Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

As the data boom continues to boom, more and more information gets filed in less and less space. Even the cloud will eventually run out of space, can’t thwart all hackers, and gobbles up energy. Now, a new way to store information could stably house data for millions of years, lives outside the hackable internet, and, once written, uses no energy. All you need is a chemist, some cheap molecules, and your precious information.

“Think storing the contents of the New York Public Library with a teaspoon of protein,” says Brian Cafferty, first author on the paper that describes the new technique and a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of George Whitesides, the Woodford L...

Material may replace many metals as lightweight, flexible heat dissipators in cars, refrigerators, and electronics. Polymers are usually the go-to material for thermal insulation. Think of a silicone oven mitt, or a Styrofoam coffee cup, both manufactured from polymer materials that are excellent at trapping heat.

Now MIT engineers have flipped the picture of the standard polymer insulator, by fabricating thin polymer films that conduct heat – an...

Researchers have created a smart device capable of producing large amounts of clean hydrogen. By concentrating sunlight, their device uses a smaller amount of the rare, costly materials that are required to produce hydrogen, yet it still maintains a high solar-to-fuel efficiency. Their research has been taken to the next scale with a pilot facility installed on the EPFL campus.

Scientists at EPFL’s Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering (LRESE) came up with the idea of concentrating solar irradiation to produce a larger amount of hydrogen over a given area at a lower cost...

Tiny robots powered by magnetic fields could help drug-delivery nanoparticles reach their disease targets. MIT Engineers have designed tiny robots that can help drug-delivery nanoparticles push their way out of the bloodstream and into a tumor or another disease site. The magnetic microrobots could help to overcome one of the biggest obstacles to delivering drugs with nanoparticles: getting them to exit blood vessels and accumulate in the right place.

Like crafts in “Fantastic Voyage” – a 1960s science fiction film in which a submarine...