frequency mixers. Good MIM diode performance requires a high asymmetry, a strong nonlinearity, a large responsively, as well as a low resistance or a high on-current. These figures of merit are mainly determined by the work function difference of the electrodes, and the barrier height between the insulator and the electrode materials. In the design of MIM diodes, ...

Reversible adhesion can be used to transfer or to manipulate objects. Especially if the objects are small and/or fragile their manipulation become very challenging. Intermolecular forces such as Van-der-Waals can be used to achieve a strong adhesion between the objects. Moreover, surface functionalization and the creation of nano- and microstructures can be used to improve these adhesion properties. Unfortunately, the adhesion becomes insufficient if the surfaces are wet or rough. Another problems ...

UV-B radiation is a major damaging agent causing damage to plants, tissues and human or animal skin upon exposure. To persist strong UV-B radiation plants produce additional antioxidant sunscreen pigments that belong to the chemical compound family of phenylpropanoids. Since many conventional compounds with sunscreen protection potential do not enter the market due to toxic side effects or they bear the risk to become environmental pollutants when accumulating in natural resources, application ...

Human influenza A virus (IAV) is responsible for seasonal disease in people and can cause worldwide pandemics. The main lines of defense against IAV are vaccines and antiviral drugs.

Influenza vaccines, including killed and live vaccines, recombinant virus-like particles and viral particles, have been available commercially for many years. Typically, the composition of influenza vaccines is based on the major influenza virus strains causing infection in the previous season. Accordingly, ...

In contrast to target-based drug discovery, phenotypic screening discloses the effect of a compound on a biological system without revealing its mode of action or its interaction sites. Phenotypic screening has delivered several new valuable drugs, however, the major challenge remains target deconvolution (1). In recent years, “omics” techniques and bioinformatics have brought significant advances to target identification in drug discovery phenotypic screening. However, such analyses can become ...

The study of mechanical properties of materials at high temperatures at the microstructural length scale requires dedicated testing setups. An accurate measurement of the sample temperature is vital for reliable testing. Most of the successful current testing platforms record the temperatures of the sample and tip near the heating sources but not at the respective surface. As a consequence, due to spatial and temporal thermal gradients a reliable surface temperature cannot be measured today. Even ...

Conventional mechanical zippers find manifold applications for luggage, clothing or even industrial applications. However, their design features significant disadvantages. In particular, they require the use of both hands by the user to align the ends of the garment and lock the insertion pin into the slider. This mechanism can be prone to jamming and failure and more generally requires the user to free his or her hands. The user must further use one or both hands to move the slider along the ...

Anthrax is an acute infectious disease caused by the spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis. B.anthracis can cause human disease via the gastrointestinal, cutaneous or inhalational routes. There is still a considerably high rate of mortality from inhalational anthrax of up to 75 percent, even though fluorquinolone class antibiotics (e.g., ciprofloxacin) are being administered as a first-line therapy. This strategy, in addition, is being threatened by the spread of plasmid-mediated ...

Ultrasound is being used in many fields ranging from medical imaging and therapy to non-destructive testing, contact-free particle handling or spatially selective heating in industrial settings. Often, those applications require shaping (including focusing) of an ultrasonic field. Compared to existing transducers with fixed lenses or phased array transducers (PATs) the present invention allows much more sophisticated sound fields to be generated using much simpler and cheaper technology.

Since 2000 bioinspired fibrillar dry adhesives have been studied intensively culminating in commercial products already available on the market. Currently known fibrillar adhesives are fully wetted by oils, leading to significantly decreased adhesion and friction performance. Therefore, a high demand exists for reversible dry fibrillar adhesives that can repel oil-like liquids and adhere strongly to surfaces wetted by them.

To meet the aforementioned challenges, an extraordinary fibrillar ...

Carbon fixation is arguably the most important biochemical processes on earth, supporting our biosphere by transforming inorganic carbon into organic matter and literally feeding all life forms. The reductive pentose phosphate cycle (rPP, also known as the Calvin–Benson–Bassham Cycle) is responsible for ≥95% of the carbon fixed in the biosphere. Although under a strong selective pressure for eons, this process displays major inefficiencies, some are due to the low catalytic rate and the ...

CellNetAnalyzer is a package for MATLAB and provides a comprehensive and user-friendly environment for structural and functional analysis of biochemical networks. CNA facilitates the analysis of metabolic (stoichiometric) as well as signaling and regulatory networks solely on their network topology, i.e. independent of kinetic mechanisms and parameters. CNA provides a powerful collection of tools and algorithms for structural network analysis which can be started in a menu-controlled ...

Applying high voltages in vacuum applications requires feedthroughs, which electrically insulate the conductor from the vacuum chamber whilst being vacuum-tight. In high- and ultrahigh vacuum environments, the materials used need to be low in outgassing rates. The current technology for feedthroughs withstanding tens to hundreds of kilovolts relies on vacuum-tight ceramic to metal connections, which are heavy, fragile and prone to contamination. Commercially available feedthroughs are stand-alone ...

The function of brain tissue is based on the dynamics of numerous nerve cells and their synaptic interaction. Direct electrical interfacing of semiconductors and nerve cells is the physical basis for a systematic development of hybrid neuroelectronic devices, such as neurocomputers and neuroprostheses. Excited nerve cells and field-effect transistors are coupled by a dissipative mechanism: ionic current through the adherent cell membrane flows along the electrical resistance of a narrow layer ...

Engineering light distributions in a three-dimensional volume to achieve selective illumination profiles is an instrumental task shared by many optical and microscopy techniques. The optimization of the light distribution can lead to significant enhancement of relevant performance figures and ultimately to the extension of the instrument or experimental protocol capabilities^1,2,3,4,5. Targeted illumination profiles can be used either to mechanically interact with molecules at nanometer ...

Resistance induced heating of electrical wiring during operation is one of the limiting factors to design high-power electromagnetic coils. The commonly used approach to eliminate the heating of electrical wires is to introduce a hollow conductive copper wire into electrical wiring and to cool this wire with water. Unfortunately, this approach is not applicable for high power density electromagnetic coil as well as for coils with small dimensions. Another approach to enhance the cooling properties ...

An Enhancement Cavity (EC) with at least one toroidal and/or cylindrical mirror is described. This allows for an arbitrary beam ellipticity of the eigenmode. In particular at a stability edge, where the ellipticity diverges with purely spherical optics, a round beam can be obtained.

Fusion Tags Comprising Ubiquitin-like Modifiers and Corresponding Proteases For Protein Purification From Selected Eukaryotic Expression Hosts

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is nowadays a leading mo¬dality for diagnostic imaging with about 100 million examinations per year worldwide. However, when invented by Paul Christian Lauterbur in 1973, MRI was too slow to allow for routine medical applications. A breakthrough was achieved in 1985 by the FLASH (Fast Low Angle Shot) technique developed by Jens Frahm and his team at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. With FLASH the measuring time for a cross-sectional ...

In mass spectroscopy, many ion sources that transform the specimen to be tested into gas phase ions operate at ambient or elevated pressure. The generated ions have to be transferred into vacuum for further characterization, for instance in a mass analyzer.
The ion transfer into vacuum represents a major bottleneck. Because the pumping power increases rapidly with the size of an opening, long capillaries or small pinholes have to be used. Their transmission is commonly as low as 1%, in optimal ...

An innovative chemical inducer of dimerization for studying protein interactions in cells, that overcomes challenges of available dimerizers.

Screening the level of specific blumenols in plant leaves allows simple implementation in marker assisted breeding and high-throughput analysis.

The efficiency of solar cells is strongly affected by local inhomogeneities. Especially inhomogeneities of the dark-current voltage (I-V) characteristic are of interest: The local dark current-voltage characteristic is a measure for the local recombination properties of the solar cell. Lock-in thermography performed in the dark (DLIT) can be used to detect and evaluate locally increased dark current densities.

The present invention relates to a method of generating pulsed coherent radiation in the UV and XUV wavelength ranges. Furthermore, the present invention relates to a radiation source for generating pulsed coherent radiation based on a high harmonic generation (HHG).

A tRNA^ALA heteroplasmy mouse model to study mitochondrial disorders such as encephalomyophathies, that recapitulates symptoms as observed in human patients with disease-causing mutation in the same mitochondrial gene.

An efficient system to monitor and control animal behavior in wildlife as well as in laboratory settings

A group of scientists at the MPI for Polymer Research in Mainz developed nano-graphene structures that can be used as a new class of fluorophores for super-resolution microscopy (SMLM and STED).

They perform like hybrids of organic dyes and QDs: they have excellent environment-independent blinking properties, emit high photon numbers, display high photo-stability, possess low toxicity, have a molecular size below 2 nm, and have narrow excitation and emission spectra.

These nanographene ...

Extremely sensitive, reliable and fast novel KDAC assay, which can be performed in a continuous format. This novel KDAC assay is based on Firefly luciferase harboring an acetylation on an essential active site lysine, incorporated by genetic code expansion. We furthermore offer a bacterial selection system for KDACs, which uses a reporter enzyme inactivated by lysine modifications at an essential active site residue, thereby linking deacetylase activity to a selectable output.

Antiviral therapy against retroviruses and alphaviruses using tRNA^Leu(UUA) overexpression

Synthetic Glycosylphosphatidylinositols (GPIs) with high selectivity and purity for Toxoplasmosis diagnosis and vaccine.

Carbohydrates form one of the major classes of biological macromolecules in living organisms, but structural analysis and the quality control of carbohydrate structures represent a major challenge due to the frequent occurrence of isomers that are difficult to distinguish using established techniques.

Changes in protein glycosylation are frequently identified in the context of diseases. For example, alterations in N-glycan profiles from blood plasma have been found to correlate with pathological ...

For the evaluation of crystallisation processes, process parameters like temperature and concentration can be easily measured. However, to measure the crystal size distribution continuously is a challenging task.
Different methods relaying on back scattering or reflection of monochromatic light can be applied that yield chord-length distributions, which often deviate from the actual crystal or particle size distribution. For analysing the true crystal dimensions and, additionally, the crystal ...

The state of an electron is completely defined by its momentum and spin. In processes like electron diffraction or photoemission electron ensembles are generated which have a characteristic 3D distribution of momentum and spin. To examine such events the three components of the momentum vector have to be measured. Up to now, the momentum distribution of an ensemble of charged particles was typically measured using energy-dispersive spectrometers based on sequential approaches (sequentially changing ...

Fluorescent dyes are widely used as indispensable markers in biology, optical microscopy, and analytical chemistry. In particular, the sensitive and stable imaging of cellular components depends on the favourable combination of chemical, biological and physical factors. The availability and proper choice of fluorescent dyes is a key factor to success in the entire labelling and imaging procedure. Due to their superior brightness and photostability, synthetic dyes represent an attractive alternative ...

Mesoporous materials present a large surface-to-volume ratio providing sites for catalysis, molecular separation, adsorption or chemical sensing. Some of the classical mesoporous materials employed include silica, alumina, zirconia, zeolites, and other diverse oxides such Ti or Co, and they are synthetized by routes as self-assembly, sol-gel, spray drying and some variations of these methods known in the state of the art. Additionally, some elements of the platinum group such as Pd, Ru, and their ...

Speckle interferometry is an established metrology technique for the characterization of rough objects. Deformations of rough objects under a load can be determined, as well as – with the help of an additional second wavelength – the surface shape of the object under test. As an illustration, Figure 1 (left) shows the so called raw phase as a result of a deformation measurement on a metal plate. The shape and the density of the fringes indicate the response of the metal plate to the load.
Owing ...

A simple, one-step assay for reliable measurements of NAD(H) and NADP(H) in complex samples, with various applications such as enzymatic assays, clinicals tests, and as point of care tests in the field of ageing.

The ability of hypervalent iodine compounds to act as electrophilic group-transfer reagents has been extensively exploited during the last several years in a variety of synthetically useful transformations
like cyanations and alkynylations. Now it was found, that novel imidazolium sulfuranes, which are isolobal to I(III) species and also depict the key threecenter four-electron bond motive, can be used as an alternative platform for the development of new electrophilic group-transfer reagents.

Imidazolium ...

Novel gas exchange membranes based on superamphiphobic coatings applied on metal meshes were created and tested in different applications, like gas scrubbing and blood oxygenation.
By using the novel membrans drawbacks of traditional membranes - like insufficient wetting, plugging and depositions chemical incompatibility and temperature instability - can be avoided.

The presented technology offers an enhanced streaming rendering pipeline that enables the display of high fidelity, high framerate and high solution for noval views in real time on thin lightweight HMDs suitable especially for VR experiences.

How does it work?

The key idea of this technology is based on a novel algorithm for Potentially Visible Set (PVS) creation: the camera offset space (COS), which for a given point on the image plane provides information under which camera ...

We offer the new composite nanomaterial for sodium ion battery cathodes. These carbon-coated nanosized Na₃V₂(PO₄)₃ particles embedded in a highly effective mixed conducting porous carbon matrix can be easily prepared by means of facile soft-chemistry based preparation method with a post heat treatment procedure. The resulting cathodes can be charged and discharged in 6 s with high current density of 22 A/g, deliver the specific capacity of 44 mAh/g and ...