As perfectly crystalline structures go, carbon nanotubes can be remarkably stretchy. A combination of two mechanisms makes their elongation a self-healing process.
The nature of the boundary between water and oil is crucial to many nanometre-scale assembly processes, including protein folding. But until now, what the interface really looks like remained in dispute.
Molecular motors are of limited use unless they are fixed in place on an immobile substrate. That has now been achieved for the first fully synthetic, fully rotating single-molecule rotors.
Newly developed ultrathin silicon membranes can filter and separate molecules much more effectively than conventional polymer membranes. Many applications, of economic and medical significance, stand to benefit.
