Metalens-based design shrinks footprint, making optical traps practical for precision sensing and measurements.

Researchers have created tiny chip-based optical tweezers that can be used to optically levitate nanoparticles in a vacuum. Optical tweezers — which employ a tightly focused laser beam to hold living cells, nanoparticles and other objects — can be used for a variety of precision measurements and sensing applications. However, these optical traps are usually produced with bulky optical components.

“By using an ultrathin metalens, we reduced the diameter of the focusing lens from about...

The breakthrough advance could lead to a novel, drug-free therapeutic that can slow, possibly stop, the growth of cancer cells. A multi-institutional research team has designed nanoparticles that can communicate with and slow the development of cancer cells. The work — detailed in a newly published paper in Advanced Materials — has uncovered a novel framework for the potential development of drug-free cancer therapies.

Led by scientists at the Advanced Science Research Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY (CUNY ASRC), the research team was able to design nanoparticles that are activated to se...

They’re also cheaper, faster and fabricated with an inkjet printer.

Sure, you could attach two screens with a hinge and call a cell phone “foldable,” but what if you could roll it up and put it in your wallet? Or stretch it around your wrist to wear it as a watch?The next step in digital displays being developed at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis could make that a reality.

First, there were light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. Then, organic LEDs, or OLEDs. Now, researchers in the lab of Chuan Wang, assistant professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering, have developed a new material that has the best of both technologies and a novel way to fabricate it — using an inkjet printer.

The research was publis...

Signs of a planet transiting a star outside of the Milky Way galaxy may have been detected for the first time. This intriguing result, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, opens up a new window to search for exoplanets at greater distances than ever before.

The possible exoplanet candidate is located in the spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51), also called the Whirlpool Galaxy because of its distinctive profile.

Exoplanets are defined as planets outside of our Solar System. Until now, astronomers have found all other known exoplanets and exoplanet candidates in the Milky Way galaxy, almost all of them less than about 3,000 light-years from Earth...