In the News & Views article on thermoelectric silicon nanowires “Materials science: Desperately seeking silicon” by Cronin B. Vining (Nature 451, 132–133; 2008), we unfortunately swapped the contexts in which the experiments in the two papers concerned were conducted. Hochbaum et al. (reference 4 of the article) suspended their nanowires above a silicon substrate, whereas those of Boukai et al. (reference 3) were supported on a thin silica platform that was fully suspended in a vacuum. The nanowire cross-sections of Hochbaum et al. were also not perfectly circular, but irregularly shaped, with diameters between 20 and 300 nm.