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.
Providing an insight into nano-enabled agriculture
A range of nano-enabled strategies can address existing inefficiencies in agrochemical delivery and activity. Many of these approaches for plant protection and nutrition involve foliar application of engineered nanomaterials, which can also be used to enhance plant resilience and to enable biofortification. Nanotechnology clearly holds great promise for crop production, helping to sustainably meet the growing global demands for food, feed and fuel. The cover art depicts nanoparticles deposited on a leaf, interacting with the unique surface environment and subsequently entering the vascular system to deliver novel functionality to the entire plant.
A semiconductor quantum dot that generates polarization-entangled photon pairs on demand has been realized, marking an important milestone for scalable integrated quantum photonics and information processing.
The successful use of nanotechnology in agriculture will only be possible with a concerted effort to overcome the challenges posed by policies and regulations that are not yet fit for purpose.
Discussions on agricultural nanotechnology are pervaded with conflicting accounts of public opinion. A pragmatist concept may help to explain why this is so difficult to identify.
Genetically modified organisms as foods are a globally contested topic. What dictates the regulatory oversight of genetically modified crops could be redefined by advances in nanotechnology and genome editing.
J. Scott Angle is the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) in the US. Anne Mullen asks him about opportunities for nanotechnology in agriculture and food security. The views expressed below do not necessarily represent the official views of NIFA or the US Department of Agriculture.
Nanotechnology offers a range of opportunities for sustainable agriculture. Successful developments will need a systems approach to designing proposed nanotechnologies.
The development of nano-enabled agriculture will require proper safety regulations. This Perspective outlines the need for a combined approach to regulate health and environmental risks under the same framework.
Nanomaterials have the potential to be very effective as fertilizers and pesticides for crops. This article reviews results so far and challenges ahead.
While measurement of an electron spin commonly destroys it, the quantum non-demolition measurement implemented here for an electron spin qubit in a semiconductor quantum dot preserves the measured spin and allows for exponential suppression of readout errors by repeated measurements.
Spin currents from an adjacent Pt layer can drive homochiral Néel domain walls in centrosymmetric rare-earth iron garnet films at more than 800 m s–1, taking advantage of the antiferromagnetic spin dynamics of the ferrimagnetic oxide.
MoS2 is shown to exhibit a stronger vdW interaction with graphite than with hexagon boron nitride, which is well described by Lifshitz theory and utilized to construct 2D heterostructures in a sophisticated way
Ionic Coulomb blockade in nanochannels is shown to be a consequence of a second Wien effect, resulting from the dissociation of Bjerrum pairs that are formed under confinement.
A vertical, electrolyte-gated organic transistor shows high on-state current densities, large on/off ratio and the potential for use in artificial neural networks.
Embedding GaAs quantum dots in broadband photonic nanostructures allows a source of entangled photons to be fabricated with simultaneous enhancements of the most important parameters.
Metallic lithium wets a functionalized mesoporous carbon film to create a self-smoothing anode that, in conjunction with a standard lithium nickel–manganese–cobalt cathode, delivers long cycling life, 350 Wh kg−1 high-energy cells under realistic conditions.
Lithium transition metal oxide cathodes can degrade under high-voltage conditions by a redox mechanism by which oxygen vacancies form at the surface and migrate towards the bulk.
A specifically designed family of synthetic lipids exhibits unique liquid-crystalline behaviour at low temperature, enabling maintenance of amorphous water down to about 10 K due to nanoconfinement.
Administration of the clinically approved iron oxide nanoparticle drug ferumoxytol in vitro results in an anti-leukaemia effect and in vivo extended overall survival in part due to the low expression of the iron export protein ferroportin.