Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk Spotlight) The defenses of the body's immune system tend to destroy synthetic nanoparticles and frequently they are captured and removed from the body within few minutes. This, of course, is a major barrier to the use of nanotechnology in medicine. In order to evade the host...
Gene editing via CRISPR/Cas9 can lead to cell toxicity and genome instability
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) CRISPR/Cas9 is a commonly used, very precise, gene editing technique whose development, by Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, was recognised with the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Commonly known as “genetic scissors”, CRISPR allows the introduction of the desired DNA sequence into (virtually) any...
Robot helps reveal how ants pass on knowledge
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Scientists have developed a small robot to understand how ants teach one another. The team built the robot to mimic the behaviour of rock ants that use one-to-one tuition, in which an ant that has discovered a much better new nest can teach the route...
Nanopowder ceramics – in control of chaos
Aug 09, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Nature strives for chaos. That's a nice, comforting phrase when yet another coffee cup has toppled over the computer keyboard and you imagine you could wish the sugary, milky brew back into the coffee cup - where it had been just seconds before. But wishing...
Manipulating interlayer magnetic coupling in van der Waals heterostructures
Aug 08, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A RMIT-led international collaboration published this week has observed, for the first time, electric gate-controlled exchange-bias effect in van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures, offering a promising platform for future energy-efficient, beyond-CMOS electronics (Nano Letters, "Electric Control of Exchange Bias Effect in FePS3−Fe5GeTe2 van der Waals...
Plasmonic nano-dynamite as power source for nanomachines
Aug 08, 2022 (Nanowerk Spotlight) The trillions of tiny molecular nanomachines that are at work inside our bodies and are keeping us alive perform such tasks as building and breaking down molecules, moving materials around a cell, and processing and expressing genetic information – and they do this while consuming...
Machine learning reveals hidden components of x-ray pulses
Aug 06, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Ultrafast pulses from X-ray lasers reveal how atoms move at timescales of a femtosecond. That’s a quadrillionth of a second. However, measuring the properties of the pulses themselves is challenging. While determining a pulse’s maximum strength, or ‘amplitude,’ is straightforward, the time at which the...
Synthetic mouse embryo models created solely from stem cells
Aug 06, 2022 (Nanowerk News) An egg meets a sperm – that’s a necessary first step in life’s beginnings, and it’s also a common first step in embryonic development research. But in a Weizmann Institute of Science study published in Cell ("Post-Gastrulation Synthetic Embryos Generated Ex Utero from Mouse Naïve...
Water can’t touch this sanded, powdered surface (w/video)
Aug 06, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Want a surface that won’t get wet? Grab some sandpaper. Rice University researchers have developed a simple method to make surfaces superhydrophobic — that is, very water-repellant — without the chemicals often used in such processes. Their technique involves sandpaper, a selection of powders and...
2D materials for next generation computing
Aug 06, 2022 (Nanowerk News) In a compact comment published in Nature Communications ("2D Materials for Future Heterogeneous Electronics"), Max Lemme and colleagues outline the most promising fields of applications of two-dimensional (2D) materials, as well as the challenges that still need to be solved to see the appearance of...