Technology Update
There are some strange uses for a spent tea bag after it’s made your cuppa, but work recently published in Scientific Reports really takes the biscuit. A group of researchers in Korea have managed to demonstrate an enhanced carbon anode structure from waste tea leaves that could be a path to cheap, high-capacity lithium […]
A new type of solid-state photoreversible colour-switching system made from Prussian blue nanoparticles and titanium dioxide nanoparticles has been created
A stumbling block for developing flexible solar cells has been the need for a smooth growth substrate to ensure high device efficiency. While glass is readily available, smooth and non-porous, it is also brittle, which makes the flexible properties of the other materials in the device redundant. Now researchers at the Institute of Photonic Sciences […]
Auger up-conversion processes can allow photovoltaic devices to harvest low-energy solar photons that are not normally absorbed. A team of researchers from the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico in the US has now demonstrated such a process in thick-shell lead selenide/cadmium selenide semiconducting quantum dots in which two low-energy, core-based excitons (electron-hole pairs) are […]
Researchers in the US and Germany have observed an unusual “butterfly”-shaped and extremely large angular magnetoresistance in the nonmagnetic Dirac material zirconium silicon sulphide (ZrSiS) that they can control using an applied magnetic field. The new findings could help in the development of “fermitronic” devices for high-speed electronics and optics……. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/67344 Stuart Parkin
NanoMet is measurement tool for converting images of nanoscale materials to quantitative size data. It includes modules for particle and fiber diameters, as well as a module for object areas…..
Nanotechnology manufacturers seeking ways to measure and analyze nanoparticles now have a simple, fast, accurate and cost-effective tool thanks to the recent release of NanoMet by developer FullScaleNANO. ….. http://www.azonano.com/news.aspx?newsID=35207
Indian researchers pioneer an alternate use for sugarcane waste. This schematic representation illustrates the process of turning bagasse into carbon quantum dots. (Credit: Elsevier) From Britain to Mexico, countries are considering sugar taxes to reduce consumption and curb the global obesity epidemic. In 2014, about 600 million people, roughly double the population of the United […]
Kattesh Katti, Ph.D., Curators’ Professor of Radiology and Physics at the MU School of Medicine and lead author of the study. Credit: Justin Kelley, MU Health The American Cancer Society reports that every year, over 700,000 new liver cancer cases are diagnosed globally. Currently, the only way to cure liver cancer is to surgically remove […]
Researchers at Stanford University in the US have developed new, stretchable and self-healing thin-film polymeric semiconductors. The materials, which contain dynamic intermolecular hydrogen bonds that can be easily broken and reformed, might be used to make advanced organic electronic films that mimic human skin….. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/66996 An intrinsically stretchable and healable organic semiconductor
Researchers at ORA in Montreal, Canada, say they have developed the first consumer-ready loudspeaker from graphene oxide. The technology is compatible with current speaker and audio systems and could find its way into many commercial products in the not too distant future, says company co-founder Xavier Cauchy….. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/67016 Prototype speaker membrane
Gold nanoparticle-based supraspheres, which are analogues of supramolecular cages and containers, can be used to perform classical host-guest chemistry, according to new experiments by researchers in Israel and Switzerland. Although real-world applications may be a way off, at the laboratory level these materials may be used as soluble systems for better understanding phenomena associated with […]
Exploiting the quirks of quantum mechanics in real-world technologies – such as quantum communication – requires material systems that enable the transfer and exchange of quantum entanglement between different systems. Now, calculations by researchers in the US indicate that defects in silicon carbide (SiC) – which is CMOS-compatible – may have winning attributes to fit […]
A new way to treat influenza using nanoparticle dendrimers containing sialic acid has been developed by a team of researchers in the US and Korea. The influenza virus binds to these nanoparticles and is thus unable to infect lung tissue. Although only tested on mice so far, the technique might help in the design of […]
A group of small crustaceans that live in the twilight zone of the open ocean are coated in nanospheres that reduce the amount of light the crustaceans reflect, biologists in the US have discovered. The spheres, which are smaller than the wavelength of visible light, appear to be bacteria. The researchers believe the coating may […]
The nitrogen vacancy (NV) centre can be used for long-term information storage. So say researchers at City University of New York–City College of New York who have used optical microscopy to read, write and reset information in a diamond crystal defect. The 2D bit density in this system is comparable to present-day DVD technology but […]
Researchers at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School at the CNRS and Université Paris-Saclay in France have developed a new way to rearrange cold atoms one by one in a fully ordered array. Their technique could be used to simulate quantum systems using neutral atoms trapped in optical tweezers….. http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/66812 Order from disorder
By embedding plant leaves with carbon nanotubes, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have transformed a plant into a living sensor that can detect chemicals like explosives and then wirelessly relay this information to a handheld device like a smartphone. Engineering electronics into plants is a new and upcoming field of research called nanobionics […]
Researchers at Harvard University in the US have succeeded in precisely controlling the interactions between photons and silicon-vacancy colour centres in a nanophotonic device
All animals have collagenous tissue, but only echinoderms (for example, sea cucumbers and starfish) have “mutable collagenous tissue” (MCT) that can rapidly change its stiffness on receiving the appropriate neuronal signals. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble have now studied MCT using synchrotron small-angle X-ray diffraction […]
Brittle nanocrystalline metals can be made ultrastrong and tough by firing them at extremely high speeds onto a hard target, according to new experiments on silver microcubes by researchers at Rice University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The impact produces an extreme gradient-nano-grained (GNG) structure in the microcubes that has a grain size […]
