Efficiently and Sustainably Killing Bacteria

Electrocatalytic sterilization: nanowires produce localized highly alkaline microenvironments

18-Mar-2025 - Harmful microorganisms such as bacteria represent one of the largest threats to human health. Efficient sterilization methods are thus a necessity. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, a research team has now introduced a novel, sustainable, electrocatalytic sterilization method based on electrodes ...

Scientists thread rows of metal atoms into nanofiber bundles

Intercalation of indium into nanostructures promises applications to nanocircuitry

13-Mar-2023 - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have successfully threaded atoms of indium metal in between individual fibers in bundles of transition metal chalcogenide nanofibers. By steeping the bundles in indium gas, rows of atoms were able to make their way in between the fibers to create a ...

An ultra-stable protein nanowire made by bacteria provides clues to combating climate change

07-Feb-2023 - Accelerated climate change is a major and acute threat to life on Earth. Rising temperatures are caused atmospheric methane which is 30-times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat. Microbes are responsible for generating half of this methane and elevated temperatures are also accelerating ...

Light accelerates conductivity in nature’s ‘electric grid’

“It is a completely different form of photosynthesis”

09-Sep-2022 - The natural world possesses its own intrinsic electrical grid composed of a global web of tiny bacteria-generated nanowires in the soil and oceans that “breathe” by exhaling excess electrons. In a new study, Yale University researchers discovered that light is a surprising ally in fostering this ...

Scientists use copper nanowires to combat the spread of diseases

02-Aug-2022 - An ancient metal used for its microbial properties is the basis for a materials-based solution to disinfection. A team of scientists from Ames National Laboratory, Iowa State University, and University at Buffalo developed an antimicrobial spray that deposits a layer of copper nanowires onto ...

Researchers build longest, highly conductive molecular nanowire

The 2.6nm-long single molecule wire has quasi-metallic properties and shows an unusual increase of conductance as the wire length increases

12-Jul-2022 - As our devices get smaller and smaller, the use of molecules as the main components in electronic circuitry is becoming ever more critical. Over the past 10 years, researchers have been trying to use single molecules as conducting wires because of their small scale, distinct electronic ...

Scientists unravel mysterious mechanism behind “whisker crystal” growth

Whisker-thin nanofilaments trail bubbles to grow

28-Jun-2022 - Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered the mechanism behind the rapid growth of ultra-thin nanowires or “whiskers” in organic compounds. Nanowires are both a desirable technological innovation and a hazard when they short electronics: understanding how they grow is crucial ...

Cooling speeds up electrons in bacterial nanowires

This is very surprising because cooling typically freezes electrons and slows them down in organic materials

13-May-2022 - The ground beneath our feet and under the ocean floor is an electrically-charged grid, the product of bacteria “exhaling” excess electrons through tiny nanowires in an environment lacking oxygen. Yale University researchers have been studying ways to enhance this natural electrical conductivity ...

Speeding through nanowire

Nanowires under tension create the basis for ultrafast transistors

09-Feb-2022 - Smaller chips, faster computers, less energy consumption. Novel concepts based on semiconductor nanowires are expected to make transistors in microelectronic circuits better and more efficient. Electron mobility plays a key role in this: The faster electrons can accelerate in these tiny wires, ...

Nanopatterns of proteins detected by cryo-electron microscopy

Nanostructures for electronics, catalysis, medicine

22-Oct-2020 - A team from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) used cryo electron microscopy to detect regular, two-dimensional structures in the form of Pascal triangles in a shock frozen protein material. The samples have been synthesized by a Chinese research group. The method of cryo electron microscopy has the ...