The Chinese State Council announced yesterday that they have appointed Chunli Bai as the next president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
Professor Bai has been the executive vice president of CAS since 2004, and will take over from former CAS President Lu Yongxiang.
The Nanoscale team would like to congratulate Professor Bai and we wish him all the best in his new role!
A simple, scalable, graphene patterning method has been developed and applied to fabricate CdSe nanobelt/graphene Schottky junction solar cells. A typical as-fabricated solar cell shows an energy conversion efficiency of ~1.25%.
A simple and scalable graphene patterning method and its application in CdSe nanobelt/graphene Schottky junction solar cells
Yu Ye, Lin Gan, Lun Dai, Yu Dai, Xuefeng Guo, Hu Meng, Bin Yu, Zujin Shi, Kuanping Shang and Guogang Qin
Nanoscale, 2011, DOI: 10.1039/C0NR00999G
Carbon nanotubes can enhance plant growth without damaging plant cells, say scientists from India
Sabyasachi Sarkar and colleagues from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur treated chickpea plants with up to 6ug/ml of water soluble carbon nanotubes. They found that the nanotubes increased the growth rate in every part of the plant – in the roots, shoots and branches.
Sarkar thought that the channels could be replicated by carbon nanotubes. ‘We followed Thomas Edison’s recipe to make carbonised filament from bamboo or wood wool in his electric bulb to get the carbon nanotubes,‘ he adds. ‘Of course, we had to derivatise them to make them water soluble.’ The team achieved this by attaching carboxylic acid groups to the surface of the tubes.
‘The work seems to support the positive effect of carbon nanotubes,’ says Xiaohong Fang, an expert in the use of carbon nanotubes as molecular transporters in plants at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China. However, she points out that the biological effects on plants may differ depending on the materials’ chemical and physical properties, plant type and cultivation conditions.
Read the rest of the Chemistry World story by Elinor Richards
View the Nanoscale article in full:
Growth stimulation of gram (Cicer arietinum) plant by water soluble carbon nanotubes
Shweta Tripathi, Sumit Kumar Sonkar and Sabyasachi Sarkar
Nanoscale, 2011, DOI: 10.1039/c0nr00722f
This month’s issue includes a collection of articles on the theme surface nanotechnology for biological applications
This themed issue is Guest Edited by Professor Marcus Textor, Professor Darrell Irvine and Professor Xingyu Jiang. It includes a Review by Antonio Nanci et al. on Nanoscale surface modifications of medically relevant metals: state-of-the art and perspectives and a Communication by Molly Stevens, Kinetic investigation of bioresponsive nanoparticle assembly as a function of ligand design, as well as much, much more!
Cover image
The cover image highlights the paper by Nicholas Melosh and colleagues and shows that the stability of nanoscale hydrophobic bands inside the hydrophobic core of lipid membranes depends on their relative size.
Nanoscale patterning controls inorganic–membrane interface structure
Benjamin D. Almquist, Piyush Verma, Wei Cai and Nicholas A. Melosh
Nanoscale, 2011, 3, 391-400
Want to read more about our themed issues? Please visit the ‘ Themed Issues’ page on our website.
Effect of surface charge of polyethyleneimine-modified multiwalled carbon nanotubes on the improvement of polymerase chain reaction
Xueyan Cao, Jingjing Chen, Shihui Wen, Chen Peng, Mingwu Shen and Xiangyang Shi
Nanoscale DOI:10.1039/C0NR00833H
There are a vast number of potential applications for carbon nanotubes in many areas of science today, but current uses are mostly associated with their structural properties in bulk quantities. However, there is a vast amount of research being conducted on how the nanoscale properties of carbon nanotubes can be used to perform precise actions at a molecular level. This concept is of particular interest in biomedical science, where fine control of interactions with biomolecules and biological structures is of great importance in developing new diagnostic and therapeutic techniques.
Considering applications of carbon nanotubes in biology, scientists in China have conducted a systematic study of how the surface charge of multi-walled carbon nanotubes affects their performance as additives in polymerase chain reactions (PCR), which are of high importance in molecular biology. Cao et al. at Donghua University, Shanghai, used polyethyleneimine (PEI)-modified multiwalled carbon nanotubes with different surface charge polarities, and showed that positively charged nanotubes could significantly enhance the specificity and efficiency of PCR, even when used at a low concentration.
Polymerase chain reactions are of fundamental importance in molecular biology as a gene amplification technique, where the copying yield of a targeted gene can be increased drastically. However, the technique suffers from low specificity and efficiency, and therefore optimisation procedures are essential. Unfortunately, as the mechanism is complex, this optimisation is not easily achieved. Nanoparticles have been studied as potential solutions to these problems due to their unique physicochemical properties, and indeed carbon nanotubes have been shown to be good additives for PCR optimization. However, this study in China is the first report relating to the optimization of PCR using CNTs with different surface charge polarities, and it represents an exciting development in the field.
To read the whole article, click here.
Biomineral nanoparticles are space-filling
Li Yang, Christopher E. Killian, Martin Kunz, Nobumichi Tamura and P. U. P. A. Gilbert
Nanoscale, 2011, 3, 603-609
Sea urchin biominerals are known to form from aggregating nanoparticles of amorphous calcium carbonate, which then crystallize into macroscopic single crystals of calcite. The group measured the surface areas of these biominerals, finding them to be comparable to those of space-filling macroscopic geologic calcite crystals. These biominerals are therefore different from synthetic mesocrystals, which are always porous. Based on this results, the group proposes that space-filling amorphous calcium carbonate is the structural precursor for echinoderm biominerals.
Mollusk shells, corals, and echinoderm biominerals have remarkable mechanical properties, making them the object of many studies to shed some light on their formation mechanisms.
Read the whole article now
Article submitted as part of the Themed Issue on Crystallization and Formation Mechanisms of Nanostructures, read the issue here
The latest top ten most accessed Nanoscale articles
See the most-read papers of January 2011 here:
Nanoscale Themed Issue announcement:
Modelling for the nanoscale
Guest Editors:
Amanda Barnard (CSIRO, Australia)
Changming Li (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Ruhong Zhou (IBM Watson & Columbia University, USA)
Yuliang Zhao (NCNST, China)
Submission deadline: 15 August 2011
The issue will be published in early 2012 and aims to address the recent developments in the field of modelling applied to the nanoscale. This will include studies on CNT-protein and CNT-water interactions (including other nanoparticles and soft matter), confinement and catalysis, DNA-nanopore interactions and sequencing, nanomaterial-environmental interaction modelling, modelling of nanoparticles and nanomaterials (both QM and MM), nucleation, growth and transformations and optical properties of nanostructures as well as modelling of nanotoxicity.
Don’t miss the deadline, submit your contribution before the 15th August 2011.
New Nanoscale Communication
Dongsheng Guan, Judith A. Jeevarajan and Ying Wang
Nanoscale, DOI: 10.1039/c0nr00939c
A group of scientists in America have developed a method to put an Al2O3 ‘nano-coating’ on LiMn2O4 cathodes, which results in significantly enhanced performance of the cathode. They claim that this method can be generalised to other electrode materials and a variety of surface coatings in order to significantly improve battery performance.
LiMn2O4 has been widely investigated for use in lithium-ion batteries due to its unique advantages such as high specific capacity and output voltage, and the fact that it is low-cost, abundant and environmentally friendly. However, LiMn2O4 does suffer from a critical problem: it is unstable in the presence of electrolytes and suffers from capacity degradation during cycling. This seriously limits the practical applications of an otherwise very promising material.
Ying Wang and his co-workers used atomic layer deposition (ALD) to deposit the Al2O3 coating on LiMn2O4 cathodes. This method allows fine control over the thickness and conformation of the thin films, and allowed the group to create ultra-thin coatings on the cathodes. Theses ‘nano-coated’ cathodes were then compared with bare cathodes to study differences in electrochemical performance. The group discovered that the Al2O3 coating reduced dissolution of manganese ions from the cathode into the electrolyte, and also reduced decomposition of the electrolyte at the cathode surface. This resulted in a significantly enhanced cycling performance of the LiMn2O4 cathode.
To read more about this study, click here.
Nanoscale Hot Article: just published
In these structures, the three critical components of a battery (cathode, separator/electrolyte, and anode) are assembled internally as tri-continuous nanoscopic phases in three steps: First, the formation of a monolithic manganese oxide ambigel nanoarchitecture. Second, the electrodeposition of a conformal ultrathin polymer (separator/electrolyte). And third, the infiltration of a counter insertion electrode (RuO2) within the residual interconnected free volume.
Using Transmission Electron Microscopy, Jeffrey Long and Debra Rolison (US Naval Research Laboratory) and their colleagues have characterized the architectures that contain all three components for a solid-state energy storage device within a void volume of tens of nanometres and have nanometre-thick distances between the opposing electrodes.
Read the article now
Architectural integration of the components necessary for electrical energy storage on the nanoscale and in 3D
Christopher P. Rhodes, Jeffrey W. Long, Katherine A. Pettigrew, Rhonda M. Stroud and Debra R. Rolison
Nanoscale, 2011, DOI: 10.1039/C0NR00731E
