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For nanotechnology to fulfil its promises, devices have to control events at the nanoscale as well as link to the macroscopic world. An organized network of nanoparticles that behaves as a sensor is one example of such a system.
As Benjamin Braddock was told in the film The Graduate “plastics” are big business. But with a limited palette of polymers to choose from, the industry has long sought to combine desirable properties from several polymers into new blends.
How does plastic deformation of polycrystalline materials with grain sizes less than 100 nm look at the atomic scale? A large-scale molecular dynamics simulation of nanocrystalline aluminium reveals some surprising behaviour.
Atomic-scale engineering turns silicon into a material in which electronics and photonics can be merged, thus leading to microphotonic integrated circuits.
For a quarter of a century, barcodes have been used in the macroscopic world to tag goods in supermarkets. Can the same idea be used to track molecules in microbiology?
Conventional superconductors, such as niobium, may soon have competition from a recent upstart. A new technique for growing thin films of MgB2 removes one serious hurdle in the path to commercialization.
