Nanotechnology

High-energy X-ray beams and a clever experimental setup allowed researchers to watch a high-pressure, high-temperature chemical reaction to determine for the first time what controls formation of two different nanoscale crystalline…

This holiday season, scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) -- a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory -- have wrapped a box of a different kind. Using a one-step…

In a recent publication in Science, researchers at the University of Paderborn and the Fritz Haber Institute Berlin demonstrated their ability to observe electrons' movements during a chemical reaction. Researchers have long studied the…

The strange class of materials known as quasicrystals has a new member. In a paper published on Thursday, Dec. 20, in Science, researchers from Brown University describe a quasicrystalline superlattice that self-assembles from a single type…

Move over Mona Lisa, here comes tic-tac-toe. It was just about a year ago that Caltech scientists in the laboratory of Lulu Qian, assistant professor of bioengineering, announced they had used a technique known as DNA origami to create…

An interdisciplinary team of three Virginia Tech faculty members affiliated with the Macromolecules Innovation Institute has created a drug delivery system that could radically expand cancer treatment options. The conventional cancer…

Scientists at Stanford University have designed an electrocatalytic mechanism that works like a mammalian lung to convert water into fuel. Their research, published December 20 in the journal Joule, could help existing clean energy…

Surfers spend much of their time watching long waves come onto the shoreline as they attempt to catch one right as it begins to curve and break. In a similar vein, scientists are working to create twisting helical electromagnetic waves…

Researchers from the U.S. Army and top universities discovered a new way to get more energy out of energetic materials containing aluminum, common in battlefield systems, by igniting aluminum micron powders coated with graphene oxide. This…

Researchers from the University of Maryland have for the first time measured an effect that was predicted more than 40 years ago, called the Casimir torque. When placed together in a vacuum less than the diameter of a bacterium (one micron)…