After powering the micro-electronics revolution, silicon could carve out an important new role in speeding the debut of ultra-clean fuel cell vehicles powered by hydrogen, researchers in China suggest. Their calculations show for the first time that silicon nanotubes can store hydrogen more efficiently than their carbon nanotube counterparts.

A new method that uses nanotechnology to rapidly measure minute amounts of insulin is a major step toward developing the ability to assess the health of the body’s insulin-producing cells in real time.

When it comes to scientific breakthroughs, we usually leave the coverage to our science writers, because they have a fighting chance of understanding them.

Carbon nanotubes are attractive candidates for use as the active elements in the next generation of electronic devices. However, it has proven incredibly difficult to align nanotubes within device architectures.

Computers and electronic devices of the future will utilise technologies not currently available. An example of such a technology is the use of carbon nanotubes as interconnects for computer chips. This is now a step closer to reality with some new work from nanotechnology researchers within the Materials Ireland Polymer Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin.

There is nothing new about combining two materials to make a composite material with more desirable properties than the originals. Fibreglass has been a mainstay of the marine industry for decades and the construction industry is built on reinforced concrete.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed new ways to make or modify nanorods and nanotubes of titanium oxide, a material used in a variety of industrial and medical applications. The methods and new titanium oxide materials may lead to improved catalysts for hydrogen production, more efficient solar cells, and more protective sunscreens.

Mimicking the agile gecko, with its uncanny ability to run up walls and across ceilings, has long been a goal of materials scientists. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Akron have taken one sticky step in the right direction, creating synthetic "gecko tape" with four times the sticking power of the real thing.

In the quantum world, photons and electrons dance, bump and carry out transactions that govern everything we see in the world around us. In this week's issue of Science, French and U.S. scientists describe a new technique in nanotechnology that allowed them to zoom in - way in - and observe those quantum transactions on a single DNA-sized carbon molecule called a nanotube.

These tiny tubes are constructed from carbon atoms and they are so small that it takes about 100,000 laid side-by-side to span the width of a single human hair. In the last five years, scientists have discovered that some individual nanotubes are fluorescent. That is, they glow when they are bathed in light. Some glow brightly. Others glow dimly. Some glow in spots. Others glow all over.

Drug delivery systems have progressed from the teaspoon to time-release capsules to drug-eluting stents. Nanotechnology promises yet another advance by delivering therapeutic agents at desired rates exactly where needed in the body.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a system for manipulating and precisely positioning individual nanowires on semiconductor wafers.