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Middle ear infections, also known as otitis media, affect more than 80% of the children in the U.S. In a new study, researchers have designed a miniaturized 3D-printed device to inactivate Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a common bacterium that causes the infection.
The device — a microplasma jet array — generates plasma, which is composed of charged particles and reactive molecules that have been previously shown to inactivate various pathogens. “This is the first time anyone has tried treating middle ear infections using plasma technology,” said Jungeun Won, a graduate student in the Boppart lab. “Usually, the treatment involves using antibiotics or surgical intervention.”
The problem with using antibiotics is two-fold. First, antibiotics are ineffective in more than 30% of the patients with acute infections. Second, their use can lead to increased antibiotic resistance because the bacteria form biofilms — aggregates that attach to the surface of the ear.
“Biofilms are very dense, making it difficult for the antibiotics to penetrate,” said Helen Nguyen (IGOH), an Ivan Racheff Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Our idea was that if we could disrupt the structure of the biofilm, we could increase the penetration of the antibiotics.”
The researchers tested the microplasma jet array by building a model of the middle ear. They used an excised rat eardrum and tested the antimicrobial effects of the microplasma on the bacteria that were located behind the eardrum.
“We used different duration times for the treatment and found that 15 minutes and longer was effective in inactivating the bacteria,” Won said. “We also monitored the tissue to see if we had created any holes or ruptures, but we didn’t find any obvious physical damage.”
“We think that the microplasma disrupts the biofilm by disturbing the bacterial cell membrane,” Nguyen said. “So far, we only have indirect measurements supporting our idea, but we will look into it in the future.”
Although the thickness of the rat eardrum is 30% lower than that of a human, which is about the width of a hair strand, the results suggest that the microplasma treatment could be used to treat middle ear infections in humans.
“Middle ear infections and the over-prescription of antibiotics to treat these are major clinical challenges that are in need of new treatment technologies and solutions,” said Stephen Boppart, Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, who is also a medical doctor.
The researchers are now designing a smaller, earbud-shaped jet array for treatments that will allow longer exposure times. They will also test the devices on animal models using biofilms of the other bacteria that cause middle ear infections, including, but not limited to, Haemophilus influenzae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Moraxella catarrhalis, to test whether the treatment is also effective with these bacteria. Additionally, the researchers will closely monitor the tissues of the middle ear to ensure that there is no structural and functional tissue damage from the plasma technology.

Despite facing cultural and political pushback, the evidence remains clear: Face masks made a difference in Kansas.
“These had a huge effect in counties that had a mask mandate,” said Donna Ginther, the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Economics and director of the Institute for Policy & Social Research at the University of Kansas. “Our research found that masks reduced cases, hospitalizations and deaths in counties that adopted them by around 60% across the board.”
Ginther’s article “Association of Mask Mandates and COVID-19 Case Rates, Hospitalizations and Deaths in Kansas” examines the effect of masks on the state’s 105 counties. It appears in JAMA Network Open, a journal published by the American Medical Association.
Kansas boasts the fifth-highest total of counties among all the states. Executive Order No. 20-52 that took effect in July of 2020 was initially adopted by only 15 counties, with 68 others not adopting the order through October. A second mandate in November was embraced by an additional 40 counties.
“We thought masks would matter for certain cases, but the effect size for hospitalizations and deaths being the same rate was pretty astonishing,” Ginther said.
Co-written with Carlos Zambrana, an associate researcher at the Institute for Policy & Social Research, Ginther estimated masks saved about 500 lives in adoptive counties. And, yet, other counties often refused to adopt the mandate, citing personal freedoms and lack of scientific evidence as reasons.

In the context of recent debate over the FDA’s approval of aducanumab, it’s refreshing to learn about a model of Alzheimer’s neurodegeneration that doesn’t start with the pathogenic proteins amyloid or Tau.
A new paper in Alzheimer’s & Dementia from Emory neuroscientist Shan Ping Yu and colleagues focuses on an unusual member of the family of NMDA receptors, signaling molecules that are critical for learning and memory. Their findings contain leads for additional research on Alzheimer’s, including drugs that are already FDA-approved that could be used preventively, and genes to look at for risk factors.
“It’s not just another rodent model of Alzheimer’s,” Yu says. “We are emphasizing a different set of mechanisms leading to neurodegeneration.”
Those mechanisms include alterations in calcium and neuronal hyperactivity, which occur first in this mouse model, rather than standard models that have clumps of amyloid or Tau as the primary drivers.
For the last several years, Yu and his laboratory have been studying the NMDA receptor subunit GluN3A in the context of stroke and also brain development. According to their research, GluN3A acts like a control rod in a nuclear reactor, cooling down signaling in the brain so that things don’t overheat. It’s an inhibitory part of a receptor assembly that is usually stimulatory.
Yu says GluN3A’s role in the adult brain is understudied, because it is generally thought to fade away after early development. Mice that are missing the gene for GluN3A get a benefit earlier in life, in that they have enhanced memory and spatial learning. But later on, the missing gene’s function catches up, and the mice develop several features of Alzheimer’s, including olfactory deficits, cognitive decline, neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation, and eventually amyloid/tau pathology.
“We show that virtually all clinical symptoms and pathophysiology spontaneously developed in the GluN3A knockout mouse in an age-dependent manner,” Yu says.
Yu says he was originally motivated to examine GluN3A’s role in neurodegeneration because the GluN3A-knockout mice develop the early symptom of olfactory dysfunction, which is commonly seen in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients. In the current paper, Yu and colleagues show that loss of GluN3A leads to elevated calcium levels, normally tightly regulated, and what they call “degenerative excitotoxicity.”
This is distinct from the excitotoxicity that is harmful in traumatic brain injury or stroke — milder and more chronic. They connect the hyperactivity and inflammation to the “calcium hypothesis” for Alzheimer’s — a well-established idea that dysregulated calcium drives neurodegeneration. Yu says that their discovery of the role of GluN3A relates more to the early stages of the disease, before amyloid plaque formation.
Looking forward, the findings on GluN3A have implications for additional investigation. First, the NMDA receptor inhibitor memantine is FDA-approved for Alzheimer’s, but it is generally thought only to have an effect on symptoms. Yu’s lab showed that they could prevent some (but not all) deficits by treating GluN3A-mutant mice with memantine. Maybe memantine or a similar drug could play a preventive role if given to people with mild cognitive impairment or early Alzheimer’s? Second, genetic variations in GluN3A has barely been studied in Alzheimer’s, and studies on other neuropsychiatric conditions suggest that a significant percentage of people carry mutations or deletions affecting GluN3A gene function.
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Rice University computer scientists are sending RAMBO to rescue genomic researchers who sometimes wait days or weeks for search results from enormous DNA databases.
DNA sequencing is so popular, genomic datasets are doubling in size every two years, and the tools to search the data haven’t kept pace. Researchers who compare DNA across genomes or study the evolution of organisms like the virus that causes COVID-19 often wait weeks for software to index large, “metagenomic” databases, which get bigger every month and are now measured in petabytes.
RAMBO, which is short for “repeated and merged bloom filter,” is a new method that can cut indexing times for such databases from weeks to hours and search times from hours to seconds. Rice University computer scientists presented RAMBO last week at the Association for Computing Machinery data science conference SIGMOD 2021.
“Querying millions of DNA sequences against a large database with traditional approaches can take several hours on a large compute cluster and can take several weeks on a single server,” said RAMBO co-creator Todd Treangen, a Rice computer scientist whose lab specializes in metagenomics. “Reducing database indexing times, in addition to query times, is crucially important as the size of genomic databases are continuing to grow at an incredible pace.”
To solve the problem, Treangen teamed with Rice computer scientist Anshumali Shrivastava, who specializes in creating algorithms that make big data and machine learning faster and more scalable, and graduate students Gaurav Gupta and Minghao Yan, co-lead authors of the peer-reviewed conference paper on RAMBO.
RAMBO uses a data structure that has a significantly faster query time than state-of-the-art genome indexing methods as well as other advantages like ease of parallelization, a zero false-negative rate and a low false-positive rate.

Like a blocked water line, obstructions in blood vessels in the human circulatory system can cause serious problems. This is especially the case in superior vena cava syndrome (SVCS), in which oxygen-depleted blood returning from the head, upper chest, and arms is partially or completely prevented from reaching the heart. The result, however, is far more serious than the inconvenience of low water pressure from a clogged pipe — SVCS requires immediate attention.
Each year, some 15,000 people in the United States are affected by SVCS, symptoms of which include facial swelling, difficulty breathing, chest pain, mental confusion, and sometimes coma. A tumor compressing the superior vena cava vessel is the most common cause, but the condition can also result from intravascular devices, such as catheters and pacemakers, that may compress or obstruct the vessel.
Historically, radiation therapy, aimed at killing tumor cells, was the treatment of choice for SVCS. But in recent decades minimally invasive endovascular stenting, in which a tubular support is placed inside the collapsed or obstructed vessel, has become the preferred option of care. Whether it is the best option has been unclear, but now, a new analysis by researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University shows that endovascular therapy currently is the safest and most effective treatment for SVCS.
“Endovascular stenting has emerged as a first-line treatment for SVCS,” said Riyaz Bashir, MD, FACC, RVT, Professor of Medicine at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University and Director of Vascular and Endovascular Medicine at Temple University Hospital. “But until our recent work, there had been no systematic review carried out to assess the actual success rate of stenting.”
The review by Dr. Bashir and colleagues was published online June 28 in the journal EClinicalMedicine.
The team’s analysis was carried out by first conducting a systematic review of medical literature databases such as PubMed and Cochrane Library. Collaborator Stephanie Clare Roth, MLIS, Biomedical & Research Services Librarian at the Ginsburg Health Sciences Library at Temple University, performed searches targeted specifically at identifying studies on endovascular therapy and SVCS. Dr. Bashir’s team then evaluated the studies for various endpoints of therapy, including success rate, restenosis rate, and SVCS recurrence after stenting.
Statistical analyses indicated that endovascular stenting was successful nearly 99 percent of the time, with relatively low restenosis and recurrence rates. “Our analyses really highlight the success of endovascular therapy for SVCS, showing that it is highly effective, safe, and durable,” Dr. Bashir said.
Dr. Bashir and colleagues plan next to look at the use of endovascular therapy in clinical practice. “We would like to understand more about how SVCS patients in the United States are currently treated,” he said. “Little is known about current clinical practices for SVCS, despite the severity of the condition.”
Other researchers who contributed to the study include Abdul Hussain Azizi, Department of Medicine, Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University; Stephanie Clare Roth, Ginsburg Health Sciences Library, Temple University; Maninder Singh and Vladimir Lakhter, Division of Cardiovascular Disease, Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University. Irfan Shafi, Department of Internal Medicine, Wayne State University/Detroit Medical Center, Detroit; Matthew Zhao, Department of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles; and Saurav Chatterjee, Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Northshore-LIJ Hospitals of Northwell Health and Zucker School of Medicine, New York.

In cancer therapy, the effectiveness of an approach is determined by its ability to preserve the non-cancerous cells. Simply put, the higher the collateral damage, the greater are the side-effects of a therapy. An ideal situation is where only the cancer cells can be targeted and destroyed. In this regard, photothermal therapy — an approach in which cancer cells infused with gold nanoparticles can be heated up and destroyed using near-infrared (NIR) light that is strongly absorbed by the gold nanoparticles — has emerged as a promising strategy due to its minimally invasive nature.
“Because NIR light is able to penetrate biological tissues, it can illuminate the gold nanoparticles within the body and turn them into nano-sized cell heating agents,” explains Prof. Masayoshi Tanaka from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), Japan, who researches nanomaterials for biomedical applications.
In particular, gold nanoplates (AuNPls) are extremely attractive as photothermal therapeutic agents owing to their efficient absorption of NIR light. However, synthesizing these nanoparticles requires harsh reagents and highly toxic conditions, making the process hazardous. In a new study, Prof. Tanaka and his collaborators from UK (University of Leeds) and Korea (Chung-Ang University) have now addressed this issue by developing a safer and more eco-friendly protocol for AuNPl synthesis, the results of which are published in ACTA Biomaterialia.
The team took the hint from a process called “biomineralization” that uses biomolecules to generate metal nanoparticles with tunable structures. “Peptides, or short chains of amino acids, are particularly attractive candidates for this purpose because of their relatively small size and stability. However, their use for producing Au nanoparticles with optimized structures for efficient NIR absorption has not yet been reported,” says Prof. Tanaka.
Motivated, the team began by identifying peptides suitable for the mineralization of AuNPls and, after picking out over 100 peptides, decided to examine the potential of a peptide named B3 for synthesizing AuNPls with controllable structure that can serve as photothermal conversion agents.
In a process called “one pot synthesis,” the team mixed a gold salt, HAuCl4, along with B3 peptide and its derivatives at various concentrations in a buffer solution (an aqueous solution resistant to changes in pH) at neutral pH and synthesized triangular and circular-shaped AuNPls with different levels of NIR absorption based on the peptide concentration.
The team then tested the effect of the AuNPls on cultured cancer cells under irradiated conditions and found them to exhibit the desired therapeutic effects. Furthermore, on characterizing the peptide using B3 derivatives, they found that an amino acid called histidine governed the structure of the AuNPls.
“These findings provide not only an easy and green synthetic method for AuNPls but also insight into the regulation of peptide-based nanoparticle synthesis,” comments Prof. Tanaka excitedly. “This could open doors to new techniques for non-toxic synthesis of nanoparticle therapeutic agents.”
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A tool developed by the Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology lab at IRB Barcelona predicts the biological activity of chemical compounds, key information to evaluate their therapeutic potential.
Using artificial neural networks, scientists have inferred experimental data for a million compounds and have developed a package of programs to make estimates for any type of molecule.
The work has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
The Structural Bioinformatics and Network Biology laboratory, led by ICREA Researcher Dr. Patrick Aloy, has completed the bioactivity information for a million molecules using deep machine-learning computational models. It has also disclosed a tool to predict the biological activity of any molecule, even when no experimental data are available.
This new methodology is based on the Chemical Checker, the largest database of bioactivity profiles for pseudo pharmaceuticals to date, developed by the same laboratory and published in 2020. The Chemical Checker collects information from 25 spaces of bioactivity for each molecule. These spaces are linked to the chemical structure of the molecule, the targets with which it interacts or the changes it induces at the clinical or cellular level. However, this highly detailed information about the mechanism of action is incomplete for most molecules, implying that for a particular one there may be information for one or two spaces of bioactivity but not for all 25.
With this new development, researchers integrate all the experimental information available with deep machine learning methods, so that all the activity profiles, from chemistry to clinical level, for all molecules can be completed.

For the first time, scientists from the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK) partner site in Essen/Düsseldorf have discovered stem cells of the hematopoietic system in glioblastomas, the most aggressive form of brain tumor. These hematopoietic stem cells promote division of the cancer cells and at the same time suppress the immune response against the tumor. This surprising discovery might open up new possibilities for developing more effective immunotherapies against these malignant brain tumors.
The DKTK is a consortium centered around the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, which has long-term collaborative partnerships with specialist oncological centers at universities across Germany.
Glioblastomas are the most common dangerous brain tumor in adults; they grow diffusely into healthy brain tissue and are therefore almost impossible to completely remove by surgery. They defy the combination of surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy and usually continue to grow unchecked. Even immunotherapies, which achieve good results in some cases in other types of cancer, have had no effect on these malignant brain tumors to date.
“Glioblastomas apparently create an environment that actively suppresses the immune response,” explained Björn Scheffler, DKTK Professor of Translational Oncology at the West German Tumor Center in Essen, partner site Essen/Düsseldorf. “They produce immunosuppressive messengers, and in the immediate environment of the tumors we find certain types of immune cells that specifically suppress the immune defense.”
Researchers were not previously aware of the variety of immune cells in the microenvironment of glioblastomas in any detail. Yet Scheffler and his colleagues realized that a precise knowledge of the cellular composition of glioblastomas was necessary in order to be able to overcome tumor-related immunosuppression using appropriate treatments.
In tissue samples of 217 glioblastomas, 86 WHO grade II and III astrocytomas, and 17 samples from healthy brain tissue, the DKTK researchers used computer-assisted transcription analyses to draw up profiles of the cellular composition. The tissue samples were taken directly from the resection margins — where remaining tumor cells and immune cells meet.
The team were able to distinguish between signals from 43 cell types, including 26 different types of immune cells. To their great surprise, the researchers discovered hematopoietic stem and precursor cells in all the malignant tumor samples, while this cell type was not found in healthy tissue samples. “Blood stem cells are actually found in bone marrow, from where they supply the body with all kinds of mature blood cells — obviously including all the different types of immune cells. Blood stem cells of the brain tumor itself have never been described before now,” remarked lead author Celia Dobersalske.
An even more surprising observation was that these blood stem cells seem to have fatal characteristics: They suppress the immune system and at the same time stimulate tumor growth. When the researchers cultured the tumor-associated blood stem cells in the same petri dish as glioblastoma cells, cancer cell division increased. At the same time, the cells produced large amounts of the PD-L1 molecule, known as an “immune brake,” on their surface.
Tumor organoids — tiny tumors grown in a petri dish from the brain tumor cells of individual patients — reacted to the blood stem cells too. In the presence of these cells, the cancer cells formed a network of cell processes that connects them. Only a few years ago, scientists from the DKFZ and Heidelberg University Hospital discovered that glioblastoma cells communicate using these connections and can thus protect themselves against treatment-related damage.
All these observations suggested that the blood stem cells found in glioblastomas have a negative impact on the course of disease. This was confirmed in a study of 159 glioblastoma patients for whom data were available on the clinical course of disease. In this group of patients, it was consistently observed that the more blood stem cells a tumor contained, the more immunosuppressive messengers were released and the more immunosuppressive markers the cancer cells formed — and the lower the overall survival of the patients was.
In order to investigate brain tumor blood stem cells in more detail, the authors teamed up with the Department of Neurosurgery at Essen University Hospital (Director: Ulrich Sure) to extract individual cells from fresh patient tissue. Using gene expression sequencing in 660 individual cells, the researchers created a profile and compared it with cells from healthy bone marrow and blood. Analysis of these data led to several specific new suggestions as to how this tumor-promoting cell population could be made harmless.
It was already known from research reports that the blood stem cells in bone marrow tend to mature into immunosuppressive cell types during differentiation in the course of cancer. It appears that they are programmed by the tumor to do so. Expert and last author Igor Cima suspects that a similar phenomenon might be responsible for the observations in the glioblastoma-associated blood stem cells: “We can now see an opportunity to intervene in order to modify the differentiation process of the glioma-associated blood stem cells, for example through particular cell messengers, and hence prevent the immune system from being blocked as a result of the tumor. Immunotherapies would then have a better chance of being effective against glioblastomas.”

The examined tissue does not need to be marked for this. The analysis only takes around half an hour. “This is a major step that shows that infrared imaging can be a promising methodology in future diagnostic testing and treatment prediction,” says Professor Klaus Gerwert, director of PRODI. The study is published in the American Journal of Pathology on 1 July 2021.
Treatment decision by means of a genetic mutation analysis
Lung tumours are divided into various types, such as small cell lung cancer, adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma. Many rare tumour types and sub-types also exist. This diversity hampers reliable rapid diagnostic methods in everyday clinical practice. In addition to histological typing, the tumour samples also need to be comprehensively examined for certain changes at a DNA level. “Detecting one of these mutations is important key information that influences both the prognosis and further therapeutic decisions,” says co-author Professor Reinhard Büttner, head of the Institute of General Pathology and Pathological Anatomy at University Hospital Cologne.
Patients with lung cancer clearly benefit when the driver mutations have previously been characterised: for instance, tumours with activating mutations in the EGFR (epidermal growth factor) gene often respond well to tyrosine kinase inhibitors, whereas non-EGFR-mutated tumours or tumours with other mutations, such as KRAS, do not respond at all to this medication. The differential diagnosis of lung cancer previously took place with immunohistochemical staining of tissue samples and a subsequent extensive genetic analysis to determine the mutation.
Fast and reliable measuring technique
The potential of infrared imaging, IR imaging for short, as a diagnostic tool to classify tissue, called label-free digital pathology, was already shown by the group led by Klaus Gerwert in previous studies. The procedure identifies cancerous tissue without prior staining or other markings and functions automatically with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI). In contrast to the methods used to determine tumour shape and mutations in tumour tissue in everyday clinical practice, which can sometimes take several days, the new procedure only takes around half an hour. In these 30 minutes, it is not only possible to ascertain whether the tissue sample contains tumour cells, but also what type of tumour it is and whether it contains a certain mutation.
Infrared spectroscopy makes genetic mutations visible
The Bochum researchers were able to verify the procedure on samples from over 200 lung cancer patients in their work. When identifying mutations, they concentrated on by far the most common lung tumour, adenocarcinoma, which accounts for over 50 per cent of tumours. Its most common genetic mutations can be determined with a sensitivity and specificity of 95 per cent compared to laborious genetic analysis. “For the first time, we were able to identify spectral markers that allow for a spatially resolved distinction between various molecular conditions in lung tumours,” explains Nina Goertzen from PRODI. A single infrared spectroscopic measurement offers information about the sample which would otherwise require several time-consuming procedures.
A further step towards personalised medicine
The results once again confirm the potential of label-free digital pathology for clinical use. “To further increase reliability and promote a translation of the method as a new diagnostic tool, studies with larger patient numbers adapted to clinical needs and external testing in everyday clinical practice are required,” says Dr. Frederik Großerüschkamp, IR imaging project manager. “In order to translate IR imaging into everyday clinical practice, it is crucial to shorten the measuring time, ensure simple and reliable operation of the measuring instruments, and provide answers to questions that are important and helpful both clinically and for the patients.”
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The invention of the laser has opened the era of nonlinear optics, which today plays an important role in many scientific, industrial and medical applications. These applications all benefit from the availability of compact lasers in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The situation is different at XUV wavelengths, where very large facilities (so called free-electron lasers) have been built to generate intense XUV pulses. One example of these is FLASH in Hamburg that extends over several hundred meters. Smaller intense XUV sources based on HHG have also been developed. However, these sources still have a footprint of tens of meters, and have so far only been demonstrated at a few universities and research institutes worldwide.
A team of researchers from the Max Born Institute (Berlin, Germany), ELI-ALPS (Szeged, Hungary) and INCDTIM (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) has recently developed a new scheme for the generation of intense XUV pulses. Their concept is based on HHG, which relies on focusing a near-infrared (NIR) laser pulse into a gas target. As a result, very short light bursts with frequencies that are harmonics of the NIR driving laser are emitted, which thereby are typically in the XUV region. To be able to obtain intense XUV pulses, it is important to generate as much XUV light as possible. This is typically achieved by generating a very large focus of the NIR driving laser, which requires a large laboratory.
Scientists from the Max Born Institute have demonstrated that it is possible to shrink an intense XUV laser by using a setup which extends over a length of only two meters. To be able to do so, they used the following trick: Instead of generating XUV light at the focus of the NIR driving laser, they placed a very dense jet of atoms relatively far away from the NIR laser focus. This has two important advantages: (1) Since the NIR beam at the position of the jet is large, many XUV photons are generated. (2) The generated XUV beam is large and has a large divergence, and can therefore be focused to a small spot size. The large number of XUV photons in combination with the small XUV spot size makes it possible to generate intense XUV laser pulses. These results were confirmed by computer simulations that were carried out by a team of researchers from ELI-ALPS and INCDTIM.
To demonstrate that the generated XUV pulses are very intense, the scientists studied multi-photon ionization of argon atoms. They were able to multiply ionize these atoms, leading to ion charge states of Ar2+ and Ar3+. This requires the absorption of at least two and four XUV photons, respectively. In spite of the small footprint of this intense XUV source, the obtained XUV intensity of 2 x 1014 W/cm2 exceeds that of many already existing intense XUV sources.
The new concept can be implemented in many laboratories worldwide, and various areas of research may benefit. This includes attosecond-pump attosecond-probe spectroscopy, which has so far been extremely difficult to do. The new compact intense XUV laser could overcome the stability limitations that exist within this technique, and could be used to observe electron dynamics on extremely short timescales. Another area that is expected to benefit is the imaging of nanoscale objects such as bio-molecules. This could improve the possibilities for making movies in the nano-cosmos on femtosecond or even attosecond timescales.
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