Few materials have exercised as much of a hold on the human imagination, or on human history, as has gold. (2008-09-05)

Engineers and applied physicists from Harvard University have demonstrated the first room-temperature electrically-pumped semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz (THz) radiation, also known as T-rays. The breakthrough in laser technology, based upon commercially available nanotechnology, has the potential to become a standard Terahertz source to support applications ranging from security screening to chemical sensing. (2008-05-19)

The Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed a new rapid, portable and inexpensive detection system that identifies personal exposures to toxic lead and other dangerous heavy metals. (2008-02-13)

TEAM 0.5, the world's most powerful transmission electron microscope - capable of producing images with half‑angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom - has been installed at the Department of Energy's National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (2008-01-23)

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered a phenomenon which allows measurement of the mechanical motion of nanostructures by using the AC Josephson effect. (2007-07-24)

Physicists at the University of Pennsylvania are using a new technique to craft some of the tiniest metal nanostructures ever created, none larger than 10 nanometers, or 10,000 times smaller than the width of a single human hair. (2007-06-26)

Scientists from Institute of Biophysics and Nanosystems Research (IBN), Austrian Academy of Sciences and of Centre for Biomedical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA report the study of "Tuning Curvature and Stability of Monoolein Bilayers by Designer Lipid-Like Peptide Surfactants" in the May 30th issue of the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE. (2007-05-30)

Materials scientists will tell you that to best understand, characterize and eventually utilize the properties of a specific material, you have to be able to define how the atoms within it are arranged. (2007-04-30)

Through photosynthesis, green plants and cyanobacteria are able to transfer sunlight energy to molecular reaction centers for conversion into chemical energy with nearly 100-percent efficiency. (2007-04-13)

Researchers at Delft University of Technology can predict how nanostructuring - the extreme reduction of structure - will affect the performance of Li-ion batteries. (2007-04-03)

Electrons love to zip around metals such as copper, especially if the metal is cooled to temperatures near absolute zero. But if they encounter a magnetic atom (say, iron) during their travels, the electrons will try to "screen," or cancel out, the magnetic atom's spin alignment by pairing with it. This pairing modifies the flow of electrons in the metal, in a phenomenon called the Kondo effect. (2007-03-15)

Researchers from MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology and Ohio State University have developed a new computer modeling approach to study how materials behave under stress at the atomic level, offering insights that could help engineers design materials with an ideal balance between strength and resistance to failure. (2007-03-02)

While government leaders argue about the practicality of reducing world emissions of carbon dioxide, scientists and engineers are seeking ways to make it happen. (2007-01-30)

Carnegie Mellon University scientists have married bright fluorescent dye molecules with DNA nanostructure templates to make nanosized fluorescent labels that hold considerable promise for studying fundamental chemical and biochemical reactions in single molecules or cells. (2007-01-29)

A strategic plan and more resources for risk research are needed now in order to ensure safe nano-workplaces today and in the future. (2007-01-02)