Apr 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) According to folklore, silver bullets kill werewolves, but in the real world, researchers want to harness this metal to fight another deadly foe: bacteria. Recently, scientists have tried to develop a silver coating for implantable medical devices to protect against infection, but they’ve had limited...
Tangle no more, nanotubes
Apr 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Carbon nanotubes that are prone to tangle like spaghetti can use a little special sauce to realize their full potential. Rice University scientists have come up with just the sauce, an acid-based solvent that simplifies carbon nanotube processing in a way that’s easier to scale...
New device achieves the tallest height of any known jumper, engineered or biological
Apr 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A mechanical jumper developed by UC Santa Barbara engineering professor Elliot Hawkes and collaborators is capable of achieving the tallest height — roughly 100 feet (30 meters) — of any jumper to date, engineered or biological. The feat represents a fresh approach to the design...
New mechanism to transfer chirality between molecules
Apr 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) If we compare the right to the left hand, we can see these are specular images —that is, like symmetrical shapes reflected in a mirror— and they cannot superimpose on each other. This property is chirality, a feature of the matter that plays with the...
Plug-and-play organ-on-a-chip can be customized to the patient
Apr 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Engineered tissues have become a critical component for modeling diseases and testing the efficacy and safety of drugs in a human context. A major challenge for researchers has been how to model body functions and systemic diseases with multiple engineered tissues that can physiologically communicate...
Glimpse inside a graphene sandwich
Apr 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Since the first successful fabrication of a two-dimensional structure of carbon atoms about 20 years ago, graphene has fascinated scientists. A few years ago, researchers discovered that two layers of graphene, slightly twisted against each other, can conduct electric current without loss. Honeycomb-shaped structures made...
Decoding the lifecycle of photogenerated charges
Apr 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) New materials will enable novel technologies to turn sunlight into electricity and fuels. Combinations of molecules and tiny nanoparticles make these materials a reality. The molecules in these materials are very good at absorbing sunlight and donating electrons to the nanoparticles. The nanoparticles then move...
Classifying exoplanet atmospheres opens new field of study
Apr 26, 2022 (Nanowerk News) An international team of researchers examined data for 25 exoplanets and found some links among the properties of the atmospheres, including the thermal profiles and chemical abundances in them (The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, "Five key exoplanet questions answered via the analysis of 25 hot...
Researchers unveil a highly efficient means to reverse magnetization with spin currents
Apr 26, 2022 (Nanowerk News) An international research team has achieved an important milestone in the quest for high density, low-power consuming nonvolatile magnetic memory (Nature Electronics, "Efficient spin-orbit torque in magnetic trilayers using all three polarizations of a spin current"). "We established a new method to enable magnetization reversal...
Microrobot collectives display versatile movement patterns (w/video)
Apr 26, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS), Cornell University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have developed collectives of microrobots which can move in any desired formation. The miniature particles are capable of reconfiguring their swarm behavior quickly and robustly. Floating on the...