Volume 14 Issue 11, November 2019

As new nanomaterials, manufacturing methods and applications advance, the nanotechnology-related environmental, health and safety community is well positioned to build upon the scientific foundation and strong collaborations they have developed to further expand understanding and ensure responsible development into the future.

The experiences gained from the past 15 years of nanomaterial risk analysis may be useful for the risk analysis efforts of other emerging technologies.

The mechanistic electrochemical mass spectrometry study of ethylene production on Cu-based nanocatalysts under CO₂/CO co-feeds indicates the existence of separate, reactant-specific surface adsorption sites for CO₂ and CO, which guided the design of a multi-component CO₂RR electrocatalyst.

Photoresponsive hydrogel pillars can be conveniently tuned to achieve either phototropic orientation or phototactic swimming.

The motion of a single electron can now be sampled with picosecond resolution, which helps to characterize and understand non-equilibrium electron dynamics in nanoscale conductors.

The use of nanomedicine in cancer requires the adoption of specific strategies to optimize its potential. This perspective proposes four strategies including the identification of patients for clinical trials, investments in modular nanocarrier design, the integration in multimodal combination therapy regimes and the inclusion in immunotherapy studies

The internal electron dynamics of submicrometre devices are hard to resolve because of bandwidth limitations of current measurement techniques. Here, the authors sample the 250 GHz coherent oscillation of a single-electron wave packet inside a quantum dot at 4.2 K employing a resonant level.

van der Waals materials enable the realization of an electrically driven polariton LED operating at room temperature.

Engineering multiple moiré patterns within a boron nitride–graphene–boron nitride heterostructure enables tunable crystal symmetry and strong modification of the graphene band structure.

Subpicosecond spin-exchange Auger interactions realized in manganese-doped quantum dots allow for manipulating hot carriers before their intraband cooling.

Lithium whisker growth can be suppressed under mechanical constraints, as revealed by an experimental set-up combining an environmental transmission electron microscope and an atomic force microscope.

Mimicking the phototropism of sunflowers, a polymeric nanomaterial can autonomously track the direction of light and align to it.

A tenfold difference in the frequency of translocation events is observed when protein molecules are passed in the forward and reverse direction through a naked truncated pyramidal silicon nanopore. The electro-osmotic vortex–protein interaction is found to determine the rectification.

The mechanistic electrochemical mass spectrometry study of ethylene production on Cu-based nanocatalysts under CO₂/CO co-feeds indicates the existence of separate, non-scrambling reactant-specific surface adsorption sites for CO₂ and CO, which provides guidance for the design of CO₂ reduction reaction electrocatalysts.

A non-precious metal cobalt phosphide hydrogen evolution catalyst is found to be active and durable in a commercial-scale polymer electrolyte membrane electrolyser.

A new DNA logic circuits architecture based on single-stranded logic gates and strand-displacing DNA polymerase requires less computation time and fewer DNA strands.