Jul 26, 2022 (Nanowerk News) For decades, a textbook process known as “Ostwald ripening,” named for the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, has guided the design of new materials including nanoparticles – tiny materials so small they are invisible to the naked eye. According to this theory, small particles dissolve...
Improving image sensors for machine vision
Jul 26, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Image sensors measure light intensity, but angle, spectrum, and other aspects of light must also be extracted to significantly advance machine vision. In Applied Physics Letters ("Multimodal light-sensing pixel arrays"), researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington University in St. Louis, and OmniVision Technologies highlight...
Bacteria can remove plastic pollution from lakes
Jul 26, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A study of 29 European lakes has found that some naturally-occurring lake bacteria grow faster and more efficiently on the remains of plastic bags than on natural matter like leaves and twigs. The bacteria break down the carbon compounds in plastic to use as food...
Evolutionary model predicts partitioning of molecules within cells
Jul 26, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) in Göttingen, Germany, and Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, have developed a new theoretical method to study mixtures consisting of many different molecules. They analyzed how the molecules interact to reliably form different...
CRISPR therapeutics can damage the genome
Jul 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A new study from Tel Aviv University (TAU) identifies risks in the use of CRISPR therapeutics – an innovative, Nobel-prize-winning method that involves cleaving and editing DNA, already employed for the treatment of conditions like cancer, liver and intestinal diseases, and genetic syndromes. Investigating the...
Tetrahedrons assemble! Three-sided pyramids form 2D structures
Jul 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Tetrahedron-shaped nanoparticles are interesting enough by themselves, but under the right circumstances, Rice University scientists have discovered they do something remarkable. While doing a routine check on a batch of tiny gold tetrahedrons, Rice chemist Matthew Jones and graduate student Zhihua Cheng found their microscopic...
Neuromorphic computing with optically driven nonlinear fluid dynamics
Jul 25, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Sunlight sparkling on water evokes the rich phenomena of liquid–light interaction, spanning spatial and temporal scales. While the dynamics of liquids have fascinated researchers for decades, the rise of neuromorphic computing has sparked significant efforts to develop new, unconventional computational schemes based on recurrent neural...