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Nanocomposite fibres that display rapid and reversible changes of colour when an electric current is passed through them could have applications in sensing.
Strain has been used to engineer the structure of metallic and insulating domains in vanadium dioxide, such that a Mott transition can take place at room temperature.
Metal-ion detection on the basis of plasmonic resonance energy transfer is proposed and demonstrated in a proof-of-concept experiment by detecting copper ions down to one nanomole with high selectively.
Nanoparticles with dynamic patches can form reversible self-assembled structures in aqueous solution that become topologically more connected on dilution.
Individual double-walled tubular aggregates are immobilized on a solid substrate out of solution using a drop-flow technique. Using near-field scanning optical microscopy, these aggregates are shown to have a remarkably uniform supramolecular structure.
An array of nine sensors made up of gold nanoparticles functionalized with different organic groups can distinguish the breath of lung cancer patients from healthy individuals in an atmosphere of high humidity.
A chemical synthesis of a copper-based catalyst allows the synthesis of silicon nanowires to be compatible with standard complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication processes.
Germanium nanowires grown vertically on a silicon substrate are used to seed micrometre-size single-crystal germanium islands, with potential applications in three-dimensional integrated circuits.
Individual DNA origami shapes can be positioned and aligned on technologically useful substrates that have been patterned using electron-beam lithography and dry oxidative etching.
The dynamic production of oxidants inside cells can be quantified by a probe based on a single nanoparticle, offering a tool to monitor and understand how cells regulate their signalling responses.
A variety of structural changes in few-layer graphene samples can be followed with atomic resolution in real time by using high-resolution transmission electron microscopy.
Experiments on nanoparticles with highly uniform sizes show how acoustic vibrations are damped through a combination of intrinsic and viscous damping by the surrounding fluid.
Semiconductor quantum dots with both plasmonic and fluorescent signatures have been fabricated by controlling the distance between the core of the dot and an ultrathin gold shell to nanometre precision.