Volume 10 Issue 10, October 2015

The relationship between technology and religion is diverse and nuanced, but understanding it can be a valuable intellectual exercise, as Chris Toumey explains.

Synthetic DNA-labelled polymers can be made to self-assemble on two- and three-dimensional DNA scaffolds in custom routings.

Nanomechanical sensors can now detect femtomolar concentrations of analytes within minutes without the need to passivate the underlying cantilever surface.

Quantum mechanical wave interference of massive molecules at an atomically thin grating sheds new light on an old question.

This Progress Article reviews recent developments in analytical methods used for nanomaterial analysis and highlights opportunities for methods used in environmental toxicology to be applied in human toxicology and vice versa.

Atomically thin gratings, fabricated in single-layer graphene, can act as nanomechanical diffraction elements for high-contrast quantum interference of phthalocyanine molecules.

The generation of strain in SnTe thin films due to lattice mismatch with the PbSe substrate can be used to tune the position of Dirac nodes in momentum space.

Capacitively coupled quantum dots can be used to realize a thermoelectric device that decouples the direction of flow of the electrical current from that of the heat current.

Fourier imaging can be achieved using a nitrogen–vacancy centre with a spatial resolution of a few nanometres.

Different adjacent molecules adsorbed on a surface can be distinguished by their Raman modes using a plasmon-enhanced Raman scattering technique with a spatial resolution below 1 nm.

A hybrid approach combining mechanical force microscopy and infrared photoacoustic spectroscopy is used to characterize the morphological and compositional substructures of plant cell walls with a lateral resolution better than 20 nm.

Colourless panels that can concentrate solar light and improve the efficiency of solar cells can now be fabricated with non-toxic quantum dots.

The position and orientation of a nanoscale object trapped in a fluid can be controlled externally, offering potential for information storage and logic operations.

Synthetic polymer wires, which contain short oligonucleotides extending from each repeat, can assemble into predesigned routings on two- and three-dimensional DNA origami templates.

Nanomechanical sensors can now function without the need to passivate the underlying cantilever surface because it is the area per receptor molecule on the surface that drives the complexation of ligand and receptor.

The failures in our experimental research are necessary steps to obtain excellent results, says Francesco Carulli.