We’re all too familiar with footage of ruptured tankers or busted rigs dumping millions of litres of oil into the sea, coating shorelines and animals in crude sludge. Many traditional methods of cleaning…
Coating liquid metal droplets in a nanoparticle mix creates an extra strong non-stick conductive material that retains its shape even under high impact, Australian research has found. The breakthrough…
The sunny season has well and truly started, as has the daily summer ritual of applying sunscreen. So now is the perfect time to consider whether “nano sunscreens”, which contain UV filtering nanoparticles…
Just on a year ago my colleagues and I announced our discovery that carbon nanotube yarns could be made to twist and rotate at great speeds when electrically stimulated. In this way we had created “artificial…
Diamond is well known for its appeal as a gemstone. Perhaps less well known are some of its extreme material properties. As well as being the hardest material in nature, diamond is very good at conducting…
A new, cheaper test that diagnoses cancer or HIV in an instant could help tackle disease early in developing countries, UK researchers have said. Researchers from Imperial College London have developed…
You may not immediately think of world records when you consider chemistry, but that’s exactly what some chemists are thinking about during their research. Many, working on something called metal-organic…
Imagine a material that is just one atom thick, 300 times stronger than steel, harder than diamond, a fantastic conductor of heat and electricity and super-flexible to boot. This might sound like the stuff…