As socie ty becomes more comfortable discussing genetics and its related ethics, a new technology is blossoming in the background. Nanotechnology may speak the same societal language as does genetics, in that both technological movements involve tiny science and large imagination. In a way, it is natural—and almost inevitable—that the genetic revolution and the nanotechnology revolution be comp...

Because of their wide abundance, their renewable and environmentally benign nature, and their outstanding mechanical properties, a great deal of attention has been paid recently to cellulosic nanofibrillar structures as components in nanocomposites. A first major challenge has been to find efficient ways to liberate cellulosic fibrils from different source materials, including wood, agricultura...

The synthesis and characterization of microand nanomaterials have received broad attention and become a leading edge in materials science and technology. Functional microand nanomaterials endow us the possibility to develop devices with distinguished performance in electronics, magnetics, optics, and photonics. In addition to the composition, the size and shape are two other important factors t...

This work reports the elaboration and structural study of new hybrid organic-inorganic materials constructed via the coupling of liquid-crystalline nonionic surfactants and polyoxometalates (POMs). X-ray scattering and polarized light microscopy demonstrate that these hybrid materials, highly loaded with POMs (up to 18 wt %), are nanocomposites of liquid-crystalline lamellar structure (Lalpha),...

Plasmonic nanostructures with a negative Poisson ratio are demonstrated, having the unusual mechanical property of auxetics to expand laterally when being stretched. Using nanomembrane technology, auxetics are shrunk by orders of magnitude, giving simultaneous access to optical properties of plasmonic metamaterials, as well as auxetic mechanical properties on the nanoscale.

novel ceramic oxides have been increasingly focused in recent years because of their potentialapplications in environmental purification especially to treat organic contaminants present in water. in thisresearch work, a set of nio-co3o4 nano-ceramic composite materials were prepared by a simple refluxcondensation method using nickel acetate / cobalt acetate as precursor salts, sodium monododecy...

The squid pen (gladius) from the Loligo vulgaris was used for preparation of β-chitin materials characterized by different chemical, micro- and nano-structural properties that preserved, almost completely the macrostructural and the mechanical ones. The β-chitin materials obtained by alkaline treatment showed porosity, wettability and swelling that are a function of the duration of the treatmen...

hyperdiamonds are covalently bonded fullerenes in crystalline forms, more or less related todiamond, and having a significant amount of sp3 carbon atoms. design of severalhypothetical crystal networks was performed by using our original software programscvnet and nano-studio. the topology of the networks is described in terms of the netparameters and several counting polynomials, calculated by ...

In this communication we elucidate a microstructural picture of proton conduction in nano-crystalline yttria-stabilized zirconia at low temperatures (Kim et al. Adv. Mater., 2008, 20, 556). Based on careful analysis of electrical impedance spectra obtained from samples with grain sizes of approximately 13 and approximately 100 nm under both wet and dry atmospheres over a wide range of temperatu...