It may sound contradictory, but diamonds are the key to a new technique that could provide a very-low-cost alternative to multimillion-dollar medical imaging and drug-discovery devices.
An international team led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley discovered how to exploit defects in nanoscale and microscale diamonds and potentially enhance the sensitivity of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) systems while eliminating the need for their costly and bulky superconducting magnets.
“This has been a longstanding unsolved problem in our field, and we were able to find a way to overcome it and to show that the solution is very simple,” said Ashok Ajoy, a postdoctoral researcher in the Materials Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab, and the Department of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, who served as the lead author of the study. “No one has ever done this before. The mechanism that we discovered is completely new.”
MRI machines are employed to locate cancerous tumors and aid in the development of treatment plans, while NMR machines are used to examine the atomic-scale structure and chemistry of drug compounds and other molecules.
Image Credit: Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley
News This Week
A Surprising Brain Signal Could Explain Why Eating Less Protein Extends Lifespan
A new paper suggests that limiting protein intake triggers a coordinated response throughout the body that may help explain how protein restriction affects healthy aging. Animals respond to protein restriction, or reduced protein in [...]
Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless
Millions of operations should be scrapped SIX IN TEN Britons have surgery at some point. So do lots of Americans, at a cost of perhaps $500bn a year, a third of all spending on [...]
Cocaine plays with mind, hijacks brain circuit, drives increasingly rigid and repetitive behavior
Researchers have found that cocaine hijacks brain circuit, which to drive increasingly rigid and repetitive behavior. The brain circuit that normally participates in selecting natural mouth and face movements, but which becomes disproportionately engaged [...]
Injectable nanodevices could provide effective treatment for drug-resistant glioblastoma
The brain cancer glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive and treatment-resistant cancers known to medicine, carrying a median survival of just 12-15 months, even with the best available care. Now, researchers at the [...]
New Treatment Cuts “Bad” Cholesterol in Half for a Full Year
A single infusion of an experimental CRISPR-Cas9 therapy was reported to safely lower LDL cholesterol by 52.5% and triglycerides by 47.8%, as measured 12 months after treatment. What if one infusion could keep cholesterol [...]
Too Much RNA Can Drain a Cell’s Energy, Scientists Discover
A virus may cripple a cell’s power supply simply by producing too much of a molecule the cell needs to survive. New research from the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences [...]
West African scientists warn of weakening health systems and urge stronger outbreak detection
LOME, Togo (AP) — West African laboratory scientists called on governments Friday to strengthen capacity to detect disease outbreaks to avoid another major outbreak, saying health systems across the region are becoming weaker. Participants [...]
A Little-Known Protein Could Point to a New Way To Treat Alzheimer’s
A study suggests that increasing SORLA protein levels could help treat Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders involving tau protein. Increasing SORLA, a protein with a protective role in the brain, helped mice withstand damage [...]
Leave A Comment