Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
The sodiation–desodiation properties of few-layer phosphorene are mostly preserved by sandwiching the material between graphene layers, a behaviour that makes phosphorene–graphene hybrids a potentially suitable anode material for sodium-ion batteries.
A single iron atom adsorbed on a platinum surface can act as the basic constituent of a Hund's metal—known as a Hund's impurity—and its magnetic properties can be probed and manipulated using the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope.
Large-area graphene devices synthesized by chemical vapour deposition are used to develop electrical resistance standards, based on the quantum Hall effect, with state-of-the-art accuracy and under an extended range of experimental conditions of magnetic field, temperature and current.
The discrimination of nucleic acid sequences and the detection of sequence-specific nucleic acid binding events by protein nanopores can be parallelized by optically encoding the ionic flux through the pores.
The photocurrent in polymorphic phase areas of BiFeO3 is enhanced by a factor of 100 due to interfacial strain gradients across the different structural phases.
Synthetic polymer wires, which contain short oligonucleotides extending from each repeat, can assemble into predesigned routings on two- and three-dimensional DNA origami templates.
The position and orientation of a nanoscale object trapped in a fluid can be controlled externally, offering potential for information storage and logic operations.
Nanomechanical sensors can now function without the need to passivate the underlying cantilever surface because it is the area per receptor molecule on the surface that drives the complexation of ligand and receptor.
A hybrid approach combining mechanical force microscopy and infrared photoacoustic spectroscopy is used to characterize the morphological and compositional substructures of plant cell walls with a lateral resolution better than 20 nm.
Miniature optomechanical disks could be used as ultrafast and ultrasensitive fluidic sensors due to the combination of their high-frequency vibrations, small mass and low dissipation in liquids.
A monolithic heterostructure nanosheet composed of a ZnCdSSe multi-segment quaternary alloy can simultaneously emit laser light in the red, green and blue.
Biodegradable lignin nanoparticles infused with minimal amounts of silver ions and coated with a cationic polyelectrolyte show short-term broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity, offering an environmentally friendly alternative to metallic silver nanoparticles.
Surface plasmon wakes can be created and steered using a one-dimensional metamaterial consisting of rotated nanoslits in which the phase velocity of a running wave of polarization propagates faster than the phase velocity of the surface plasmons.
Using nanofabricated chambers, living bacterial cells can be 'sculpted' into defined shapes, such as squares and rectangles, which can be used to explore the spatial adaptation of Min protein oscillations, a Turing reaction–diffusion pattern that assists cell division.
Chloride concentrations inside subcellular organelles of living cells can now be measured in a pH-independent manner using a DNA nanodevice, offering a tool for studying chloride homeostasis and its associated diseases.
Rolled-up ultraflexible mesh electronics can be injected through a syringe needle of diameter as small as 100 μm into man-made and biological cavities, gels and tissues, where they can unfold and perform sensing operations.
The anisotropic optical properties of black phosphorus can be exploited to fabricate photodetectors with linear dichroism operating over a broad spectral range.