Volume 7 Issue 8, August 2012

Lentil-shaped liposomes, formed from novel phospholipids that have an unnatural structure, release their contents only under high shear stress such as inside a constricted blood vessel, offering a way to deliver drugs to clogged arteries without the use of targeting ligands.

The dispersion forces between atoms and nanostuctures have been measured by using a scanning probe microscope in which the tip is a confined gas of ultracold atoms.

Nanoscale charge channels combine the benefits of vacuum tubes with solid-state electronics.

Cerium oxide nanoparticles introduced into a full-scale incinerator are properly filtered and remain in ash residues, but other risks from nanoparticles generated or altered by incinerators should not be overlooked.

Electrons can be confined to individual momentum valleys in the electronic structure of molybdenum disulphide by shining circularly polarized light onto single layers of this two-dimensional material.

Circularly polarized light has been used to achieve a valley polarization of 30% in single-layer molybdenum disulphide.

Circularly polarized light has been used to confine charge carriers in single-layer molybdenum disulphide entirely to a single energy-band valley, representing full valley polarization.

Time-varying magnetic fields can be used to drive magnetic domain walls around arbitrary paths, including closed loops, in a ratchet-like fashion.

Replacing the semiconductor channel in a conventional field-effect transistor with a vacuum channel could lead to a new generation of low-power, high-speed devices.

A nanomechanical beam and a disk-shaped optical resonator are integrated on a chip to make a transducer that can measure extremely weak forces.

The fundamental interactions between a rubidium atom and a carbon nanotube can be probed by inserting the nanotube into an ultracold cloud of atoms.

Large-scale incinerators can remove engineered nanoparticles from flue gas and loosely trap them in solid combustion residues.

High-speed atomic force microscopy and molecular simulations are used to form a probability map of the interactions and motions of a protein in a lipid membrane.

Similar to certain enzymes, vanadium pentoxide nanowires show antibacterial activity and can prevent the colonization of marine microorganisms on surfaces such as ship hulls.

Lentil-shaped phospholipid vesicles are sensitive to shear stress, offering a new class of materials that can deliver drugs in response to rheological changes in the body.