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Category: nanotechnology

What Is Nanotechnology? The Atomic Future Waiting to Begin

The idea never died, progress is still being made.

Nanotechnology was once imagined as the next great technological revolution—atom-by-atom manufacturing, machines as small as cells, and materials we can only dream of today. Instead, it stalled. While AI, robotics, and nuclear surged ahead, nanotech faded into the background, reduced to buzzwords and sci-fi aesthetics.

But the idea never died.

We can manipulate matter at the atomic scale. We can design perfect materials. We can build molecular machines. What’s been missing isn’t physics—it’s ambition, investment, and the will to push beyond today’s tools.

In this interview with futurist J. Storrs Hall, we explore what nanotechnology really is, why it drifted off course, and why its future may finally be on the horizon. If AI was a “blue-sky fantasy” until suddenly it wasn’t, what happens when someone decides nanotech deserves the same surge of talent, money, and imagination?

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Ultrasound-activated nanoparticles in immune cells trigger targeted inflammatory response

Piezoelectric nanoparticles deployed inside immune cells and stimulated remotely by ultrasound can trigger the body’s disease-fighting response, according to an interdisciplinary team of Boston College researchers.

The paper is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Atomic-level surface control boosts brightness of eco-friendly nanosemiconductors by 18-fold

Light-emitting semiconductors are used throughout everyday life in TVs, smartphones, and lighting. However, many technical barriers remain in developing environmentally friendly semiconductor materials.

In particular, nanoscale semiconductors that are tens of thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair (about 100,000 nanometers) are theoretically capable of emitting bright light, yet in practice have suffered from extremely weak emission. KAIST researchers have now developed a new surface-control technology that overcomes this limitation.

A KAIST research team led by Professor Himchan Cho of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering has developed a fundamental technology to control, at the atomic level, the surface of indium phosphide (InP) magic-sized clusters (MSCs)—nanoscale semiconductor particles regarded as next-generation eco-friendly semiconductor materials.

Emerging strategies of bacterial adaptation mechanisms to silver and metal oxide nanomaterials

How do bacteria adapt to antimicrobial nanomaterials? In this review, Suchánková et al. explain microbial adaptation strategies and offer insights for safer and more effective nano-antimicrobials. FEMSMicrobiolRev.

This review explores induced bacterial adaptation to antimicrobial nanomaterials, summarizing known mechanisms across nanomaterial types and bacterial spec.

Q&A: What do scientists need to learn next about blocking enzymes to treat disease?

Enzymes are the molecular machines that power life; they build and break down molecules, copy DNA, digest food, and drive virtually every chemical reaction in our cells. For decades, scientists have designed drugs to slow down or block enzymes, stopping infections or the growth of cancer by jamming these tiny machines. But what if tackling some diseases requires the opposite approach?

Speeding enzymes up, it turns out, is much harder than stopping them. Tarun Kapoor is the Pels Family Professor in Rockefeller’s Selma and Lawrence Ruben Laboratory of Chemistry and Cell Biology. Recently, he has shifted the focus of this lab to tackle the tricky question of how to make enzymes work faster.

Already, his lab has developed a chemical compound to speed up an enzyme that works too slowly in people with a rare form of neurodegeneration. The same approach could open new treatment possibilities for many other diseases where other enzymes have lost function, including some cancers and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s.

Novel AI method sharpens 3D X-ray vision

X-ray tomography is a powerful tool that enables scientists and engineers to peer inside of objects in 3D, including computer chips and advanced battery materials, without performing anything invasive. It’s the same basic method behind medical CT scans.

Scientists or technicians capture X-ray images as an object is rotated, and then advanced software mathematically reconstructs the object’s 3D internal structure. But imaging fine details on the nanoscale, like features on a microchip, requires a much higher spatial resolution than a typical medical CT scan—about 10,000 times higher.

The Hard X-ray Nanoprobe (HXN) beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, is able to achieve that kind of resolution with X-rays that are more than a billion times brighter than traditional CT scans.

Sunlight-driven nanoparticles enable cleaner ammonia synthesis at room temperature

Ammonia (NH3) is a colorless chemical compound comprised of nitrogen and hydrogen that is widely used in agriculture and in industrial settings. Among other things, it is used to produce fertilizers, as well as cleaning products and explosives.

Currently, ammonia is primarily produced via the so-called Haber-Bosch process, an industrial technique that entails prompting a reaction between nitrogen and hydrogen at very high temperatures and pressure. Despite its widespread use, this process is known to be highly energy-intensive and is estimated to be responsible for approximately 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers at Stanford University School of Engineering, Boston College and other institutes have identified new promising catalysts (i.e., materials that speed up chemical reactions) that could enable the sunlight-driven synthesis of ammonia at room temperature and under normal atmospheric pressure.

Acid-treated carbon nanotubes boost efficiency and stability of flexible perovskite solar modules

Flexible perovskite solar modules (f-PSMs) are a key innovation in current renewable energy technology, offering a pathway toward sustainable and efficient energy solutions. However, ensuring long-term operational stability without compromising efficiency or increasing material costs remains a critical challenge.

In a study published in Joule, a joint research team from the Institute of Metal Research (IMR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhengzhou University has achieved power conversion efficiency (PCE) surpassing 20% in flexible modules capable of withstanding a range of external stresses. The study highlights the use of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) as window electrodes for scalable f-PSMs.

SWCNT films exhibit excellent hydrophobicity, resisting moisture-induced degradation while enhancing device stability. Their flexibility and affordability further position SWCNT-based electrodes as a practical option for sustainable energy systems, providing an ideal opportunity for buildings and infrastructure to incorporate their own power sources in support of a net-zero carbon emissions future.

Iron-based magnetic material achieves major reduction in core loss

A research team from NIMS, Tohoku University and AIST has developed a new technique for controlling the nanostructures and magnetic domain structures of iron-based soft amorphous ribbons, achieving more than a 50% reduction in core loss compared with the initial amorphous material.

The developed material exhibits particularly high performance in the high-frequency range of several tens of kilohertz—required for next-generation, high-frequency transformers and EV drive power supply circuits. This breakthrough is expected to contribute to the advancement of these technologies, development of more energy-efficient electric machines and progress toward carbon neutrality.

The research is published in Nature Communications.

Ultra-strong, lightweight metal composite can withstand extreme heat

University of Toronto researchers have designed a new composite material that is both very light and extremely strong—even at temperatures up to 500 Celsius.

The material, which is described in a paper published in Nature Communications, is made of various metallic alloys and nanoscale precipitates, and has a structure that mimics that of reinforced concrete—but on a microscopic scale.

These properties could make it extremely useful in aerospace and other high-performance industries.

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