X-ray imaging reveals secrets in battery materials

Imaging and data analysis techniques offer new approach to probing material properties.

Adapting nanotechnology imaging tools to study ants' heat-deflecting adaptations

In a typical experiment involving biological material such as nanoscale hairs, it would usually be sufficient to use an electron microscope to create an image of the surface of the specimen. This research, however, required to look inside the ant hairs and produce a cross-section of the structure's interior. The relatively weak beam of electrons from a standard electron microscope would not be able to penetrate the surface of the sample.

Staying cool: Saharan silver ants inspire nanophotonics research

Researchers first to show that Saharan silver ants can control electromagnetic waves over an extremely broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum--findings may lead to biologically inspired coatings for passive radiative cooling of objects.

Biomedical breakthrough: Carbon nanoparticles you can make at home

Researchers have found an easy way to produce carbon nanoparticles that are small enough to evade the body's immune system, reflect light in the near-infrared range for easy detection, and carry payloads of pharmaceutical drugs to targeted tissues.

Researchers design placenta-on-a-chip to better understand pregnancy

Researchers have developed a 'placenta-on-a-chip' to study the inner workings of the human placenta and its role in pregnancy. The device was designed to imitate, on a micro-level, the structure and function of the placenta and model the transfer of nutrients from mother to fetus.

Structural origin of glass transition

Scientists have demonstrated through computer simulations that the enhancement of fluctuations in a liquid's structure plays an important role as a liquid becomes a solid near the glass-transition point, a temperature below the melting point. This result increases our understanding of the origin of the glass transition and is expected to shed new light on the structure of liquids, thought until now to have been uniform and random.

Graphene wrappings could boost chip speeds by up to 30 percent

Inside each chip are millions of tiny wires to transport data; wrapping them in a protective layer of graphene could boost speeds by up to 30 percent.