Perspectives

This Perspective provides an overview of the potential aspects of water treatment and cleaning in which nanotechnology could play an important role.

This Perspective provides an overview of the potential of nanotechnology to provide low-cost monitoring of chemicals, microbes and other analytes in drinking water.

This Perspective evaluates catalysts based on engineered nanomaterials and the next-generation water treatment technologies they seek to enable.

New tools and approaches in hazard and risk assessment of engineered nanomaterials may pave the way to safe nanomaterial-driven innovations.

This Perspective discusses recent progress and future opportunities for borophene research.

This Perspective assesses the commercial feasibility of digital integrated circuit technology based on heterostructures of two-dimensional materials.

This Perspective describes the fundamental principles of nano-opto-electo-mechanical systems and their applications in communication, sensing and signal transduction.

Phase-coherent caloritronics is an emerging field of nanoscience based on the possibility to control and manipulate heat currents thanks to the long-range phase coherence of the superconducting condensate

The advantages and challenges of integrating the methods of life-cycle assessment and risk assessment are discussed in terms of the objectives for evaluating nanotechnologies in a safe and sustainable way.

Integrating life-cycle assessment and risk assessment makes sense only after results have been obtained in parallel from each procedure.

Risk assessment and life cycle assessment are both needed in the environmental evaluation of engineered nanomaterials. Scientists from both fields should collaborate intensively to deal with mutual challenges to achieve a complete and comprehensive assessment.

This Perspective discusses the possibilities for using structural nanocomposites to enhance the mechanical properties of materials for automotive applications.

This Perspective establishes catalyst activity targets for hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cells and discusses advantages and research needs of this technology.

This Perspective discusses an approach to artificial photosynthesis based on arrays of semiconducting microwires and flexible polymeric membranes, and highlights the scientific and engineering challenges involved in delivering an artificial photosynthetic system that is simultaneously safe, robust, efficient and scalable.

Living matter should inspire the design of future nanosystems.

Nanostructured metamaterials fabricated on nanomembranes can be reconfigured by thermal, electric, magnetic and optical forces resulting in dynamically controlled optical properties.

This Perspective discusses materials that can sustain hybrid surface plasmon and surface phonon polaritons for future nanophotonics applications.

Recent theoretical advances are starting to elucidate how natural systems use dissipative self-assembly to build their complex nanomachinery and might point to ways in which the same principles can be exploited to fabricate analogous artificial nanoassemblies.

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.