UMass Amherst leads research on how to turn damaging force to helpful new uses

One of the least-studied factors in traumatic brain damage and other soft-tissue injuries is the focus of a new, four-year, $2.6 million grant from the Office of Naval Research. A team led by polymer scientist Alfred Crosby at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with others at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, San Diego, will study cavitation, the sudden expansion of bubbles in a material.

As Crosby explains, the creation and collapse of bubbles in liquids is well known and has been studied extensively for the past century. When cavitation bubbles collapse, they force liquid into a smaller area, causing a pressure wave and increased temperature. In a pump, for example, cavitation can cause wear and erode metal parts over time. Cavitation inside artificial heart valves can damage not only the parts but the blood. Microcavitation in the brain as a result of high-impact blows or being near an explosion is suspected as a factor in brain injury.

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Inspired by proteins that can recognize dangerous microbes and debris, then engulf such material to get rid of it, polymer scientists led by Todd Emrick at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed new polymer-stabilized droplet carriers that can identify and encapsulate nanoparticles for transport in a cell, a kind of “pick up and drop off” service that represents the first successful translation of this biological process in a materials context.

As Emrick explains, “These carriers act as nanoparticle taxicabs. They find particles on one surface, recognize their composition, pick them up and drop them off later on another surface. The work is inspired by the very sophisticated biological/biochemical machinery operating in vivo, found for example in the case of osteoclasts and osteoblasts that work to balance bone density through deposition and depletion of material. We replicated this with much simpler components: oil, water and polyolefins.” Details are now online in Science Advances.

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UMass Amherst researchers offer new analysis of evolution and biomechanics​

Using 3D-printed replicas of 200-million-year-old mammal teeth and polymers that mimic insect prey, scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst this week provide the first laboratory-tested evidence that the ability for teeth to damage prey is a more significant factor driving evolutionary changes in tooth shape than either bite force or the animal’s energy expenditure.

This unexpected finding should change the way biologists view natural selection as it is studied through dental morphology, the authors say. Tooth shape is linked to diet and the biomechanics of feeding, and much of what is known about early mammalian evolution comes from their fossilized teeth, they point out. Details appear in the current online edition of the British Royal Society journal, Interface.

Evolutionary biology doctoral student Andrew John Conith and his advisor Elizabeth Dumont, with polymer scientists Alfred Crosby and graduate student Michael Imburgia, wanted to better understand how tooth shape influenced diet in early mammals. Dumont and Crosby are both members of the Center for Evolutionary Materials at UMass Amherst, where researchers apply biological thinking to engineering problems.

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For 50 years, the Polymer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has made possible views of such vistas and empowered our understanding of them. The department has since become one of the largest academic centers for polymer research in the world, with more than 200 scientists and students and $40 million in state-of-the-art instrumentation. It has granted more than 500 doctoral degrees to what are now generations of researchers.

The striking images from the VISUAL (Ventures in Science Using Art Laboratory) library, a project of the National Science Foundation’s grant-funded Materials Research Science & Engineering Center (MRSEC) on Polymers, use art as a medium to educate the general public on practical advances in polymer science.

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