Apr 07, 2026 Scientists use a mechanical resonator to enable greater entanglement for potentially more powerful sensors. (Nanowerk News) Most people think of diamonds as high-end adornments. Not Ania Bleszynski Jayich. The UC Santa Barbara physicist sees diamonds, which she grows in the UC Quantum Foundry, as a potentially powerful...
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Living fungi as factories for self-assembling functional materials
Apr 07, 2026 Living fungi weave conductive nanoparticles into their own growing networks, amplifying bioelectric signals 9-fold and opening a path to self-assembling functional materials. (Nanowerk Spotlight) Most manufacturing works by imposing structure on passive raw materials: melting, molding, cutting, curing. Biology works differently. A growing organism builds itself, assembling...
Targeted nanoparticle therapy doubled survival rates in aggressive brain cancer models
Apr 06, 2026 Targeted liposomal nanoparticles successfully cross the blood brain barrier to treat glioblastoma and doubled survival rates in preclinical brain cancer models. (Nanowerk News) Mayo Clinic researchers developed an experimental nanotherapy that delivers two cancer drugs directly to brain tumors, according to a study published in Communications Medicine...
Researchers turn recovered car battery acid and plastic waste into clean hydrogen
Apr 06, 2026 Researchers have developed a solar-powered reactor to break down hard-to-recycle forms of plastic waste using acid recovered from old car batteries, and converting it into clean hydrogen fuel and valuable industrial chemicals. (Nanowerk News) The reactor, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is powered by...
Trapping molecules turns carbon nanotubes into three-state transistors
Apr 06, 2026 Confined molecules inside carbon nanotubes polarize under gate voltage, creating transistors with three stable logic states from a single material system. (Nanowerk Spotlight) Squeeze a molecule into a space barely wider than itself, and its properties change. Bond angles shift, the electron cloud redistributes, and the molecule...
Astronomers thought the early universe was full of hydrogen. Now they’ve found it
Apr 06, 2026 A new study has now increased the known number of hydrogen gas halos by a factor of ten: from roughly 3,000 to over 33,000. (Nanowerk News) Astronomers using data from the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) have discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos,...
Researchers reach the absolute limit of stillness for a nanoscale rotor
Apr 06, 2026 Researchers cool a levitated silica nanorotor to its librational quantum ground state in two rotational degrees of freedom simultaneously, reaching the fundamental limit set by quantum uncertainty. (Nanowerk News) Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can never be perfectly still. But how precisely can it be...
Structural color can now be printed with an inkjet printer
Apr 06, 2026 Non-fading and non-toxic structural color can now be applied to flat or 3D surfaces using an inkjet printer. This development also opens possibilities for novel display and anti-counterfeiting technologies. (Nanowerk News) While traditional printer pigments fade and most structural color can’t be printed, the Kobe University material...
Diamond nanocoatings make single-use Raman sensors reusable in harsh environments
Apr 04, 2026 A thin diamond film encapsulates gold nanoparticles into a reusable SERS substrate that survives acid, abrasion, and months of storage without losing sensitivity. (Nanowerk Spotlight) Every molecule scatters light in a slightly different way, and Raman spectroscopy reads those differences like a chemical barcode. The technique is...
Electrons in moire crystals explore higher-dimensional quantum worlds
Apr 04, 2026 Physicists have discovered 3D 'moire crystals' that simulate four-dimensional quantum materials to a T. (Nanowerk News) The electrons that power our society flow left and right through the circuitry in our electronics, back and forth along the transmission lines that make up our power grid, and up...