Cilia are the body’s diligent ushers. These microscopic hairs, which move fluid by rhythmic beating, are responsible for pushing cerebrospinal fluid in your brain, clearing the phlegm and dirt from your lungs, and keeping other organs and tissues clean. A technical marvel, cilia have proved difficult to reproduce in engineering applications, especially at the microscale. Cornell researchers have now designed a micro-sized artificial cilial system using platinum-based components that can control the movement of fluids at such a scale. The technology could someday enable low-cost, portable diagnostic devices for testing blood samples, manipulating cells or assisting in microfabrication processes.

In his dark basement lab in Wurzberg Germany in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen produced the first-ever X-ray image using a cathode ray tube – a radiograph of his wife’s hand, wedding ring and all. Today, 60 feet below the Cornell University campus, at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), researchers utilize X-rays that are 100 million times more intense than Röntgen's first beams of light. Researchers at CHESS examine proteins that reveal new ways to fight cancer, battery cells that enable a charge far beyond current capabilities, and structural materials that enable space travel to improve with lightweight, yet more structurally sound components. Today’s high energy X-rays provide scientific advances and innovation far beyond what Röntgen could have ever imagined.

How might we extract the tech-essential mineral lithium sustainably from seawater? Will doctors someday engineer super-immune T cells? How do dialects arise in language? Why do we forget? The College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) has awarded seven New Frontier Grants totaling $1.25 million to faculty members pursuing critical developments in areas ranging from quantum materials to sustainable technologies to a philosophical theory of widespread sentience. Now in its second year, the program’s goal is to encourage A&S faculty to engage in high-impact, boundary-pushing research with potential to secure external support. This year, 42 applications represented disciplines spanning the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.

Holding the right material at the right angle, Cornell researchers have discovered a strategy to switch the magnetization in thin layers of a ferromagnet – a technique that could eventually lead to the development of more energy-efficient magnetic memory devices. The team’s paper, “Tilted Spin Current Generated by the Collinear Antiferromagnet Ruthenium Dioxide,” published May 5 in Nature Electronics. The paper’s co-lead authors are postdoctoral researcher Arnab Bose and doctoral students Nathaniel Schreiber and Rakshit Jain.

When Kristina Hugar was working on her Ph.D. at Cornell, she wasn’t just doing science for science’s sake. “I care very deeply about the environment and climate change, and I wanted to figure out a way to focus my career and life on addressing the defining crisis of our time,” said Hugar, M.S. ’12, Ph.D. ’16, whose dissertation research improved alkaline exchange membrane materials to make alternative energy sources more effective. She, like scores of other clean energy entrepreneurs, have found at Cornell an innovative, powerful ecosystem that supports the transition to a sustainable and decarbonized economy.

New research from Cornell scientists is exploring how human genetics impacts functions of the gut microbiome, and is expanding awareness of the role human genetics plays in shaping the microbiome. The trillions of individual organisms constituting a person’s gut microbiome greatly impact metabolic function, disease and overall health. What has been less clear is how and to what extent the gut microbiome is, in turn, shaped by the genome of its human host. Ilana Brito, assistant professor and Mong Family Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in the Nancy E. and Peter C. Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, and her coauthors took a novel approach to examining host-microbiome genetic interactions and were able to show many instances where a human host’s genetic makeup directly affected the functional performance of the gut microbiome.

Cornell and two Cornell research-startups have joined a consortium that aims to propose a Northeast research hub to make hydrogen a viable, clean-energy alternative to carbon-based fuels. The New York-led multistate collaboration is guided by Gov. Kathy Hochul and organized by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). With approximately $9.6 billion available in federal funding, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is expected to request proposals starting in early May for regional hydrogen centers that would offer a broad array of services, which will likely include research and demonstration projects. The Northeast group plans to apply for a portion of that federal funding.

Cornell engineers have created a deep-ultraviolet laser using semiconductor materials that show great promise for improving the use of ultraviolet light for sterilizing medical tools, purifying water, sensing hazardous gases and enabling precision photolithography, among other applications. When it comes to ultraviolet light, two important qualities are frequency – certain frequencies are best for destroying viruses or sensing molecules – and linewidth, a measure of the laser’s precision. Scientists and engineers seek sources of higher quality, more efficient ultraviolet light emission, but it’s challenging to work with the semiconductor materials that can enable this. A paper published March 11 in the journal AIP Advances details how Cornell scientists produced an aluminum gallium nitride-based device capable of emitting a deep-ultraviolet laser at sought-after wavelengths and modal linewidths.

Photocathodes are materials that emit electrons when illuminated by light, and are vital to the performance of some of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators. But due to poor crystalline properties, photocathodes have yet to realize their full potential. Cornell researchers are addressing this limitation. A team of researchers at Cornell’s Center for Bright Beams, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, has developed a technique to create a single-crystal alkali antimonides photocathode, with an efficiency up to 10 times higher than its predecessors.

A nitrogen doped carbon-coated nickel anode can catalyze an essential reaction in hydrogen fuel cells at a fraction of the cost of the precious metals currently used, Cornell researchers have found. The new discovery could accelerate the widespread use of hydrogen fuel cells, which hold great promise as efficient, clean energy sources for vehicles and other applications. It’s one of a string of discoveries for the Héctor D. Abruña lab in their ongoing search for active, inexpensive, durable catalysts for use in alkaline fuel cells.