Things you don't want to know in your early research career.

Inkjet Printing of Conjugated Polymer Precursors on Paper Substrates for Colorimetric Sensing and Flexible Electrothermochromic Display

Bora   Yoon  ,     Dae-Young   Ham  ,     Oktay   Yarimaga  ,     Hyosung   An  ,     Chan Woo   Lee  ,
    a n d  Jong-Man   Kim   *

Advanced Materials

Volume 23, Issue 46, pages 5492–5497, December 8, 2011

 
Inkjet-printable aqueous suspensions of conjugated polymer precursorsare developed for fabrication of patterned color images on paper substrates. Printing of a diacetylene (DA)-surfactant composite ink on unmodified paper and photopaper, as well as on a banknote, enables generation of latent images that are transformed to blue-colored polydiacetylene (PDA) structures by UV irradiation. Both irreversible and reversible thermochromism with the PDA printed images are demonstrated and applied to flexible and disposable sensors and to displays.

Amazing Screen Technology : Samsung Flexible AMOLED

REM Sleep Depotentiates Amygdala Activity to Previous Emotional Experiences

Els van der Helm¹, Justin Yao¹, Shubir Dutt¹, Vikram Rao¹, Jared M. Saletin¹, Matthew P. Walker^1, 2, 

Summary

Clinical evidence suggests a potentially causal interaction between sleep and affective brain function; nearly all mood disorders display co-occurring sleep abnormalities, commonly involving rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep [ [1] , [2] , [3] and [4] ]. Building on this clinical evidence, recent neurobiological frameworks have hypothesized a benefit of REM sleep in palliatively decreasing next-day brain reactivity to recent waking emotional experiences [ [5] and [6] ]. Specifically, the marked suppression of central adrenergic neurotransmitters during REM (commonly implicated in arousal and stress), coupled with activation in amygdala-hippocampal networks that encode salient events, is proposed to (re)process and depotentiate previous affective experiences, decreasing their emotional intensity [3]. In contrast, the failure of such adrenergic reduction during REM sleep has been described in anxiety disorders, indexed by persistent high-frequency electroencephalographic (EEG) activity (>30 Hz) [ [7] , [8] , [9] and [10] ]; a candidate factor contributing to hyperarousal and exaggerated amygdala reactivity [ [3] , [11] , [12] and [13] ]. Despite these neurobiological frameworks, and their predictions, the proposed benefit of REM sleep physiology in depotentiating neural and behavioral responsivity to prior emotional events remains unknown. Here, we demonstrate that REM sleep physiology is associated with an overnight dissipation of amygdala activity in response to previous emotional experiences, altering functional connectivity and reducing next-day subjective emotionality.

The Race to X-ray Microbeam and Nanobeam Science

1. Gene E. Ice, 
2. John D. Budai, 
3. Judy W. L. Pang

1. Science 2 December 2011: 
   Vol. 334 no. 6060 pp. 1234-1239 
   DOI: 10.1126/science.1202366

1. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: icege@ornl.gov

X-ray microbeams are an emerging characterization tool with broad implications for science, ranging from materials structure and dynamics, to geophysics and environmental science, to biophysics and protein crystallography. We describe how submicrometer hard x-ray beams with the ability to penetrate tens to hundreds of micrometers into most materials and with the ability to determine local composition, chemistry, and (crystal) structure can characterize buried sample volumes and small samples in their natural or extreme environments. Beams less than 10 nanometers have already been demonstrated, and the practical limit for hard x-ray beam size, the limit to trace-element sensitivity, and the ultimate limitations associated with near-atomic structure determinations are the subject of ongoing research.

Drug Delivery and Imaging with Polydiacetylene Micelles

Edmond Gravel,*[a] Julien Ogier,[b]Thomas Arnauld,[b]Nicolas Mackiewicz,[c]Fr d ric Ducong ,[c]
and Eric Doris* [a]

Abstract : This concept article summarizes our recent findings regarding photopolymerized micelles obtained
from the self-assembly of diacetylene-containing amphiphiles. Their synthesis and characterization are presented as well as some biomedical applications, such as tumor imaging and drug delivery. Finally, ongoing studies and future challenges are briefly discussed.