A Top-10 Nanotechnology List Worth Reading

My aversion to top-5 or top-10 nanotechnology lists is powerful. However, Nature Nanotechnology has overcome my disgust with the top-10 idea and listed its top-10 most-downloaded articles in the last few weeks. I don’t know if this is a new or an established feature of the publication, but it is the first time I’ve seen it.

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.