Jun 15, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A new process developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) enables printing of nanometer-scale quartz glass structures directly onto semiconductor chips. A hybrid organic-inorganic polymer resin is used as feedstock material for 3D printing of silicon dioxide. Since the process works without sintering, the...
A band-aid with sensor function
Jun 15, 2023 (Nanowerk News) To ensure that wounds remain tightly sealed in the abdomen after surgery, researchers at Empa and ETH Zurich have developed a patch with a sensor function. The polymer patch warns before the occurence of dangerous leaks on sutures in the gastrointestinal tract take hold, while...
Ultrafast and tunable: Graphene-based terahertz-to-visible light conversion
Jun 15, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A study carried out by a research team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), University of Exeter Centre for Graphene Science, and TU Eindhoven demonstrates that graphene-based materials can be used to efficiently convert high-frequency signals into visible...
Researchers develop highly efficient energy harvesting device
Jun 15, 2023 (Nanowerk News) An international research group has engineered a new energy-generating device by combining piezoelectric composites with carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP), a commonly used material that is both light and strong. The new device transforms vibrations from the surrounding environment into electricity, providing an efficient and reliable...
Metamaterials with built-in frustration have mechanical memory
Jun 14, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Researchers from the UvA Institute of Physics and ENS de Lyon have discovered how to design materials that necessarily have a point or line where the material doesn’t deform under stress, and that even remember how they have been poked or squeezed in the past...
Key building block for life found at Saturn’s moon Enceladus
Jun 14, 2023 (Nanowerk News) The search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system just got more exciting. A team of scientists has discovered new evidence that the subsurface ocean of Saturn’s moon Enceladus contains a key building block for life. The team directly detected phosphorus in the form of...
Photosynthesis, key to life on Earth, starts with a single photon
Jun 14, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Using a complex cast of metal-studded pigments, proteins, enzymes, and co-enzymes, photosynthetic organisms can convert the energy in light into the chemical energy for life. And now, thanks to a study published in Nature ("Single-photon absorption and emission from a natural photosynthetic complex"), we know...
Engineering safer machine learning
Jun 14, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Children first learning to walk may go a bit too fast and fall down, or run into a piece of furniture. However, that cause-and-effect element teaches them invaluable information about how their bodies move through space so that they can avoid falling in the future....
Scientists create long-lasting, cobalt-free, lithium-ion batteries
Jun 14, 2023 (Nanowerk News) In a discovery that could reduce or even eliminate the use of cobalt – which is often mined using child labor – in the batteries that power electric cars and other products, scientists at the University of California, Irvine have developed a long-lasting alternative made...
A novel technique to observe colloidal particle degradation in real time
Jun 14, 2023 (Nanowerk News) In the early 2000s, scientists from the UK made a worrisome discovery that the oceans are teeming with small particles of plastic (less than one millimeter in length) due to the continuous degradation of plastic waste. These microscopic particles of plastic have become a major...