The nanoscopic equivalent of stacking a deck of cards—layering materials a mere few atoms thick atop one another—has emerged as a favorite pastime of material scientists and electrical engineers worldwide....

Since the first successful fabrication of a two-dimensional structure of carbon atoms about 20 years ago, graphene has fascinated scientists. A few years ago, researchers discovered that two layers of graphene, slightly twisted against each other, can conduct electric current without loss. In recent...

Diamond nanocrystals, namely nanodiamonds, which host point defects such as nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers, are a promising quantum material....

Researchers created an ultrathin loudspeaker that can turn any rigid surface into a high-quality, active audio source. The fabrication process can enable the thin-film devices to be produced at scale. ...

If we compare the right to the left hand, we can see these are specular images—that is, like symmetrical shapes reflected in a mirror—and they cannot superimpose on each other. This property is chirality, a feature of the matter that plays with the symmetry of biological structures at different...

Wettability of a material is the ability of a liquid to maintain contact with a solid surface, and it is proportional to hydrophilicity and inversely proportional to hydrophobicity. It is one of the most important properties of a solid, and understanding the wettability of different substrates is...

Semiconducting nanomaterials with 3D network structures have high surface areas and a lot of pores that make them excellent for applications involving adsorbing, separating, and sensing. However, simultaneously controlling the electrical properties and creating useful micro- and macro-scale...

A team of researchers working at China's Fourth Hospital of Harbin Medical University has developed a new kind of male contraceptive that is easily reversed. In their paper published in the journal ACS Nano, the group describes their approach, the elements that went into making their contraceptive...

A study shows that the preference of biological molecules for left or right-handedness -- a hallmark of living matter -- could emerge spontaneously as prebiotic chemical networks adapt to optimize energy harvesting. The proposed mechanism of symmetry breaking is general and can apply to other...

Scientists have made a major breakthrough on how the spin evolves in the nanoworld on extremely short time scales. ...