Using a carbon nanotube instead of traditional silicon, Cornell researchers have created the basic elements of a solar cell that hopefully will lead to much more efficient ways of converting light to electricity than now used in calculators and on rooftops.

People aren't the only ones who've got rhythm. Two reports published online on April 30th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveal that birds – and parrots in particular – can also bob their heads, tap their feet, and sway their bodies along to a musical beat.

In the quest to pack ever-smaller electronic devices more densely with integrated circuits, nanotechnology researchers keep running up against some unpleasant truths: higher current density induces electromigration and thermomigration, phenomena that damage metal conductors and produce heat, which leads to premature failure of devices.

That's essentially the finding of a team of Rice University researchers who have created hybrid carbon nanotube metal oxide arrays as electrode material that may improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries.

After announcing last April a method for growing exceptionally long, straight, numerous and well-aligned carbon cylinders only a few atoms thick, a Duke University-led team of chemists has now modified that process to create exclusively semiconducting versions of these single-walled carbon nanotubes.

Owing to the novel properties of carbon nanotubes (CBNs), a series of problems associated with in vitro toxicity assessments of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have appeared in many literatures. In order to properly evaluate the potential risk to human health, the cell toxicity assay of CBNs can not be conducted by traditional methods employed in common toxicology.

Research done by scientists in Italy and Switzerland has shown that carbon nanotubes may be the ideal "smart" brain material. Their results, published December 21 in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Nanotechnology, are a promising step forward in the search to find ways to "bypass" faulty brain wiring.

Using highly uniform samples of carbon nanotubes—sorted by centrifuge for length—materials scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have made some of the most precise measurements yet of the concentrations at which delicate mats of nanotubes become transparent, conducting sheets.

A fresh discovery about the way water behaves inside carbon nanotubes could have implications in fields ranging from the function of ultra-tiny high-tech devices to scientists' understanding of biological processes, according to researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Singled-walled carbon nanotubes are graphene sheets wrapped into tubes, and are typically made up of various sizes and with different amounts of twist (also known as chiralities).

Researchers have overcome a major obstacle in producing transistors from networks of carbon nanotubes, a technology that could make it possible to print circuits on plastic sheets for applications including flexible displays and an electronic skin to cover an entire aircraft to monitor crack formation.

Researchers have identified a signature for water inside single-walled carbon nanotubes, helping them understand how water is structured and how it moves within these tiny channels.