An easy way to see the world's thinnest material

05-Jan-2010 - It's been used to dye the Chicago River green on St. Patrick's Day. It's been used to find latent blood stains at crime scenes. And now researchers at Northwestern University have used it to examine the thinnest material in the world. The useful tool is the dye fluorescein, and Jiaxing Huang, ...

Dip ordinary paper into ink infused with nanotubes and nanowires to create an instant battery

Paper batteries and supercapacitors may power hybrid cars or store electricity on the grid

11-Dec-2009 - Stanford scientists are harnessing nanotechnology to quickly produce ultra-lightweight, bendable batteries and supercapacitors in the form of everyday paper. Simply coating a sheet of paper with ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires makes a highly conductive storage device, said Yi ...

New silicon-germanium nanowires could lead to smaller, more powerful electronic devices

11-Dec-2009 - Microchip manufacturers have long faced challenges miniaturizing transistors, the key active components in nearly every modern electronic device, which are used to amplify or switch electronic signals. Now, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, Purdue ...

Structure of calcite shells revealed

New research offers clues to how shells grow in nature

02-Dec-2009 - Single crystals of the mineral calcite - the chief material in limestone - are predictable, homogeneous and, well, a little boring. But scientists have long marveled at how biological crystals of calcite grow together with other organic materials to form, for example, shells and sea urchin ...

Nanowires key to future transistors, electronics

01-Dec-2009 - A new generation of ultrasmall transistors and more powerful computer chips using tiny structures called semiconducting nanowires are closer to reality after a key discovery by researchers at IBM, Purdue University and the University of California at Los Angeles. The researchers have learned how ...

Water droplets direct self-assembly process in thin-film materials

25-Nov-2009 - You can think of it as origami – very high-tech origami. Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a technique for fabricating three-dimensional, single-crystalline silicon structures from thin films by coupling photolithography and a self-folding process driven by capillary ...

Empa scientists synthesize graphene-like material

Polymer with honeycomb structure

25-Nov-2009 - Graphene consists of a two-dimensional carbon layer in which the carbon atoms are arranged on a hexagonal lattice, resembling a honeycomb. Carbon nanotubes are rolled-up sheets of graphene, and thick piles of graphene sheets form graphite. Graphene boasts some very special characteristics - it is ...

Accidental discovery produces durable new blue pigment for multiple applications

18-Nov-2009 - An accidental discovery in a laboratory at Oregon State University has apparently solved a quest that over thousands of years has absorbed the energies of ancient Egyptians, the Han dynasty in China, Mayan cultures and more – the creation of a near-perfect blue pigment. Through much of recorded ...

In touch with molecules

16-Nov-2009 - The performance of modern electronics increases steadily on a fast pace thanks to the ongoing miniaturization of the utilized components. However, se-vere problems arise due to quantum-mechanical phenomena when conven-tional structures are simply made smaller and reach the nanometer scale. ...

Caltech scientists develop DNA origami nanoscale breadboards for carbon nanotube circuits

11-Nov-2009 - In work that someday may lead to the development of novel types of nanoscale electronic devices, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has combined DNA's talent for self-assembly with the remarkable electronic properties of carbon nanotubes, ...