A blue wrench (of molecules) to adjust a green bolt (a pillarene ring) that binds a yellow chemical “guest.” It’s a new tool — just 1.7 nanometers wide — that could help scientists catalyze and create a host of useful new materials.Credit: Severin Schneebeli, UVM
Hold up your two hands. They …

Imperfections running through liquid crystals can be used as miniscule tubing, channeling molecules into specific positions to form new materials and nanoscale structures, according to engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The discovery could have applications in fields as diverse as electronics and medicine.

“By controlling the geometry of the system, …

A spray-on nanocrystal solar cell array.Credit: Image courtesy of St. Mary’s College of Maryland
A new study out of St. Mary’s College of Maryland puts us closer to do-it-yourself spray-on solar cell technology — promising third-generation solar cells utilizing a nanocrystal ink deposition that could make traditional expensive silicon-based solar panels …

Low-energy electron hologram of an individual tobacco mosaic virion. Hologram of a tobacco mosaic virion, lying on ultraclean freestanding graphene, recorded with electrons of 65 eV kinetic energy. The scale bar corresponds to 10nm.Credit: J.-N. Longchamp/University of Zurich, Switzerland
Knowing the detailed shape of biomolecules such as proteins is essential for …

Ultrathin sheets of a new 2D hybrid perovskite are square-shaped and relatively large in area, properties that should facilitate their integration into future electronic devices.Credit: Peidong Yang
To the growing list of two-dimensional semiconductors, such as graphene, boron nitride, and molybdenum disulfide, whose unique electronic properties make them potential successors to …

Researchers from North Carolina State University have created the first entropy-stabilized alloy that incorporates oxides — and demonstrated conclusively that the crystalline structure of the material can be determined by disorder at the atomic scale rather than chemical bonding.

“High entropy materials research has been a hot field since 2007, but …

A digitally-coloured microflower magnified 20,000 times.Credit: Image courtesy of RMIT University
Researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, have developed artificial microflowers that self-assemble in water and mimic the natural blooming process, an important step for advances in frontier-edge electronics.

Flower-shaped structures have been the focus of research because their distinctive surfaces …

What looks like a bed of nails are actually nanowires. Each outgrowing thread has a diameter of 80 nanometres (billionths of a metre). The green things climbing on the nanowires are neurons.Credit: Image courtesy of Lund University
Neurons thrive and grow in a new type of nanowire material developed by researchers …

A covariance matrix produced with a new technique at Rice University maps fluorescence signals from various species of single-walled carbon nanotubes that are beginning to aggregate in a sample. The matrix allows researchers to know which types of nanotubes (identified by their fluorescence spectra) have aggregated and in what amounts, …

This image shows a sample morphology probed by Raman spectroscopy.Credit: C. Neumann, S. Reichardt, P. Venezuela, M. Drögeler, L. Banszerus, M. Schmitz, K. Watanabe, T. Taniguchi, F. Mauri, B. Beschoten, S. V. Rotkin and C. Stampfer
This week, an international group of scientists is reporting a breakthrough in the effort to …