Nanoscience and technology articles within Nature Chemistry

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  • Research Highlights |

    The hydrophilic edges and hydrophobic centres of graphene oxide sheets mean they act as surfactants.

    • Neil Withers

  • Article |

    Thermal reduction of graphene oxide is an attractive route towards the preparation of graphene, but complete removal of residual oxygen is problematic. Now, molecular dynamics simulations elucidate the chemical changes involved in this process.

    • Akbar Bagri
    • , Cecilia Mattevi
    •  & Vivek B. Shenoy

  • News & Views |

    Controlling the movements of molecular systems through external stimuli is crucial for the construction of nanoscale mechanical machines. A spring-like compound has now been prepared — a double helicate that retains its handedness under ion-triggered extension and contraction.

    • Ben L. Feringa

  • Article |

    In analogy to classical living polymerizations, the controlled formation of highly monodisperse cylindrical micelles — ranging from approximately 200 nm to 2 µm in length — has been demonstrated using very small and uniform crystallite seeds as initiators for the crystallization-driven living self-assembly of block copolymers with a crystallizable, core-forming metalloblock.

    • Joe B. Gilroy
    • , Torben Gädt
    •  & Ian Manners

  • Research Highlights |

    Radioactive iodide can be aimed at specific organs in the body by trapping it inside sugar-functionalized carbon nanotubes.

    • Stephen Davey

  • Article |

    Optically driven phase transitions are widely used in optical memory devices, and the materials showing this effect are normally chalcogenides or organic compounds. Now a room-temperature light-induced phase transition between metal and semiconducting phases has been observed in a titanium oxide material.

    • Shin-ichi Ohkoshi
    • , Yoshihide Tsunobuchi
    •  & Hiroko Tokoro

  • Article |

    Although fullerenes have been synthesized from graphite for a long time, the exact mechanism is relatively unknown. Now, in situ microscopy and quantum chemical modelling have directly followed the formation of fullerenes from a single graphitic sheet — graphene.

    • Andrey Chuvilin
    • , Ute Kaiser
    •  & Andrei N. Khlobystov

  • Article |

    Glass is widely used as an electrical insulator in electrodes, but in spite of its high resistance, 100-nm-thick layers of glass have now been shown to be sufficiently conductive for electrochemical measurements. Obtaining redox couples through glass-covered nanoelectrodes suggests that the pH response of the glass is due to the formation of a hydrogel layer in acidic solution.

    • Jeyavel Velmurugan
    • , Dongping Zhan
    •  & Michael V. Mirkin

  • Research Highlights |

    Molybdenum and tungsten sulfide nanosheets, analogous to graphene, have been made.

    • Neil Withers

  • Article |

    Efficient conduction of protons on a micrometre scale is critical for the development of fuel cell membranes — a key component of clean energy sources. Now, self-assembling amphiphilic polymers have been shown to provide a nanoscale organization of proton-conducting functionalities that dramatically increases anhydrous proton conductivity.

    • Yangbin Chen
    • , Michael Thorn
    •  & S. Thayumanavan

  • Article |

    The rational design of catalytic materials requires synthetic control over their reactive properties. Now, the activity of dealloyed Pt–Cu bimetallic nanoparticles, which catalyse the oxygen reduction reaction, can be tuned through control of the geometric strain at their surface.

    • Peter Strasser
    • , Shirlaine Koh
    •  & Anders Nilsson

  • Article |

    Porous coordination polymers — PCPs, also known as metal–organic framework materials — have been widely investigated for their useful properties, but controlling their size and shape in a nanocrystalline form is difficult. Now, a rapid method of preparing porous crystalline nanosized PCPs that uses a microemulsion system under ultrasonic irradiation has been reported.

    • Daisuke Tanaka
    • , Artur Henke
    •  & Juergen Groll

  • News & Views |

    Electrochemistry has so far been mostly centred around measuring factors and coefficients. Through the reversible reduction and oxidation of an electrode coating formed from three-dimensional hybrid aniline–gold nanoparticles, it has now moved on to controlling the pH of a solution, thus triggering specific reactions.

    • Reginald M. Penner

  • Article |

    Gold nanoparticles can catalyse oxidation reactions in remarkably mild conditions and have excited much interest in recent years. With experimental studies disagreeing over the size of the most active nanoparticles, density functional calculations have now shown that limiting the particle size to below two nanometres is crucial.

    • Olga Lopez-Acevedo
    • , Katarzyna A. Kacprzak
    •  & Hannu Häkkinen

  • Research Highlights |

    A comparison of models for the sun-protection factor, transparency and production of reactive oxygen species leads to a prediction of the optimum size of titania nanoparticles for use in sunscreen.

    • Stephen Davey

  • Article |

    Nanotubular structures made from different materials are being investigated for applications ranging from sensing to drug delivery, but controlling how they interact with ‘cargo’ molecules has proved challenging. Now, the selective uptake, precise positioning and triggered release of gold nanoparticles has been achieved with nanotubes assembled from triangular DNA building blocks.

    • Pik Kwan Lo
    • , Pierre Karam
    •  & Hanadi F. Sleiman

  • Article |

    Formic acid fuel cells require nanosized intermetallic nanoparticles as anode catalysts, but current techniques are poor at producing the small size required. Now, surface-modified ordered mesoporous carbons have been used to produce nanocrystallites as small as 1.5 nm that are extremely active catalysts.

    • Xiulei Ji
    • , Kyu Tae Lee
    •  & Linda F. Nazar

  • Research Highlights |

    The slow oxidation of tellurium in semiconductor cadmium telluride nanoparticles, accompanied by the replacement of tellurium by sulfur, has led to CdS/CdTe nanoparticles that self-assemble under visible light into twisted nanoribbons.

    • Anne Pichon

  • Article |

    Fullerene cages that break the isolated pentagon rule are rare and often unstable. Now a range of fullerenes that feature three sequentially fused pentagons of carbon have been stabilized by chlorination.

    • Yuan-Zhi Tan
    • , Jia Li
    •  & Lan-Sun Zheng

  • News & Views |

    Chemical reactions of fullerenes and metallofullerenes lined up inside single-walled carbon nanotubes can be monitored at the atomic scale inside an aberration-corrected transmission electron microscope.

    • Mauricio Terrones

  • News & Views |

    A molecular 'walker' can be made to move up and down a molecular 'track' by alternately locking and unlocking the two different types of covalent bonds that join the two components together. By changing the conditions under which one of the bond-forming/bond-breaking processes occurs, a directional bias for walking can be achieved.

    • Sijbren Otto

  • Article |

    Well-resolved images of small molecules and their motions can be obtained with high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. It has now been shown that this technique can also be used to visualize individual chemical reactions involving the dimerization of fullerenes and metallo-fullerenes trapped inside carbon nanotubes by monitoring how the positions of their atoms change over time.

    • Masanori Koshino
    • , Yoshiko Niimi
    •  & Sumio Iijima

  • Research Highlights |

    More predictable chemical patterns have been created by using nanoparticles instead of ions.

    • Neil Withers

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