News & Comment

The purity of carbon nanotubes has a significant affect on the thermal conductivity of composite materials

Nanoscience and nanotechnology offer fundamental challenges in research and the possibility of a new industrial revolution. This presents opportunities for all sorts of scientists and engineers.

The future of nanotechnology depends on public acceptance, says Chris Toumey, so the nanotechnology community needs to listen to public opinion.

Governments invest billions in it and tens of thousands of papers are published on the subject every year, but what exactly is nanotechnology?

The invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope 25 years ago, followed by the arrival of the atomic force microscope five years later, were crucial events in the history of nanoscience and nanotechnology. As the recent International Conference on Nanoscience and Technology in Basel made clear, scanning probe microscopes based on these discoveries are still having a tremendous impact on many areas of research.

Researchers have combined photolithography and self-assembly to pattern a silicon wafer

Single photoconducting nanowires made from an organic polymer may lead to smaller solar cells and photo-detectors

Nanosized objects can be easily manipulated on a low-friction workbench made of multiwalled carbon nanotubes

Disk-like molecules can be self-assembled into nanowires and crosslinked to form robust structures

The charge on a quantum dot controls the magnetic properties of a single manganese atom embedded in it

RNA molecules can be used as scaffolds for the synthesis of CdS nanocrystals of the same size

Quantum ‘back-action’ has been used to lower the temperature of a vibrating nanobeam

The 'molecular fingerprinting' technique known as SERS has now been applied to living samples for the first time

Multiwalled carbon nanotubes can stimulate the growth of a single-celled organism when cultured in yeast medium

A single molecule fixed to the wall of a nanopore can be switched between two states using light

The efficiency of amorphous-silicon solar cells can be improved by adding a layer of gold nanoparticles