Volume 11 Issue 11, November 2016

Nanotechnology is starting to play a role in a number of commercial products, though in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary way, says Peter Dobson.

The controlled positioning of more than 8,000 chlorine vacancies on a surface at 77 K is a step towards the implementation of ultradense rewritable atomic memories.

Small dipeptide fragments enzymatically combine and split to form sequences that self-assemble into nanomaterials.

Two reports show FDA-approved nanoparticles can kill cancer cells through iron- and reactive oxygen species-dependent mechanisms, offering new strategies for cancer treatment.

The control of atomic vacancies on a chlorine-terminated Cu(100) surface by means of a scanning tunnelling microscope tip makes it possible to construct a rewritable atomic memory of over a kilobyte in size with an information density as high as 502 terabits per square inch.

Single-crystal graphene can be grown on a copper foil at a rate of 60 μm s^-1 by using an adjacent oxide substrate that continuously supplies oxygen to the surface of the copper catalyst.

Lateral displacement pillar arrays can now be used to separate nanoscale colloids including exosomes, offering new opportunities for on-chip sorting and quantification of biocolloids by size.

Magnetotactic bacteria that respond to oxygen gradients can be used to carry drug payloads deep into the hypoxic regions of tumours, offering a way to improve the therapeutic index of various nanocarriers.

The magnetic field-driven dynamics of nanosized magnetic vortex cores can be used to generate propagating short-wavelength spin waves in heterostructures with antiferromagnetically coupled layers.

Large-scale electronic circuits can be assembled via the spatially controlled synthesis of heterostructures made of single-layer molybdenum disulfide contacting graphene.

Searchable dynamic peptide libraries, which are based on the sequence exchange of unprotected peptides under user-defined conditions, can be used to discover self-assembled peptide nanostructures.

A pore with a subnanometre diameter, created in a thin silicon nitride membrane, can be used to detect the primary structure of a denatured protein molecule.

Starved cancer cells and xenograft tumours in mice treated with ultrasmall silica nanoparticles undergo ferroptosis — a form of programmed cell death.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved iron supplement ferumoxytol, which contains iron oxide nanoparticles, can suppress growth of early mammary cancers and lung cancer metastasis by inducing pro-inflammatory M1 type macrophage polarization in the tumour tissue, offering a new ‘off label’ application for an approved drug.

Straying off-course can lead to unexpected far-reaching results, says Floris Kalff.