Tiny gold radiators fry bacteria on implants

Oct 29, 2024 (Nanowerk News) In the fight against antibiotic resistance, a new technology developed at Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, can be of great importance when, for example, hip and knee implants are surgically inserted. By heating up small nanorods of gold with near-infrared light (NIR), the bacteria...

Surprise at the grain boundary

Oct 29, 2024 (Nanowerk News) Using state-of-the-art microscopy and simulation techniques, an international research team systematically observed how iron atoms alter the structure of grain boundaries in titanium. They were in for a surprise: “Iron atoms not only segregate to the interface, but they form entirely unexpected cage-like structures,” explains...

A new chemistry for CRISPR

Oct 28, 2024 (Nanowerk News) CRISPR-Cas9 has long been likened to a kind of genetic scissors, thanks to its ability to snip out any desired section of DNA with elegant precision. But it turns out that CRISPR systems have more than one strategy in their toolkit. A mechanism originally discovered...

Seeing a black hole’s jet in a new light

Oct 28, 2024 (Nanowerk News) Research led by the University of Michigan has pored over more than two decades’ worth of data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory to show there’s new knotty science to discover around black holes. In particular, the study looks at the high-energy jet of particles being...

What if you eat nanoplastics?

Oct 28, 2024 (Nanowerk News) In a laboratory set-up simulating the human stomach and intestine, researchers at the University of Amsterdam have explored the fate of plastic nanoparticles during gastrointestinal digestion. In a paper in Chemosphere ("What if you eat nanoplastics? Simulating nanoplastics fate during gastrointestinal digestion"), they report how...