On the line: Watching nanoparticles get in shape chemeurope.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from chemeurope.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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VIDEO: Imaging of the same spot shows that cracks eventually self-heal, an important trademark that maintains the integrity of structured liquids. Real-time video of 70 nm nanoparticles (red) and 500 nanometer. view more
Credit: Paul Ashby and Tom Russell/Berkeley Lab and Science Advances
Liquid structures - liquid droplets that maintain a specific shape - are useful for a variety of applications, from food processing to cosmetics, medicine, and even petroleum extraction, but researchers have yet to tap into these exciting new materials full potential because not much is known about how they form.
Now, a research team led by Berkeley Lab has captured real-time high-resolution videos of liquid structures taking shape as nanoparticle surfactants (NPSs) - soap-like particles just billionths of a meter in size - jam tightly together, side by side, to form a solid-like layer at the interface between oil and water.
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IMAGE: At left: Experimental PASSI (photon avalanche single-beam super-resolution imaging) images of thulium-doped avalanching nanoparticles separated by 300 nanometers. At right: PASSI simulations of the same material. view more
Credit: Berkeley Lab and Columbia University
Since the earliest microscopes, scientists have been on a quest to build instruments with finer and finer resolution to image a cell s proteins - the tiny machines that keep cells, and us, running. But to succeed, they need to overcome the diffraction limit, a fundamental property of light that long prevented optical microscopes from bringing into focus anything smaller than half the wavelength of visible light (around 200 nanometers or billionths of a meter) - far too big to explore many of the inner-workings of a cell.
Scientists design a rechargeable N95 mask with a custom fit medicalxpress.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from medicalxpress.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.