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Nanoscale copper for crop nutrition and protection
Nanoparticles have the potential to improve the efficiency of agrochemicals while minimizing their environmental impact. Chuanxin Ma and colleagues have now demonstrated that foliar delivery of nanoscale copper to young seedlings stimulates innate plant defenses in the roots, yielding resistance to sudden soybean death syndrome and enhanced crop growth under pathogen stress. The degree of enhanced immunity was controlled by material properties and was computationally predictable, demonstrating the significance of material tunability as a powerful tool for nano-enabled agriculture and for combatting food insecurity. The cover image is an artist’s impression of the interaction between nanoparticles and plants.
Two nanoparticle-based vaccines close to obtaining approval by the US Food and Drug Administration could represent a giant step in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
The internal surface of an optical fibre can be covered by uniform two-dimensional-material layers for highly nonlinear and low-loss light propagation.
Function implementation and optimization in nanoscale and quantum-electronic devices become increasingly challenging with the growing complexity of the devices. Training a deep neural network with the physical device response and searching for the functionality in the digital device can ease this challenge.
Epitaxial quantum dot charge spin qubits offer efficient quantum light links, but their coherence is limited by interactions with the nanoscale ensemble of atomic nuclear spins. Employing nuclear spins instead as its hardware, strain-free GaAs/AlGaAs quantum dots can constitute a fully functional two-qubit quantum register.
Holography of incoherent emission from SERS probes allows multiplexed single-particle localization in three dimensions in one shot using a wide-field microscope.
A hexagonal boron nitride nanocoating grown directly on a stainless-steel mesh enables ultrahigh power input intensity in an electrothermal membrane distillation system to desalinate hypersaline solutions with exceptionally high water flux, single-pass water recovery and heat utilization efficiency.
Foliar application of different forms of nanoscale copper to plant seedlings induces material-specific biochemical and molecular changes in root tissue that stimulate plant defence against soybean sudden death syndrome.
A fluoropolymer-based cancer nanovaccine that delivers antigens directly to the cytosol of dendritic cells and elicits strong antitumour immune responses inhibiting tumour growth in animal models can be used to produce personalized treatment for post-surgical immunotherapy.
A shape-changing pH-responsive cancer vaccine delivers antigenic peptides directly to the cytoplasm and boosts the cellular immune response upon activation of the inflammasome pathway, efficiently inhibiting tumour growth and extending survival in animal tumour models.