An international team has discovered a simple and environmentally friendly way to power the next generation of self-charging electronics. The work is published in Nano Energy. By making tiny plastic spheres move against each other, they generate electricity through friction. Instead of using complex fluoropolymer-based materials, the researchers created ultrathin, structured layers of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) spheres using a simple rubbing technique. Typically, producing such ultrathin films requires highly advanced equipment and is both costly and difficult.

Structural colors are not created by pigments or dyes but are colorless arrangements of physical nanostructures. When light waves hit these nanostructures, they interfere with one another. Some waves cancel each other out (they are absorbed) while the rest are reflected (or scattered) back to our eyes, giving us the color we see. Structural color systems can be engineered to reflect multiple colors from the same colorless material. This is different from pigments, which absorb light and reflect only one color—red pigments reflect red, blue pigments reflect blue and so on.

A collaborative research team has successfully developed a self-powered pollution prevention technology that can remove pollutants from the surface of solar panels without external power. This technology uses a wind-powered rotational triboelectric nanogenerator to generate power and combines said power with electrodynamic screen (EDS) technology to move dust in the desired direction for removal. The findings are published in the journal Nano Energy. The team was led by Professor Juhyuck Lee from the Department of Energy Science and Engineering, Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology, along with Dr. Wanchul Seung at Global Technology Research, Samsung Electronics.

Evaporation is a natural process so ubiquitous that most of us take it for granted. In fact, roughly half of the solar energy that reaches the Earth drives evaporative processes. Since 2017, researchers have been working to harness the energy potential of evaporation via the hydrovoltaic (HV) effect, which allows electricity to be harvested when fluid is passed over the charged surface of a nanoscale device. Evaporation establishes a continuous flow within nanochannels inside these devices, which act as passive pumping mechanisms. This effect is also seen in the microcapillaries of plants, where water transport occurs thanks to a combination of capillary pressure and natural evaporation.

It can take years of focused laboratory work to determine how to make the highest quality materials for use in electronic and photonic devices. Researchers have now developed an autonomous system that can identify how to synthesize "best-in-class" materials for specific applications in hours or days. The new system, called SmartDope, was developed to address a longstanding challenge regarding enhancing properties of materials called perovskite quantum dots via "doping." "These doped quantum dots are semiconductor nanocrystals that you have introduced specific impurities to in a targeted way, which alters their optical and physicochemical properties," explains Milad Abolhasani, an associate professor of chemical engineering at North Carolina State University and corresponding author of the paper "Smart Dope: A Self-Driving Fluidic Lab for Accelerated Development of Doped Perovskite Quantum Dots," published open access in the journal Advanced Energy Materials. "These particular quantum dots are of interest because they hold promise for next generation photovoltaic devices and other photonic and optoelectronic devices," Abolhasani says. "For example, they could be used to improve the efficiency of solar cells, because they can absorb wavelengths of UV light that solar cells don't absorb efficiently and convert them into wavelengths of light that solar cells are very efficient at converting into electricity."

"Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) have succeeded for the first time in imaging individual sugars within the glycocalyx at molecular resolution and linking their spatial arrangement to their biological function. The findings, recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, open up completely new perspectives for understanding this important cell structure—with far-reaching consequences for diagnosis and therapy.

The glycocalyx is the cell's "doorkeeper": everything that approaches the cell interacts with it first. In recent years, glycocalyx has increasingly become the focus of biomedical research, because it influences numerous processes related to health and disease. Nevertheless, it has not been possible to link its spatial organization to its biological function, because it takes place on a scale of only one nanometer, a size that could not be made visible using previous methods.

Now, scientists at MPL have achieved a breakthrough using a special microscopy method in combination with a particular chemical labeling technique—individual sugar molecules could be visualized in the glycocalyx on the cell surface."

"The high-precision resolution in the range of a single nanometer allows scientists not only to count sugars and understand their interactions, but also to record their arrangement and communication in the natural environment of the cell. Like a map, this reveals the density of individual sugars at different locations in the cell and how this arrangement changes in the course of cellular events."

Particle accelerators are the ultimate tools for exploring the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The largest ones push particles to near-light speeds, creating extreme conditions that replicate the early universe. Here’s a look at the biggest and most powerful particle accelerators in the world. 1. Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – CERN, Switzerland/France 🔹 Circumference: 27 km (17…

"The humble membranes that enclose our cells have a surprising superpower: They can push away nano-sized molecules that happen to approach them."

"The team's findings, which appear in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, confirm that the powerful electrical fields that cell membranes generate are largely responsible for repelling nanoscale particles from the surface of the cell.

This repulsion notably affects neutral, uncharged nanoparticles, in part because the smaller, charged molecules the electric field attracts crowd the membrane and push away the larger particles."

"The findings provide the first direct evidence that the electric fields are responsible for the repulsion. According to NIST's David Hoogerheide, the effect deserves greater attention from the scientific community."