Uncategorized

All animals have collagenous tissue, but only echinoderms (for example, sea cucumbers and starfish) have “mutable collagenous tissue” (MCT) that can rapidly change its stiffness on receiving the appropriate neuronal signals. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble have now studied MCT using synchrotron small-angle X-ray diffraction […]

Brittle nanocrystalline metals can be made ultrastrong and tough by firing them at extremely high speeds onto a hard target, according to new experiments on silver microcubes by researchers at Rice University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The impact produces an extreme gradient-nano-grained (GNG) structure in the microcubes that has a grain size […]

“Movies” of electrons as they move across a semiconductor junction have been made by researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan using a new imaging technique. Combining photoemission electron microscopy with femtosecond laser pump-probe methods, the technique tracks the motion of electrons on timescales shorter than 1 ps. The researchers say it […]

Researchers at Stanford University in the US and the University of Oxford in the UK have developed a new perovskite that can harvest infrared photons very well. When used together with another perovskite semiconductor that can harvest visible photons, the tandem device can covert solar energy into electricity with 20% efficiency. This figure could be […]

Researchers at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis have invented a new ultralow power technique to trap nanoparticles in the sub-10 nm gaps between two gold electrodes. The technique, which overcomes many of the problems encountered in traditional dielectrophoresis experiments, could help make portable biosensors….. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/66547 Making nanogap electrodes

Researchers at the University of Oxford in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US are the first to combine experimental and theoretical approaches at the atomic level to study how monolayer molybdenum sulphide (a typical 2D material) fractures. Thanks to transmission electron microscopy observations, backed up with large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, […]

By functionalizing the surface of a variety of nano-objects (such as nanowires, nanosheets, nanocubes and even biological cells) with polyphenols, researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia say that they can turn them into superstructured assemblies. The technique, which literally transforms the nanobject into a LEGO brick-like structure with stubs, could be used to […]

Ordinary silicon, the material that has dominated the semiconductor industry for decades, could also make a very promising host material for quantum bits in a future quantum computer. So say researchers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the US, who have found that electrically […]

The negative refraction of electrons in graphene has been seen for the first time in experiments done by physicists in the US. The work represents an important advance in the fabrication of graphene electronic devices, and could lead to new applications of graphene such as low-power transistors……… http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/66506 Wrong way: electrons undergoing negative refraction at […]

Researchers in Korea and the UK have discovered that a graphene coating on biological samples helps dissipate the charge build-up that normally occurs on the surface of these samples during non-destructive electron microscopy imaging. Such a charge build-up is usually a big problem in this context and prevents high-resolution images from being obtained…….. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/66514 Graphene […]

The 2016 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L Feringa for the design and synthesis of molecular machines, touted to herald a second industrial revolution. Just as the constant miniaturization of the transistor over recent decades has led to mobile phones and other pocket-sized devices with […]

Researchers in the US, Japan and China are the first to have studied the anisotropic light–matter interactions in gallium telluride (GaTe), a technologically important 2D semiconductor with in-plane anisotropy. Thanks to techniques like anisotropic optical extinction and Raman spectroscopy, they have found that the anisotropy is related to various parameters such as GaTe flake thickness, […]