At the top of the list is the work done by Angela Belcher and her team at MIT in using viruses to self-assemble carbon nanotubes for use in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), about which the inventor of DSSCs, Michael Grätzel, remarked to me recently, “That’s a real breakthrough—we can learn a lot from her fascinating experiment.”
It’s an interesting list of research and opinion. On the opinion side, I was glad to see the publishers made available for everyone with or without a subscription a take on the toxicity of nanoparticles entitled “The dose makes the poison“ that mirrors some of my own thoughts on the topic.
While some of the research I have covered, I have not reported a majority of the research listed on the pages of this blog. I have, however, recently highlighted some of the other work of the lead researchers, such as MIT researcher Michael Strano.
The most intriguing of the studies I have not covered are the Dutch-Swiss research into “Single-Molecule Transport Across an Individual Biomimetic Nuclear Pore Complex” (which in my defense was only published last week) and the South Korean and Japanese paper “Roll-to-Roll Production of 30-Inch Graphene Films for Transparent Electrodes.”As I said, this is the first time I’ve seen this feature in Nature, so I will need to check back again and look to see if they offer it on some of their other journals, such as Nature Photonics and Nature Materials.
