Technology Update
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 […]
