Nanotechnology

Nanoengineering deals with structures at the nanoscale — between one and 100 nanometers. A nanometer (nm) is one billionth of a meter, and the distance between individual atoms in a solid is between 0.1 nm and 0.4 nm. The nanoscale is therefore about as small as materials can get, without becoming individual atoms. Nanotechnology and…

By Karen McNulty Walsh and Stephanie Kossman, Brookhaven National Laboratory Research at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory spans scales from the cosmic to subatomic, advancing our understanding of the world around and within us. Looking for discoveries that spark transformational technologies? Brookhaven has those, too! Here’s the 2021 recap of important…

By Yong Zhu and Matt Shipman, North Carolina State University Researchers at North Carolina State University demonstrated a low-cost technique for retrieving nanowires from electronic devices that have reached the end of their utility and then using those nanowires in new devices. The work is a step toward more sustainable electronics. “There is a lot…

by University of California San Diego Electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a technology that improves the resolution of an ordinary light microscope so that it can be used to directly observe finer structures and details in living cells. The technology turns a conventional light microscope into what’s called a super-resolution…

By Troy Rummler Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have built the world’s smallest and best acoustic amplifier. And they did it using a concept that was all but abandoned for almost 50 years. According to a paper published May 13 in Nature Communications, the device is more than 10 times more effective than the earlier…

by Bill Schweber, Contributing Author The previous part of this article looked at the challenges of nanoflow sensors, especially with respect to blood flow. This part looks at graphene, which is the basis for the new sensor. Graphene is a material structure which did not exist until relatively recently. However, its constituent element of graphite…

by Bill Schweber, contributing author When it comes to nearly all biological measurements, the ranges of many of the parameters of interest are orders-of-magnitude below those with which many engineers are familiar. Instead of megahertz or even kilohertz, the living-creature world is in the single or double-digit hertz range, such as the roughly 60+ beats…

 By Theresa Duque Nitrogen dioxide, an air pollutant emitted by fossil fuel-powered cars and gas-burning stoves is not only bad for the climate – it’s bad for our health. Long-term exposure to NO2 has been linked to increased heart disease, respiratory diseases such as asthma, and infections. Nitrogen dioxide is odorless and invisible – so…

Materials science likes to take nature and the special properties of living beings that could potentially be transferred to materials as a model. A research team led by chemist Professor Andreas Walther of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has succeeded in endowing materials with a bioinspired property: Wafer-thin stiff nanopaper instantly becomes soft and elastic…

By Daniel Ackerman | MIT News Office Superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without resistance — are remarkable. They provide a macroscopic glimpse into quantum phenomena, which are usually observable only at the atomic level. Beyond their physical peculiarity, superconductors are also useful. They’re found in medical imaging, quantum computers and cameras used with telescopes.…

CEA announced today the acquisition of a Cryogenic Wafer Prober manufactured by Bluefors Oy, the Finnish specialist in designing and manufacturing ultralow temperature-dilution refrigerator systems for cutting-edge research in quantum computing and nanotechnology. CEA-Leti, a technology research institute at CEA, is the first microelectronics research institute to install this strategic equipment in its cleanroom. Created…

By Theresa Duque Since the earliest microscopes, scientists have been on a quest to build instruments with finer and finer resolution to image a cell’s proteins – the tiny machines that keep cells, and us, running. But to succeed, they need to overcome the diffraction limit, a fundamental property of light that long prevented optical microscopes…

A research team at Sandia National Laboratories has successfully used machine learning — computer algorithms that improve themselves by learning patterns in data — to complete cumbersome materials science calculations more than 40,000 times faster than normal. Their results, published Jan. 4 in npj Computational Materials, could herald a dramatic acceleration in the creation of…

The animation depicts the controlled transport of a single molecule between two scanning tunneling microscope tips in an experiment at ORNL. Credit: Michelle Lehman/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, contributed to a groundbreaking experiment published in Science that tracks the real-time transport of individual molecules.…

Graphene is a flat hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms, just one atom thick. It is a form of carbon related to carbon nanotubes and buckyballs (C60). Although it has always occurred naturally, it is only recently that it has been isolated and it’s individual properties examined. It is now known that graphene has exceptional electrical,…

Park Systems and NanoScientific Publications announce NanoScientific Symposium Asia, which will be held virtually, Nov. 24-25, 2020. The event will help nanoscience researchers and scientists catch up on the latest studies being formed using SPM and is sponsored by Physics World and Nanotechnology World Association. “NanoScientific Symposium Asia is a valuable opportunity for people doing…

By varying the energy and dose of tightly focused electron beams, researchers have demonstrated the ability to both etch away and deposit high-resolution nanoscale patterns on two-dimensional layers of graphene oxide. The 3D additive/subtractive “sculpting” can be done without changing the chemistry of the electron beam deposition chamber, providing the foundation for building a new…

By Chris Adam Purdue University researchers have passed another significant milestone as they work to take a new two-dimensional nanomaterial to market for use in nanoelectronics, quantum devices and infrared technology used in national defense tools and biochemical sensors. The Purdue team received a U.S. patent for the nanomaterial, derived from the rare element tellurium,…

by Cornell University A Cornell University-led collaboration has created the first microscopic robots that incorporate semiconductor components, allowing them to be controlled – and made to walk – with standard electronic signals. These robots, roughly the size of paramecium, provide a template for building even more complex versions that utilize silicon-based intelligence, can be mass…

There are many things quantum dots could do, but the most obvious place they could change our lives is to make the colors on our TVs and screens more pristine. Research using the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan is helping to bring this technology closer to our living rooms. Quantum dots…

Energy Exploration Technologies (EnergyX) and ProfMOF announce a partnership between their companies to promote the use of Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs), a relatively new class of nanotechnology materials suitable in the development of projects involving renewable energy and large-scale lithium-ion production and battery storage. ProfMOF is the world leader in the research and development of…

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, in conjunction with industry partner Sentient Science, are making the discovery and design of new materials — a notoriously time-consuming and costly process — significantly easier through the development of an artificial intelligence-based computer modeling framework. The research was awarded $150,000 through the DOE’s…

The discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is made by a jellyfish, transformed cell biology. It allowed scientists to stitch the GFP sequence to proteins from other organisms to trace their movements and interactions in living cells. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have designed peptide nanoparticles that can each glow…

By  Jules Bernstein A new film made of gold nanoparticles changes color in response to any type of movement. Its unprecedented qualities could allow robots to mimic chameleons and octopi — among other futuristic applications. Unlike other materials that try to emulate nature’s color changers, this one can respond to any type of movement, like…

By Chris Adam A team of Purdue University innovators has developed a new way for manufacturers to use nanocellulose – a green nanomaterial derived from natural sources such as plant matter, for use in vehicles, food packaging and other manufactured items. Normally to process nanocellulose, solvents or other dispersants are usually added to the mixture…