News & Views

Charged domain walls in ferroelectric thin films can be manipulated at the nanoscale and used to induce charges in the surrounding insulating material.

The delivery of flexible electronic scaffolds to precise locations in biological tissues or cavities is achieved by injecting them via a syringe needle with a diameter much smaller than the size of the scaffold.

Three different mechanical waveforms are generated at the nanoscale by Fourier synthesis of surface acoustic waves.

Single-molecule junctions with high rectification ratios can be realized by exposing different electrode surface areas to an ionic liquid.

An axle-shaped molecule pumps charged rings from solution into an alkyl collection unit, a mechanism that, in two repetitive cycles, takes the system increasingly further from equilibrium.

A single layer of MoS₂ can be used to fabricate a memristor by exploiting structural defects in the crystal.

Water desalination membranes can be created by etching nanometre-sized pores in a single layer of graphene.

Single-photon sources have been demonstrated in two-dimensional semiconductors.

Nonlinear generation of light from an atomically thin semiconductor can be controlled by electrical fields.

Calcium and phosphate ions secreted in the intestine form nanoparticles that protect and shuttle protein antigens from the lumen to immune cells in the intestinal wall lining.

The combination of Cerenkov light and nanoparticles now enables photodynamic therapy that does not rely on external light sources.

Two-dimensional cathodoluminescence projections are used to reconstruct the plasmonic excitation of nanoscale crescents by tomography.

Multimodal microbubbles exposed to ultrasound shrink to nanoparticles that retain the imaging and drug delivery potential of the parent microbubble.

The four-letter molecular code of DNA and the twenty-letter expression language of peptides have inspired the development of two thriving, but distinct, branches of nanotechnology; a technique that combines the two approaches could lead to robust, scalable materials with unique optoelectronic properties.

Full-colour displays with high spatial resolution can be produced with properly designed upconversion nanocrystals that emit light at different wavelengths, depending on the properties of the excitation pulses.

By combining the geometric phase with plasmonic metasurfaces, it is possible to make wide-angle holograms with power efficiency of 80% over a broad range of frequencies.

The radiative heat exchange on the nanoscale can be tuned using polar dielectric nanostructures.

Sensitive measurement of nitrogen–vacancy centres close to the surface of diamond enables magnetic resonance imaging with a resolution of a few nanometres in ambient conditions.

A label-free mass spectrometry imaging method maps the locations of carbon nanomaterials injected into mice through the detection of small carbon clusters.

Molecular dipoles can self-assemble in a head-to-tail fashion inside single-walled carbon nanotubes to form a material with a large second-order nonlinear optical response.