More powerful batteries could help electric cars achieve a considerably larger range and thus a breakthrough on the market. Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry at ETH Zurich and Empa -Switzerland – have now developed a nanomaterial which enables considerably more power to be stored in lithium ion batteries. They provide power not only for electric cars, but also for electric bicycles, smartphones and laptops; nowadays, rechargeable lithium ion batteries are the storage media of choice when it comes to supplying a large amount of energy in a small space and light weight.

Monodisperse tin nanodroplets in an electron microscopic

During the development of the nanomaterial, the issue of the ideal size for the nanocrystals arose, which also carries the challenge of producing uniform crystals. “The trick here was to separate the two basic steps in the formation of the crystals – the formation of as small as a crystal nucleus as possible on the one hand and its subsequent growth on the other,” explains Maksym Kovalenko, head of the research team at ETH Zurich. By influencing the time and temperature of the growth phase, the scientists were able to control the size of the crystals. “We are the first to produce such small tin crystals with such precision,” says the scientist.

Source: http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/

A team of scientists from Polytechnique Montréal (Canada), Northwestern University (USA), and Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics (Germany) led by Professor Oussama Moutanabbir has made a fascinating discovery of a novel process to precisely functionalize nanowires. By using aluminum as a catalyst instead of the canonical gold, the team demonstrated that the growth of nanowires triggers a self-doping process involving the injection of aluminum atoms thus providing an efficient route to dope nanowires without the need of post-growth processing typically used in semiconductor industry. The scientists investigated this phenomenon at the atomistic-level using the emerging technique of highly focused ultraviolet laser-assisted atom-probe tomography to achieve three-dimensional atom-by-atom maps of individual nanowires.

The discovery provides myriad opportunities to create entirely new class of nanoscale devices by precisely tailoring shape and composition of nanowires. The results of their breakthrough will be published in Nature.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Researchers in the Sheffield Centre for Robotics, jointly established by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University – United Kingdom -, have been working to program a group of 40 robots, and say the ability to control robot swarms could prove hugely beneficial in a range of contexts, from military to medical.The researchers have demonstrated that the swarm can carry out simple fetching and carrying tasks, by grouping around an object and working together to push it across a surface.The robots can also group themselves together into a single cluster after being scattered across a room, and organize themselves by order of priority. Dr Roderich Gross, head of the Natural Robotics Lab, in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, says swarming robots could have important roles to play in the future of micromedicine, as ‘nanobots’ are developed for non-invasive treatment of humans.

“We are developing Artificial Intelligence to control robots in a variety of ways. The key is to work out what is the minimum amount of information needed by the robot to accomplish its task. That’s important because it means the robot may not need any memory, and possibly not even a processing unit, so this technology could work for nanoscale robots, for example in medical applications.” Dr Gross said.

Source: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/

A Stanford team has designed an entirely new form of cooling panel that works even when the sun is shining. Such a panel could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by radiating sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.
In the future we can imagine homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don’t heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more.

“People usually see space as a source of heat from the sun, but away from the sun outer space is really a cold, cold place,” explained Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering and the paper’s senior author. “We’ve developed a new type of structure that reflects the vast majority of sunlight, while at the same time it sends heat into that coldness, which cools manmade structures even in the day time.”

Source: http://engineering.stanford.edu/

A research team lead by Dr Peixuan Guo from the University of Kentucky (USA) have cracked a 35-year-old mystery about the workings of the natural motors that are serving as models for development of a futuristic genre of synthetic nanomotors that pump therapeutic DNA, RNA or drugs into individual diseased cells.

The importance of nanomotors in nanotechnology is akin to that of mechanical engines to daily life. The AAA+ superfamily is a class of nanomotors performing various functions. Their hexagonal arrangement facilitates bottom-up assembly for stable structures. Bacteriophage phi29 DNA-translocation motor contains three co-axial rings and viral DNA-packaging motor has been believed to be a rotational machine. However, the researchers found a revolution mechanism without rotation. By analogy, the earth revolves around the sun while rotating on its own axis.
Click here to enjoy the video

Source University of Kentucky: http://nanobio.uky.edu/
AND
ACS Nano: http://pubs.acs.org

A researcher from North Carolina State University has developed a technique for creating high-density ceramic materials that requires far lower temperatures than current techniques – and takes less than a second, as opposed to hours. Ceramics are used in a wide variety of technologies, including body armor, fuel cells, spark plugs, nuclear rods and superconductors. At issue is a process known as “sintering,” which is when ceramic powders (such as zirconia) are compressed into a desired shape and exposed to high heat until the powder particles are bound together into a solid, but slightly porous, material. But new research from Dr. Jay Narayan, John C. Fan Distinguished Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State, may revolutionize the sintering process.

“This technique allows you to achieve ‘theoretical density,’ meaning it eliminates all of the porosity in the material,” Narayan says. “This increases the strength of the ceramic, as well as improving its optical, magnetic and other properties.”
Source: http://news.ncsu.edu/

While the demand for ever-smaller electronic devices has spurred the miniaturization of a variety of technologies, one area has lagged behind in this downsizing revolution: energy-storage units, such as batteries and capacitors. Now, Richard Kaner, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Maher El-Kady, a graduate student in Kaner‘s laboratory, may have changed the game.The UCLA researchers have developed a groundbreaking technique that uses a DVD burner to fabricate micro-scale graphene-based supercapacitors — devices that can charge and discharge a hundred to a thousand times faster than standard batteries. These micro-supercapacitors, made from a one-atom–thick layer of graphitic carbon, can be easily manufactured and readily integrated into small devices such as next-generation pacemakers.The new cost-effective fabrication method, described in a study published this week in the journal Nature Communications, holds promise for the mass production of these supercapacitors, which have the potential to transform electronics .

“The integration of energy-storage units with electronic circuits is challenging and often limits the miniaturization of the entire system,” said Kaner,. “This is because the necessary energy-storage components scale down poorly in size and are not well suited to the planar geometries of most integrated fabrication processes.” “Traditional methods for the fabrication of micro-supercapacitors involve labor-intensive lithographic techniques that have proven difficult for building cost-effective devices, thus limiting their commercial application,” El-Kady said. “Instead, we used a consumer-grade LightScribe DVD burner to produce graphene micro-supercapacitors over large areas at a fraction of the cost of traditional devices. Using this technique, we have been able to produce more than 100 micro-supercapacitors on a single disc in less than 30 minutes, using inexpensive materials.”
Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/

Chad A. Mirkin, a researcher from Northwestern University, has developed a completely new set of building blocks that is based on nanoparticles and DNA. Using these tools, scientists will be able to build — from the bottom up, just as nature does — new and useful structures. Using nanoparticles and DNA, Mirkin has built more than 200 different crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. Some of the lattice types can be found in nature, but he also has built new structures that have no naturally occurring mineral counterpart.

“We have a new set of building blocks,” Mirkin said. “Instead of taking what nature gives you, we can control every property of the new material we make. We’ve always had this vision of building matter and controlling architecture from the bottom up, and now we’ve shown it can be done.”

Mirkin has presented his research in a session titled “Nucleic Acid-Modified Nanostructures as Programmable Atom Equivalents: Forging a New Periodic Table” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Physicists of the University of Vienna together with researchers from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna developed nano-machines which recreate principal activities of proteins. They present the first versatile and modular example of a fully artificial protein-mimetic model system, thanks to the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC), a high performance computing infrastructure. These “bionic proteins” could play an important role in innovating pharmaceutical research. The results have now been published in the journal “Physical Review Letters“.

Proteins are the fundamental building blocks of all living organism we currently know. Because of the large number and complexity of bio-molecular processes they are capable of, proteins are often referred to as “molecular machines“. Take for instance the proteins in your muscles: At each contraction stimulated by the brain, an uncountable number of proteins change their structures to create the collective motion of the contraction. This extraordinary process is performed by molecules which have a size of only about a nanometer, a billionth of a meter. Muscle contraction is just one of the numerous activities of proteins: There are proteins that transport cargo in the cells, proteins that construct other proteins, there are even cages in which proteins that “mis-behave” can be trapped for correction, and the list goes on and on. “Imitating these astonishing bio-mechanical properties of proteins and transferring them to a fully artificial system is our long term objective“, says Ivan Coluzza from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Vienna, who works on this project together with colleagues of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna.

Source: http://medienportal.univie.ac.at/

The design, synthesis, and running of a molecular nanovehicle on a surface assisted by proper nanocommunication channels for feeding and guiding the vehicle now constitute an active field of research and are no longer a nano-joke. In this Perspective, we describe how this field began, its growth, and problems to be solved. Better molecular wheels, a molecular motor with its own gears assembling for torque transmission must be mounted on (i.e., chemically bonded to) a good molecular chassis for the resulting covalently constructed molecular nanovehicle to run on a surface in a controlled manner at the atomic scale.

“We propose a yearly molecule concept nanocar contest to boost molecular nanovehicle research“, say Christian Joachim and Gwenael Rapenne from CEMES/CNRS, in Toulouse – France -, associated with A*Star (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) in Singapore.
source: http://www.cemes.fr/
AND
http://pubs.acs.org

An international team of scientists has taken the next step in creating nanoscale machines by designing a multi-component molecular motor that can be moved clockwise and counterclockwise. It’s an essential step in creating nanoscale devices—quantum machines that operate on different laws of physics than classical machines—that scientists envision could be used for everything from powering quantum computers to sweeping away blood clots in arteries.
Although researchers can rotate or switch individual molecules on and off, the new study is the first to create a stand-alone molecular motor that has multiple parts, said Saw-Wai Hla, an Ohio University professor of physics and astronomy who led the study with french researcher Christian Joachim (CEMES/CNRS) working with A*Star in Singapore and in France Gwenael Rapenne of CEMES/CNRS.

This illustration shows the structure of the molecular motors.
In the study, published in Nature Nanotechnology, the scientists demonstrated that they could control the motion of the motor with energy generated by electrons from a scanning tunneling microscope tip. The motor is about 2 nanometers in length and 1 nanometer high and was constructed on a gold crystal surface.
See other recent research by a Dutch team in this nanocomputer.com post: http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1015
Others researches: http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=614 AND http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=421

Source: http://www.cemes.fr/
AND
http://www.ohio.edu/

Alain Kaloyeros, who heads the University at Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE), said that New York is in a good position to face the mounting challenges within nanotechnology globally.
Kaloyeros, CEO of the nanocollege, writes that the cost for future nanotechnology development is rising “exponentially” and the cost for fabrication facilities, now at $5 billion, is expected to cost between $10 billion to $15 billion.
Those two factors are driving companies to join New York’s model focused on consortiums, where companies work on non-competitive research at “Switzerland-like innovation hubs.” Kaloyeros said in this model, New York acts “as the ‘referee’ by providing the leveled playing field for each consortium participant to leverage its investments and protect its competitivenes.

CNSE is based at the Albany NanoTech complex on Fuller Road in Albany, New York. The college has been the recipient of more than $14 billion in high-tech investments.
Its other sites are in Halfmoon, where it conducts solar energy research; Rochester, where its Smart System Technology and Commercialization Center of Excellence (STC) is located; and Utica, where its Center of Competency in Information Technologies is located.
The Albany NanoTech site is the epicenter of New York’s tech development. That was illustrated best last year when the state announced a $4.8 billion research project involving the world’s largest computer-chip manufacturers, including IBM, GlobalFoundries, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., and Intel.

Using the power of the sun and ultrathin films of iron oxide (commonly known as rust), Technion-Israel Institute of Technology researchers have found a novel way to split water molecules to hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough, published this week in Nature Materials, could lead to less expensive, more efficient ways to store solar energy in the form of hydrogen-based fuels. This could be a major step forward in the development of viable replacements for fossil fuels.

“Our approach is the first of its kind,” says lead researcher Associate Prof. Avner Rothschild, of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. “We have found a way to trap light in ultrathin films of iron oxide that are 5,000 thinner than an office paper. This enables achieving high solar energy conversion efficiency and low materials and production costs. ”
Let’s remind that two days ago Swiss Scientists from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) – Switzerland – have declared that they are producing hydrogen from sunlight, water and rust. Their prototypes shared the same basic principle: a dye-sensitized solar cell – invented by Michael Grätzel, a colleague from University of Geneva, – combined with an oxide-based semiconductor. The device is completely self-contained. More on http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=4215

Source: http://www1.technion.ac.il/

Nano particles are a millionth of a millimeter in size, making them invisible to the human eye. Unless, that is, they are under the microscope of Prof. Madhavi Krishnan, a biophysicist at the University of Zurich (Switzerland). Prof. Krishnan has developed a new method that measures not only the size of the particles but also their electrostatic charge. Up until now it has not been possible to determine the charge of the particles directly. This unique method, which is the first of its kind in the world, is just as important for the manufacture of drugs as in basic research.

Put simply, particles with just a small charge make large circular movements in their traps, while those with a high charge move in small circles. This phenomenon can be compared to that of a light-weight ball which, when thrown, travels further than a heavy one. The US physicist Robert A. Millikan used a similar method 100 years ago in his oil drop experiment to determine the velocity of electrically charged oil drops. In 1923, he received the Nobel Prize in physics in recognition of his achievements. «But he examined the drops in a vacuum», Prof. Krishnan explains. «We on the other hand are examining nano particles in a solution which itself influences the properties of the particles».

Source. http://www.mediadesk.uzh.ch/articles/2012/riesenschritt-in-miniwelt-uzh-forscherin-misst-elektrische-ladung-von-nano-partikeln_en.html

How to raise the RAM memory limits of smartphones and tablets that limit the number of applications that can be run  at on time?  Elad Mentovich, a Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University, has made a vertical transistor based on a single carbon-60 molecule that he reckons could be the basis for both a logic transistor and a memory element. Major companies in the memory industry have already expressed interest in the technology, said Mentovich, 

Because the memory is a based on a single molecule of carbon in a spherical form it can be as small as one-nanometer in diameter, making it a candidate for post-CMOS integration. The molecular memory is ready to produced in existing wafer fabs Mentovich asserts. This new type of carbon-based transistors ramps up speed and memory for mobile devices.

Source: http://apl.aip.org/resource/1/applab/v99/i3/p033108_s1?isAuthorized=no

The first self- propelled microsubmarine has been designed in the laboratory of the Jacobs School of Nanoengineering (University of South California at San Diego)  by Dr Joseph Wang and his team.  The task of these microsubmarines is  to pick up droplets of oil from contaminated waters and transport them to collection facilities. The report concludes that these tiny machines could play an important role in cleaning up oil spills, like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico.

Joseph Wang and colleagues explain that different versions of microengines have been developed, including devices that could transport medications through the bloodstream to diseased parts of the body. But no one has ever shown that these devices – which are about 10 times smaller than the width of a human hair — could help clean up oil spills. There is an urgent need for better ways of separating oil from water in the oceans and inside factories to avoid releasing oil-contaminated water to the environment. Wang's team developed so-called microsubmarines, which require very little fuel and move ultrafast, to see whether these small engines could help clean up oil.
Source: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn301175b
To contact Joseph Wang: http://ne.ucsd.edu/~joewang/

Let's remind that a month ago a team from the University of Texas has experimented a nanotechnology based robot jellyfish. To see more click here.

 Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have developed a new catalyst that reversibly converts hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide to a liquid under very mild conditions. The work — described in a paper published online March 18, 2012, in Nature Chemistry — could lead to efficient ways to safely store and transport hydrogen for use as an alternative fuel.

“This is not the first catalyst capable of carrying out this reaction, but it is the first to work at room temperature, in an aqueous (water) solution, under atmospheric pressure — and that is capable of running the reaction in forward or reverse directions depending on the acidity of the solution,” said Brookhaven chemist Etsuko Fujita, who oversaw Brookhaven’s contributions to this research. “When the release of hydrogen is desired for use in fuel cells or other applications, one can simply flip the ‘pH switch’ on the catalyst to run the reaction in reverse,” said Brookhaven chemist James Muckerman, a co-author on the study. He noted that the liquid formic acid might also be used directly in a formic-acid fuel cell.

Source: http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=1400&template=Today

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas and Virginia Tech have created an undersea vehicle inspired by the common jellyfish that runs on renewable energy and could be used in ocean rescue and surveillance missions. In a study published this week in Smart Materials and Structures, scientists created a robotic jellyfish, dubbed Robojelly, that feeds off hydrogen and oxygen gases found in water.

“We’ve created an underwater robot that doesn’t need batteries or electricity,” said Dr. Yonas Tadesse, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UT Dallas and lead author of the study. “The only waste released as it travels is more water.” These muscles are made of a nickel-titanium alloy wrapped in carbon nanotubes, coated with platinum and housed in a pipe. As the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen encounters the platinum, heat and water vapor are created. That heat causes a contraction that moves the muscles of the device, pumping out the water and starting the cycle again. “It could stay underwater and refuel itself while it is performing surveillance,” Tadesse said.
CLICK HERE TO ENJOY THE VIDEO DEMONSTRATION

source: http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2012/3/22-16551_Researchers-Unveil-Robot-Jellyfish-That-Runs-on-Na_article-wide.html

Engineers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, known as PNNL, in Richland, WA – USA,, are conducting research that could go a long way toward making the cars more affordable — not necessarily to buy, but to operate. And that could ultimately make the cars more popular with the public. While internal-combustion engines generate a lot of heat, making it easy to heat the passenger cabin in winter, electric vehicles produce very little excess heat. As a result, providing electricity for the same amount of cabin heat can reduce their driving range by up to 40 percent. The researchers want to create a new, 5-pound molecular heat pump, the size of a 2-liter bottle, that would handle both heating and cooling and allow the cars to travel longer distances before they'd need to be plugged in again.

 Instead of using a conventional heat pump to control heating and air conditioning, the cars would be heated and cooled with a new class of nanomaterial — or an "electrical metal organic framework" 

"We're really just barely under way," said Pete McGrail, of Pasco, a laboratory fellow and engineer who has worked at PNNL for 29 years. "The vehicle is going to be more attractive because it's going to be able to travel longer distances on the same charge you're putting in overnight," McGrail said. "So it's going to make it more marketable, more attractive, and it's going to take less energy."
Source: http://energytech.pnnl.gov/research_areas/research_area_description.asp?id=202

How to kill cancer cells? To be effective, the drug carrier system needs to be able to identify and reach its target, and it needs to be able to release its payload at the target at the right time, or over a longer period of time.

Xian-Zheng Zhang, the Director of the Key Laboratory of Biomedical Polymers of Ministry of Education and a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Wuhan University in China, said, ."It is of great importance to design intelligent drug carriers that can specifically respond to physiopathological signals and allow explosive release of the loaded drugs while entrapping the drugs efficiently during the process of blood circulation," 

" Zhang and his team have designed and fabricated a system that could effectively keep the drug entrapped in its carrier in the blood and normal tissues, but would allow explosive drug release under the right physiopathological stimuli – an acidic environment – once the drug carrier reaches the cancerous tissue.

Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.201102132/full.

Scientists have developed a new kind of tiny motor — which they term a “microrocket” — that can propel itself through acidic environments, such as the human stomach, without any external energy source, opening the way to a variety of medical and industrial applications.  NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang  from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and colleagues explain that self-propelled nano- or microscale motors could have applications in targeted drug delivery or imaging in humans or as a way to monitor industrial applications, such as semiconductor processing. 

 Their report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society describes the microrockets traveling at virtual warp speed for such devices. A human moving at the same speed would have to run at a clip of 400 miles per hour.

Source: http://cse-ece-ucsd.blogspot.com/2012/01/microrockets-take-off-in-acid-joseph.html

 http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=223&content_id=CNBP_029267&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=96996c92-1151-4248-b179-70caa354ae77

Porofessor Yu Sun and his team at the Advanced Micro and Nanosystems Laboratory, University of Toronto, Canada,  have developed an automated vision-based nanomanipulation technique that, when used in conjunction with existing large-scale nano-assembly methods, is capable of precisely controlling the number of nanowires incorporated into each device. Reporting their findings in the January 17, 2012 online edition of Nanotechnology ("Automated nanomanipulation for nanodevice construction"), the team developed an automated visual serving algorithm for physically removing individual nanowires from an array of multi-nanowire transistor devices.

Click on the image to see lab's videos

.The batch microfabrication process we used is wafer-scale but has an uncontrolled number of bridging nanowires that also have significantly varying diameters," explains Yanliang Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow in Sun's group at the time of this work and the paper's first author. "Nanorobotic selective nanowire removal, despite being a serial process, permits precision control of the number and diameter of nanowires. Experimental results demonstrate that the nanorobotic system has a nano-FET device post-processing success rate of 95% (versus 48.3% for manual nanomanipulation) and has a speed of 1 min/device (versus 10.3 min/device)", he added.
Source: http://amnl.mie.utoronto.ca/index.php?page=videos&part=6

The tiny hairs on the abdomen of a cricket have inspired researchers at the University of Twente in Nederlands, to make a new type of sensor which is ultra sensitive to air flows. These synthetic cricket hairs can now also be tuned very precisely for a certain range of frequencies: the hairs are 10 times more sensitive in this range.

These hairs enable the cricket to feel/hear the approach of its enemies and estimate their distance and direction unerringly. These characteristics can be simulated by making a hair that is suspended in a flexible microsystem. The hair is made of polymer SU8, is 0.9 millimetre in length and is thicker at the base than at the top. The smallest movements are registered by the flexibly-suspended plate to which the hair is attached; the electrical capacity changes as a result and gives a measure for the movement. Potential applications include direction sensors used by robots and the study of very specific air flows. In the longer term, the synthetic hairs could also be used in hearing aids. The hairs can be made extra sensitive to certain frequencies in all these applications.
The researchers of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology are presenting these new results in the scientific journal Applied Physics Letters..
Source: http://www.utwente.nl/organization/stories/synthetic-cricket-pricks-up-its-ears

Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University have now introduced a new bubble-free, high efficient nanomotor system that involves the operation of a miniaturized copper-platinum nanobattery. Their work has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) ("Autonomous Nanomotor Based on Copper–Platinum Segmented Nanobattery"). In this paper, first-authored by Ran Liu, a Ph.D. researcher in Ayusman Sen's group, they demonstrate that this motor system is significantly more efficient than the previously described bimetallic systems, such as platinum-gold segmented nanorod in hydrogen peroxide.

 Click on the picture to see the astonishing video!

The nanomotor described by Liu and Sen is based on self-propelling of template-synthesized copper-platinum bimetallic nanowires in either bromine or iodine diluted solutions. The motion is due to self-electrophoresis induced by the redox reaction occurring at the two electrodes of the copper-platinum nanobattery.

Scientists at the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and at Empa (Switzerland) have successfully taken “a decisive step on the road to artificial nano-scale transport systems”. They have synthesised a molecule from four rotating motor units, i.e. wheels, which can travel straight ahead in a controlled manner. “To do this, our car needs neither rails nor petrol; it runs on electricity. It must be the smallest electric car in the world – and it even comes with 4-wheel drive” comments Empa researcher Karl-Heinz Ernst. Reduced to the max: the emission-free, noiseless 4-wheel drive car, jointly developed by Empa researchers and their Dutch colleagues, represents lightweight construction at its most extreme. The nano car consists of just a single molecule and travels on four electrically-driven wheels in an almost straight line over a copper surface. The “prototype” can be admired on the cover of the latest edition of «Nature».

The downside: the small car, which measures approximately 4×2 nanometres – about one billion times smaller than a VW Golf – needs to be refuelled with electricity after every half revolution of the wheels – via the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). Furthermore, due to their molecular design, the wheels can only turn in one direction. “In other words: there’s no reverse gear”, says Ernst, who is also a professor at the University of Zurich, laconically.
Source: http://www.empa.ch/plugin/template/empa/3/114118/—/l=2