In order to better understand important biological membranes, it is necessary to explore new methods. Researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) have succeeded in creating an artificial placental barrier on a chip, using a high-resolution 3D printing process. The placenta has an essential and highly complex task: it must ensure the exchange of important substances between the mother and her unborn child, whilst simultaneously blocking other substances ...

Spoiling old dogs in their twilight years by retiring them to the sofa and forgiving them their stubbornness or disobedience, doesn’t do our four-legged friends any good. Regular brain training and lifelong learning create positive emotions and can slow down mental deterioration in old age. Physical limitations, however, often do not allow the same sort of training as used in young dogs.

In research published in Nature Communications, Stefan Kuhn at the University of Vienna and col-leagues have created an amazingly stable, material hand for an electronic clock, realised by the rotations of a micrometre sized silicon cylinder, which is levitated by light. The team use the clock to kick the tiny rotor with pulses of polarised light, causing it to spin one million times a second.

2D materials have opened up new horizons in the field of materials science over the last ten years. Now EU-funding has fed into the creation of a combination of structures to form suspended buckyball sandwiches, offering interesting properties for further research. Scientists have created a new structure by encapsulating a single layer of fullerene molecules between two graphene sheets.

University of Vienna research team has succeeded in breaking two novel records while experimenting with so-called twisted particles of light. These results, now published in the journal PNAS, are not only of fundamental interest but also give a hint towards the enormous information capacity a single particle of light may offer in future applications. Time and again, properties of the light surprise the research world.

Researchers at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), the University of Vienna, and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona have achieved a new milestone in quantum physics: they were able to entangle three particles of light in a high-dimensional quantum property related to the 'twist' of their wavefront structure.