Nanoscience and technology articles within Nature

Featured

  • Letter |

    Metamaterials have the counterintuitive optical property of negative refraction index. They have a wide range of possible applications, including 'invisibility cloaks' and perfect lenses, but their performance is severely limited by absorption losses. These authors have incorporated an optical gain medium within a metamaterial as a way to compensate the intrinsic loss, and show that optical pumping leads to a significantly improved negative refraction index and figure of merit within the 722–738-nm visible wavelength range.

    • Shumin Xiao
    • , Vladimir P. Drachev
    •  & Vladimir M. Shalaev

  • Letter |

    Topological surface states are a class of electronic states that might be of interest in quantum computing or spintronic applications. They are predicted to be robust against imperfections, but so far there has been no evidence that these states do transmit through naturally occurring surface defects. Here, scanning tunnelling microscopy has been used to show that topological surface states of antimony can be transmitted through naturally occurring barriers that block non-topological surface states of common metals.

    • Jungpil Seo
    • , Pedram Roushan
    •  & Ali Yazdani

  • Letter |

    Light–matter interactions in semiconductors hold great promise for numerous applications, but as device size is reduced such interactions typically weaken, potentially posing problems for applications at the nanoscale. Here the authors circumvent these limitations by producing colloidal particles with metallic cores and semiconducting shells, in which coupling of the plasmons in the metal to the excitons in the semiconductor is engineered to enhance light–matter interactions in the particle.

    • Jiatao Zhang
    • , Yun Tang
    •  & Min Ouyang

  • Careers Q&A |

    Chang-Hwan Choi, a nanoengineer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, received a 2010 Young Investigator Program award from the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) for his design of anti-corrosion surfaces that will make Navy vessels more durable.

    • Virginia Gewin

  • News |

    Nature reports from the research ship Pelican as scientists map the hidden extent of the Deepwater disaster.

    • Mark Schrope

  • Letter |

    Many new functional materials and devices could be made if it were possible to rationally combine nanometre-scale particles into larger structures. An assembly line operating on the nanometre scale has now been demonstrated. It uses a DNA origami tile as a framework and track for the assembly process, three distinct DNA machines attached to the tile as programmable cargo-donating devices, and a DNA walker to generate the target product by moving along the track and collecting cargo from those devices that are switched on.

    • Hongzhou Gu
    • , Jie Chao
    •  & Nadrian C. Seeman

  • News & Views |

    Robots have to store lots of information in order to coordinate their actions, but how can this be done for nanometre-scale robots? One answer is to program data into the robots' environment instead.

    • Lloyd M. Smith

  • News |

    Massive use of surfactant chemicals turns Gulf of Mexico into a giant experiment.

    • Daniel Cressey

  • Editorial |

    Ways to obtain more accurate data can and should be put in place to police greenhouse-gas emissions.

  • Letter |

    Supercooling is a phenomenon by which a liquid remains in its fluid phase well below its melting point. Supercooling can be inhibited by the presence of a solid surface, whereby crystalline surfaces cause adjacent atoms in the liquid to become ordered, inducing crystal nucleation of the melt. Here it is shown that a particular surface ordering of gold atoms on top of a silicon substrate can stabilize the liquid phase of a gold-silicon eutectic droplet, and thus enhance supercooling.

    • T. U. Schülli
    • , R. Daudin
    •  & A. Pasturel

  • News Feature |

    After years of wrangling over the chemical's toxicity, researchers are charting a new way forwards. Brendan Borrell investigates how the debate has reshaped environmental-health studies.

    • Brendan Borrell

  • Letter |

    An imaging technique that could identify all the individual atoms, including defects, in a material would be a useful tool. Here an electron-microscopy approach to the problem, based on annular dark-field imaging, is described. A monolayer of boron nitride was studied, and three types of atomic substitution were identified. Careful analysis of the data enabled the construction of a detailed map of the atomic structure.

    • Ondrej L. Krivanek
    • , Matthew F. Chisholm
    •  & Stephen J. Pennycook

  • Letter |

    Surface-enhanced Raman scattering is a powerful spectroscopy technique that can be used to study substances down to the level of single molecules. But the practical applications have been limited by the need for metal substrates with roughened surfaces or in the form of nanoparticles. Here a new approach — shell-insulated nanoparticle-enhanced Raman spectroscopy — is described, and its versatility demonstrated with numerous test substances.

    • Jian Feng Li
    • , Yi Fan Huang
    •  & Zhong Qun Tian

  • News & Views |

    Gold nanoparticles coated with a thin layer of an oxide allow molecules adsorbed on surfaces as diverse as those of platinum, yeast cells or citrus fruits to be characterized routinely in the laboratory.

    • Martin Moskovits

  • News & Views |

    Unexpected chlorine chemistry in the lowest part of the atmosphere can affect the cycling of nitrogen oxides and the production of ozone, and reduce the lifetime of the greenhouse gas methane.

    • Roland von Glasow

  • News Feature |

    Chemists looking to create complex self-assembling nanostructures are turning to DNA. Katharine Sanderson looks at the science beneath the fold.

    • Katharine Sanderson

  • News |

    Nanowires growing from bacteria might link up distant chemical reactions in sediments.

    • Katharine Sanderson

  • News |

    Catastrophic failure that caused accelerator shutdown was not a freak accident, says project physicist.

    • Geoff Brumfiel

  • News |

    Collaboration launches effort to track marine nutrients.

    • Mark Schrope

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Nanoscience and technology across other nature.com journals