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A novel type of nanowire crystals was demonstrated by researchers at the University of Copenhagen that can fuse together both semiconductor and metallic materials with atomic precision at their interface. This way, nanowires and their electrical contacts have been fused in one hybrid material which might lay the foundation for the next generation of semiconductor electronics. […]
Researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently demonstrated a new technique for building complex and very fine 3D micro and nano structures out of 2-D shapes. The whole process is very similar to how a children’s pop-up book works, starting as a flat 2D surface only to expand into a 3D shape when prompted. The authors note that the pop-up method has various advantages over 3D printing, including use of multiple materials during the fabrication process and integration with electronics.
A breakthrough in optical communications has been reported by Stanford engineers who used a complex algorithm to design a prism-like device that splits light into different colours (frequencies) and at right angles. This is the absolute first step towards building a circuit, and ultimately a computer, that uses light instead of wires to relay signals. This […]
An Israeli company has developed a battery that can charge a smartphone in just 30 seconds; to make things even more interesting, the technology could be scaled and power up electric cars in a matter of minutes. Demonstrated at the 2014 Microsoft Think Next Conference in Tel Aviv earlier this year, StoreDot‘s prototype battery fully charged […]
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? This nonsensical question actually has meaning in the world of Jonty Hurwitz, an anamorphic artist. For his latest project, Hurwitz teamed with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the Weitzmann Institute of Science to 3D print sculptures that recreate the smallest human forms ever. These […]
On Tuesday, Google’s head of life sciences inside the company’s Google X research lab reported a new exciting project that involves using nanoparticles that magnetically attach to key molecules and cells in the bloodstream to detect diseases, including cancer. The particles – ingested under the form of a pill – would later be gathered, scanned and […]
A team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering demonstrated the latest advances in programmable DNA self-assembly by crystallizing 32 structures with precisely prescribed depths and complex 3D features. The DNA crystals could potentially be used as the basis of a programmable material platform that would allow scientists to build extremely precise and complex […]
Taking inspiration from nature, scientists at MIT have engineered a new sort of glue that acts like a powerful adhesive even in underwater conditions and can cling on to virtually any surface, be it metal or organic. The glue might prove to be useful to repair ships or seal wounds and surgical incisions. The strongest […]
When it feels threatened, the hagfish produces a slime which is only 12 nanometers wide, but 15 centimeters long – 10,000,000 times longer than it is wide. It’s not clear exactly what this slime is made of (likely a sugar modification), but its purpose is to make the hagfish slippery and possibly clog the gills of a predator. […]
DARPA just announced the launch of a new extremely exciting program: Atoms to Product (A2P). The aim is to develop a suit of technologies that will allow manufacturing of products from the nanoscale up to what we know as ‘life size’. The revolutionary miniaturization and assembly methods would work at scales 100,000 times smaller than current state-of-the-art technology. […]
A team of researchers from the Aarhus University in Denmark and CalTech has developed an origami-inspired method of organizing molecules on the nanoscale. The team has modeled RNA, DNA’s close cousin into complicated shapes using the technique. Together with DNA, RNA comprises the nucleic acids, which, along with proteins, constitute the three major macromolecules essential for […]
This bacterium has a lot in common with power companies. Power companies use copper wires to channel electricity (and therefore, electrons), and this bacterium developed a mechanism to do something similar: in the absence of oxygen, it grows nanowires from its own body through which it pushes electrons to nearby rocks. This is how it […]
The difference between a poison and a cure is the dosage – and this could be very well said about this approach. Bio-engineers report that peptides in some venoms bind to cancer cells and block tumor growth and spread and could be effectively used to fight cancer – the only problem is they might also […]
We’ve covered quite a bit the recent developments involving perovskite as an extremely promising light-to-energy conversion semiconductor. Now, researchers at University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität are performing research on perovskite-based devices that work the other way around by emitting light. Their research has turned out promising results that suggest high-brightness LEDs, manufactured at […]
Researchers have found a cheap and quick way of producing peptides in a laboratory. Producing one of the body's natural defenses against cancer and then implanting it into patients can prove pivotal in the fight against cancer.
Here at ZME Science we often report on cutting edge developments and various medical breakthroughs that offer novel treatments and such. Most of these drugs or techniques are first studied on animal models, and while they hold great promise, it’s most often than not that the desired response isn’t replicated in humans. This translates in […]
Expect the price of sand to skyrocket! Researchers at University of California, Riverside have devised a coin-sized battery that uses silicone at its anode (negative side), instead of the over-used graphite, that lasts up to three times longer than conventional lithium-ion batteries. The key of the research is the silicon extraction method which uses quartz-rich […]
You might have thought black is too solemn or boring, but you may just change your mind. Through careful material science manipulation, involving thousands of tightly packed carbon nanotubes, British company Surrey NanoSystems made a super black coating that absorbs almost 99.96% of visual light – a world record. Practically only a tiny fraction of the visual […]
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report they’ve devised a new type of highly efficient solar cell that is potentially easier to manufacture and cheaper than cells of similar performance. The stacked cell allows photon energy to be garnered from across the whole solar spectrum, and this new design makes use of a […]
It’s official – graphene is the wonder material of the millennium. A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (MPI-P) in Mainz and the National Univ. of Singapore found that thermal conductivity of graphene diverges with the size of the samples. What’s the big deal? Well, the findings show that the thermal […]
The most basic principle of a solar cell is that it works by transferring the energy from an incoming photon (light) to a molecule, which causes one or more electrons to become displaced until an electrical current is formed. That’s the absolute gist of it, only besides electricity, some of the incoming photon energy gets […]
A technique developed by MIT researchers reveals the motion of energy-carrying quasiparticles (excitons) in solid material. Let’s work that out in common English. Quasiparticles aren’t technically particles, but they act like they are. It’s hard to give a definition without going into more complicated physics here, but a quasiparticle is a disturbance, in a medium, that behaves […]
Australian brush turkeys incubate their eggs in places most animals would stay clear of: moist piles of rotting vegetation. There are some advantages to this approach, most notably that the heat released by the microbes keeps the eggs warm but those same microbes can also get through eggshells and kill the embryos. However, even though the risks […]
The future is here. Nano-sized entities made of DNA that are able to perform the same kind of logic operations as a silicon-based computer have been introduced into a living animal. It’s every Science Fiction fan’s dream come true. The tiny DNA computers are called origami robots, because they work by folding and unfolding strands of DNA; […]
Throughout the world, tens of millions of people get stitches every year, and researchers have been looking for better options for quite a while. Now, a team of Maryland researchers proposed applying sticky, biodegradable mats of polymer nanofibers onto surgical incisions to seal them and promote healing. This is not a new idea, but the […]
In nature, organisms communicate in various ways, be it through acoustic or biological signals. Insects, for instance, communicate and relay important information, such as a threat to a hive, using pheromones – an excreted chemical with a particular signature. Scientists at the University of Warwick in the UK and the York University in Canada have […]
Mona Lisa is probably the most well known picture in the world – it’s been painted thousands of times, inspired countless artists, and her enigmatic smile still puzzles researchers and artists alike; but never before has it been painted on such a small canvas. Demonstrating a very potent nanotechnique, researchers have made a miniature Mona Lisa […]
In terms of materials, graphene is definitely the hot cherry at the moment; it is basically a one-atom thick layer of the mineral graphite (carbon), with more such layers stacked together forming crystalline graphene. It is very light, with a 1-square-meter sheet weighing only 0.77 milligrams, but also very durable and has a number of […]
Over the past decades, what we mean by glue has changed significantly; techniques have emerged, materials have been developed, and one of the most viable candidates for a superglue is gold. Researchers have found numerous applications for attaching molecules to gold; the approach uses chemicals called thiols to bind the materials together. But while this […]
Creating glasses that don’t fog or freeze up could not only bring a world of comfort to millions of people, but it could also have a myriad of applications in cameras, microscopes, mirrors and refrigerated displays – to name just a few. While there have been many advancements in this field, so far, the main problem […]
The veined wing of the clanger cicada kills bacteria is able to destroy bacteria by its structure alone – one of the first structures ever found that can do this. The clanger cicada is an insects that looks like something between a fly and a locust; its wings are covered with a vast hexagonal array […]
Finding ways to diagnose cancer earlier could potentially save millions of lives, improving the chances of survival for many patients. This is why researchers have developed nanoparticles which amplify tumor signals, making them much easier to detect. Nanotech to the rescue The new technology was developed by researchers from MIT and it makes biomarker detection […]
In a breakthrough for nanotechnology, researchers at the Harvard’s Wyss Institute have found the right mix of chemistry and molecular programming to trick DNA strands to fit together perfectly, just like Lego bricks, and thus form various objects and shapes, all based on the scientists’ software design. Thus, a myriad of objects made out of […]
We’ve all been hearing about the miracles that carbon nanostructures will provide us in the near future for several years now. One of the first steps to making its application commercially viable is making it easy to use and manufacture. Researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology at Weihai and Southeast University have made identifying the […]
Scientists at University of Texas Dallas have made artificial muscles capable of supporting 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 times more mechanical power than natural muscle of the same size. Applications for this kind of technology are quite numerous, ranging from extremely strong and intelligent textiles to high-temperature applications since the fabric has […]
Data storage has reached great heights in the past two decades. You can now fit in a typical PC hard-drive thousands of CDs and millions of floppy disks (who else remembers these?). However, magnetic hard drive developers have almost reached the physical limit to where they can cram up data. Researchers at University of Texas at […]
Previously, scientists have managed to devise material that can convert light into electricity, and other materials that can convert heat into electricity. Now, a group of researchers at University of Texas at Arlington have managed to create a hybrid material that can convert both forms of energy at the same time into electricity. This double spanned function […]
Common to Central and South America, the Blue Morpho is an iconic butterfly, prized for its brilliant blue color and iridescence. Beyond its beauty, however, scientists have discovered that its wings have a certain microscopic texture that could benefit a wide range of applications from self-cleaning instruments, to more efficient piping. For example, the researchers […]
New tests conducted by MIT researchers working at the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies showed nanomaterials could lead to better armor against pretty much everything, from all sort of bullets to micrometeorites. Go small to go big In the good old days, if you wanted a good armor, you had to bulk up. First it was […]
Scientists at Stanford University have successfully devised the world’s first solar cell made entirely out of carbon. This alternative to typical silicon solar panels is not only a lot cheaper to produce, but also a lot less simpler to use. Such carbon cells can be coated on any surface and turn it into a solar […]
No, this isn’t some kind of reinvented alchemy or optical illusion. Scientists at University of Southampton have changed the colour of gold, silver and other metals without coating, by using a nanotechnology patterning technique. Applications may include harder to forge currency or encryption of valuable documents, among other. The team of researchers embossed the surface of […]
It seems scientists have yet to draw the line on where graphene, man’s greatest material ever discovered, ceases to amazes with its new abilities, since apparently new properties and uses for the carbon allotrope are found constantly. Most of the contributions come from University of Manchester, where the material has been recognized for its true history-shaping […]
Graphene is one of the most phenomenal materials discovered in science. It’s so thin, it can be molded into sheets just 1 atom thick, yet despite this, it’s so strong that you can actually pick it up. It has the highest current density (a million times that of copper) at room temperature, the highest intrinsic mobility […]
In today’s fast evolving world of tech, miniaturization is crucial. In most portable consumer electronics goods, like smartphones or tablets, the typical lithium-ion battery takes up quite its share of space, impending further sensible miniaturization of design. A new technique developed by scientists at Rice University might, however, render battery volume to a minimum, following the advent of a […]
Be it a bacteria or a fully complex being, say a human, all living, biological organisms undergo lighting fast protein structure reassembly in response to environmnetal stimuli. For instance, receptor proteins in the sinus are stimulated by various odor molecules, basically telling the organism that there’s food nearby or it’s in the vicinity of danger (sulphur, methane, […]
Curious enough, one hundred years after renowned physicist Max von Lauefirst used X-ray diffraction to unravel the intricate atomic architecture of molecules, a team of international scientists have analyzed tiny protein crystals at an unprecedent scale of resolution, premiering in the process the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser. Called the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford, the X-ray […]
The 2012 London summer Olympic games are just a few weeks away, and as millions are set to flock to the city and other hundreds of millions will rejoice on the web and TV at the world’s grandest spectacle of athletic performance, it’s pretty clear this is one of the most anticipated events of the year. Every […]
Most digital devices today, like displays or blue-ray disks, use lasers which emit the colors red, green and blue, which when combined can render any color in the visible spectrum of light. However, current technology requires a separate laser for each color, since they produce monochromatic light. A team of researchers at Brown University has […]
Scientists have described and proven how many of the world’s phenomenae function, from the very fundamental laws of Newtonian mechanics, to the discrete behaviors of quantum physics, eventually peering through some of the Universe’s most well kept secrets. It’s remarkable then, how little we know about how heat is conducted through and between materials. A better […]
Graphene has been countless times hailed as the material at the forefront of the coming technological leaps ahead in the future, thanks to its extraordinary properties and countless applications. Electronics is where graphene shines the most, though, and now scientists at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have managed to synthesize a semiconductor variant of graphene which might lead […]
