Nano News: June 2015

Biodegradable, flexible silicon transistors

Portable electronics users tend to upgrade their devices frequently as new technologies offering more functionality and more convenience become available. A report published by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2012 showed that about 152 million mobile devices are discarded every year, of which only 10 percent is recycled -- a legacy of waste...

Graphene flexes its electronic muscles

Flexing graphene may be the most basic way to control its electrical properties, according to calculations by theoretical physicists at Rice University and in Russia. The Rice lab of Boris Yakobson in collaboration with researchers in Moscow found the effect is pronounced and predictable in nanocones and should apply equally to other forms of graphene....

Researchers map 3D distribution of carbon nanotubes in composite materials

Despite their small size and simple structure, carbon nanotubes—essentially sheets of graphene rolled up into straws—have all sorts of potentially useful properties. Still, while their promise looms large, how to fully realize that promise has proven to be something of a mystery. In an effort to strip away some of that mystery, researchers from the...

Swarms of tiny robots are joining forces to break through blocked arteries (w/video)

Swarms of microscopic, magnetic, robotic beads could be scrubbing in next to the world’s top vascular surgeons—all taking aim at blocked arteries. These microrobots, which look and move like corkscrew-shaped bacteria, are being developed by mechanical engineers at Drexel University as a part of a surgical toolkit being assembled by the Daegu Gyeongbuk...

Nanowaveguides open a new route to photonics

A new route to ultrahigh density, ultracompact integrated photonic circuitry has been discovered by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. The team has developed a technique for effectively controlling pulses of light in closely packed nanoscale waveguides, an essential...

Mechanism of biological multi-fuel engine

University of Tokyo researchers have constructed the atomic model structure of the protein complex that corresponds to the stator (stationary part of a motor that surrounds the rotating part of a motor) of the flagellar motor for the first time by molecular simulation based on previously published experimental data, and elucidated the mechanism by...

High-performance microscope displays pores in the cell nucleus with greater precision

An active exchange takes place between the cell nucleus and the cytoplasm: Molecules are transported into the nucleus or from the nucleus into the cytoplasm. In a human cell, more than a million molecules are transported into the cell nucleus every minute. In the process, special pores embedded in the nucleus membrane act as transport gates. These...

The quantum spin Hall effect is also a fundamental property of light

Photons have neither mass nor charge, and so behave very differently from their massive counterparts, but they do share a property, called spin, which results in remarkable geometric and topological phenomena. The spin—a measure of the intrinsic angular momentum—can be thought of as an equivalent of...

Interfering light waves produce unexpected forces

Few physical systems are better understood than the interference of two planar waves—like ripples on a pond. Proving that there are still secrets to be discovered even in such fundamentally well-known systems, RIKEN researchers Konstantin Bliokh, Aleksandr Bekshaev and Franco Nori have used theory to reveal a new, hidden force in this system that acts...

Dancing droplets (w/video)

Just as the size of transistors continues to decrease, laboratories are also expected to shrink until they eventually fit on a chip. ETH Zurich researchers have developed a system of using sound waves to move, merge or sort minuscule droplets with reagents or cells in a controlled manner. With ultrasound, represented by curved red and blue lines,...

Designing crack-resistant metals with nanoporous materials

Potential solutions to big problems continue to arise from research that is revealing how materials behave at the smallest scales. The results of a new study to understand the interactions of various metal alloys at the nanometer and atomic scales are likely to aid advances in methods of preventing the failure of systems critical to public and industrial...

3D plasmonic antenna capable of focusing light into few nanometers

Professors Myung-Ki Kim and Yong-Hee Lee of the Physics Department at KAIST and their research teams developed a 3D gap-plasmon antenna which can focus light into a few nanometers wide space. Their research findings were published in ("Squeezing Photons into a Point-Like Space"). Figure 1: 3D Gap-Plasmon Antenna Structure and the Simulation Results....

Artifical neuron mimicks function of human cells (w/video)

Scientists at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet have managed to build a fully functional neuron by using organic bioelectronics ("An organic electronic biomimetic neuron enables auto-regulated neuromodulation"). This artificial neuron contain no ‘living’ parts, but is capable of mimicking the function...

Using lasers to see the shape of molecules

A scientist in a crisp, white lab coat and protective eye goggles sits behind a safety shield, controller in hand. In front of him is a powerful titanium-sapphire laser, aimed at a crystal lens. His thumb gently squeezes the trigger on the controller. There is an imperceivable wisp of gas that is escaping from a nozzle and crossing the laser’s path....

Nanostructure design enables pixels to produce two different colors

Through precise structural control, A*STAR researchers have encoded a single pixel with two distinct colors and have used this capability to generate a three-dimensional stereoscopic image ("Three-dimensional plasmonic stereoscopic prints in full colour"). Figuring out how to include two types of information...

Robust graphene based dual-phase Li metal anode with polysulfide-induced solid electrolyte interphase

Researchers have proposed an efficient and stable dual-phase lithium metal anode for Li-S batteries, containing polysulfide-induced solid electrolyte interphase and nanostructured graphene framework at Tsinghua University, appearing on ("Dual-Phase Lithium Metal Anode Containing a Polysulfide-Induced Solid Electrolyte Interphase and Nanostructured...

Sweeping lasers snap together nanoscale geometric grids

Down at the nanoscale, where objects span just billionths of a meter, the size and shape of a material can often have surprising and powerful electronic and optical effects. Building larger materials that retain subtle nanoscale features is an ongoing challenge that shapes countless emerging technologies. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's...

Toward tiny, solar-powered sensors

The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards “the Internet of things” — the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have their own embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks. Realizing...

A simple reversible process that changes friction in the nanoworld

It is possible to vary (even dramatically) the sliding properties of atoms on a surface by changing the size and "compression" of their aggregates: an experimental and theoretical study conducted with the collaboration of SISSA, the Istituto Officina dei Materiali of the CNR (Iom-Cnr-Democritos), ICTP in Trieste, the University of Padua, the University...

Plasmonics: revolutionizing light-based technologies via electron oscillations in metals

For centuries, artists mixed silver and gold powder with glass to fabricate colorful windows to decorate buildings. The results were impressive, but they didn’t have a scientific reason for how these ingredients together made stained glass. In the early 20th century, the physicist Gustav Mie figured out that the color of a metal nanoparticle is related...

Soft core, hard shell - the latest in nanotechnology

Medical science is placing high hopes on nanoparticles as in future they could be used, for example, as a vehicle for targeted drug delivery. In collaboration with an international team of researchers, scientists at the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the University of Marburg have for the first time...

First solar cell made of highly ordered molecular frameworks

Researchers at KIT have developed a material suited for photovoltaics. For the first time, a functioning organic solar cell consisting of a single component has been produced on the basis of metal-organic framework compounds (MOFs). The material is highly elastic and might also be used for the flexible coating of clothes and deformable components....

A bundled attraction

The magnetically driven, reversible bundling of one-dimensional (1D) arrays of superparamagnetic nanoparticles has been demonstrated for the first time by a RIKEN-led research team ("Tailoring Micrometer-Long High-Integrity 1D Array of Superparamagnetic Nanoparticles in a Nanotubular Protein Jacket and Its Lateral Magnetic Assembling Behavior"). The...

Explained: chemical vapor deposition

In a sense, says MIT chemical engineering professor Karen Gleason, you can trace the technology of chemical vapor deposition, or CVD, all the way back to prehistory: “When the cavemen lit a lamp and soot was deposited on the wall of a cave,” she says, that was a rudimentary form of CVD. Today, CVD is a basic tool of manufacturing — used in everything...

Researchers design placenta-on-a-chip to better understand pregnancy

National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers and their colleagues have developed a "placenta-on-a-chip" to study the inner workings of the human placenta and its role in pregnancy. The device was designed to imitate, on a micro-level, the structure and function of the placenta and model the transfer...

Structural origin of glass transition

A University of Tokyo research group has demonstrated through computer simulations that the enhancement of fluctuations in a liquid’s structure plays an important role as a liquid becomes a solid near the glass-transition point, a temperature below the melting point ("Assessing the role of static length scales behind glassy dynamics in polydisperse...