(PhysOrg.com) -- Carbon nanotubes - tiny, rolled-up tubes of graphite - promise to add speed to electronic circuits and strength to materials like carbon composites, used in airplanes and racecars. A major problem, however, is that the metals used to grow nanotubes react unfavorably with materials found in circuits and composites. But now, researchers at MIT have for the first time shown that nanotubes can grow without a metal catalyst. The researchers demonstrate that zirconium oxide, the same compound found in cubic zirconia `fake diamonds,` can also grow nanotubes, but without the unwanted side effects of metal.

In a paper published this week in Science, a Manchester team lead by Nobel laureates Professor Andre Geim and Professor Konstantin Novoselov has literally opened a third dimension in graphene research. Their research shows a transistor that may prove the missing link for graphene to become the next silicon.

In order to find a method for more cost-effective data storage, a group of researchers from the DFG-Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan have created a DNA-based “write-once-read-many-times” (WORM) memory device.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Because of its physical limitations, silicon use in tiny integrated logic circuits will have to one day soon be replaced by something that can work in a smaller state. That is, if we want to see miniaturization of computer components to continue. For several years, graphene has been ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A relatively fast, easy and inexpensive technique for inducing nanorods - rod-shaped semiconductor nanocrystals - to self-assemble into one-, two- and even three-dimensional macroscopic structures has been developed by a team of researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). This technique should enable more effective use ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- In optical devices designed and used to collect light, there has always been a loss of light due to reflection, now, new research by a team of physicists from Spain and England has found, via calculation, that if charged graphene disks of just the right size were made ...

Rice University scientists have created a nano-infused oil that could greatly enhance the ability of devices as large as electrical transformers and as small as microelectronic components to shed excess heat.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Engineers have built the first carbon nanotube (CNT) transistor with a channel length below 10 nm, a size that is considered a requirement for computing technology in the next decade. Not only can the tiny transistor sufficiently control current, it does so significantly better than predicted by theory. ...