Carbon nanotubes can make home refrigeration more accessible for low-income households

Researchers replaced widely-used, but environmentally unfriendly, R134a refrigerant with the more energy-efficient R600a. They dosed R600a with multi-walled carbon nanotubes.

New stretchable, self-healing and illuminating electronic material for wearables and soft robots

Imagine a flexible digital screen that heals itself when it cracks, or a light-emitting robot that locates survivors in dark, dangerous environments or carries out farming and space exploration tasks. A novel material could turn these ideas into reality.

Paper-thin gallium oxide transistor handles more than 8,000 volts

The advancement surpasses silicon and other mature technologies, and could help improve distances that electric cars, locomotives can travel.

Researchers develop experimental rapid COVID-19 test using nanoparticle technique

Advanced nanotechnology provides 'naked eye' visual detection of virus in 10 minutes.

Nanopatterning electronic properties of twisted 2D semiconductors

Researchers have demonstrated that atomic lattices of slightly twisted 2D transition metal dichalcogenides undergo extensive lattice reconstruction, which can pattern their optoelectronic properties on nanometre length scale.

Photonic crystals: 'even thin is functional'

It was always thought that photonic crystals should be thick and bulky to be functional. Scientists now discovered that even very thin 3D photonic band gap crystals are powerful devices to strongly control the flow of light.

Kirigami/origami: unfolding the new regime of advanced 3D microfabrication/nanofabrication

3D micro-/nanofabrication holds the key to build a large variety of micro-/nanoscale materials, structures, devices, and systems with unique properties that do not manifest in their 2D planar counterparts. Recently, scientists have explored some very different 3D fabrication strategies such as kirigami and origami that make use of the science of cutting and folding 2D materials/structures to create versatile 3D shapes.