Reviews & Analysis

The transport of dissolved ions inside tiny carbon nanotubes apparently violates the famous Nernst–Einstein relation, which links diffusive and electric-field-driven motion.

This Review analyses the possibilities that a nanomedicine approach offers to tackle COVID-19-induced thrombosis and the associated challenges.

DNA chirality allows it to act as an electrohydrodynamical turbine under the action of an electroosmotic flow when confined in nanopores.

Manipulation of vacancy and strain enables fabrication of large area, phase-controllable 2D ferroelectric materials and their hetero-phase junction.

Combining equilibrium self-assembly with coupling mechanisms defying Newton’s third law allows for the design of programmable, time-varying, self-organized assemblies mimicking living matter.

A nanoscopically thin gold coating at the optical percolation threshold was fabricated using scalable methods. Despite its extreme thinness, the film absorbs about 30% of the solar radiation while being transparent. The resulting photoinduced heating prevents or mitigates fogging on transparent surfaces.

Carbon dioxide can be removed from the atmosphere by increasing the phytoplankton population in the oceans using nutrients. Life cycle assessment, cost analyses and data from previous studies reveal that engineered nanoparticles could increase the efficiency of this process and that it can be made affordable, viable, and safe for marine ecosystems.

Treatment with polycations was shown to selectively target abdominal fat in mice owing to the negatively charged extracellular matrix in adipose tissue. The polycations can inhibit the storage of lipids in fat cells, causing them to shrink and leading to improved metabolic health in obese mice.

Lorentz electron ptychography, a coherent diffractive imaging method, unveils magnetization singularities in a skyrmion lattice in FeGe and captures subtle internal structures near the skyrmion cores, boundaries, and dislocations.

By applying strain to artificially reduce the crystal symmetry of a non-centrosymmetric two-dimensional material, a very large bulk photovoltaic effect is uncovered with anisotropic properties that reflect its non-linear origins.

A multi-beam optical tweezer scheme achieves levitation and cooling of two nanoparticles at the same time.

Quantum dots can convert terahertz photons into visible light. This mechanism is used to develop a semiconductor-based room-temperature terahertz camera that can simultaneously record the field strength and polarization states of a terahertz beam. The proposed detector has fast speeds and can be manufactured at the wafer-scale.

A strategy that uses nanoconjugates to label solid cancer cells with the hematopoietic cell-specific molecule SLAMF7, broadens the scope of cancer types susceptible to immune-based anti-cancer therapies and could provide a new approach to treat solid cancers.

A doughnut-shaped microstructure with single-handed helical feature has been created via the combination of bottom-up self-assembly and top-down solution depositing processes.

Introducing nanotextured interfaces simultaneously increases the light-harvesting ability, optoelectronic properties and fabrication yield of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells. In this way, the efficiency limit of conventional silicon solar cells is surpassed, paving the way to higher-performance photovoltaics.