Engineering articles within Nature

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  • News & Views |

    Nanoparticles that generate light through a mechanism known as second harmonic generation have been used to image live tissue. The particles overcome many problems associated with fluorescent probes for bioimaging.

    • Bruce E. Cohen

  • News & Views |

    Do excited molecules relaxing to their ground state pass through a 'seam' connecting the potential energy profiles of the states? Experimental data suggest the answer to this long-standing question is 'yes'. See Letter p. 440

    • Todd J. Martinez

  • News & Views |

    Tiny holes have been drilled through individual layers of graphene — atomically thin sheets of carbon — using an electron beam. These nanopores might be useful for the ultrarapid sequencing of single DNA molecules.

    • Hagan Bayley

  • News |

    Programmable sheet puckers up spontaneously into an aeroplane or a boat.

    • Philip Ball

  • Letter |

    Network theory has become pervasive in all sectors of biology, from biochemical signalling to human societies, but identification of relevant functional communities has been impaired by many nodes belonging to several overlapping groups at once, and by hierarchical structures. These authors offer a radically different viewpoint, focusing on links rather than nodes, which allows them to demonstrate that overlapping communities and network hierarchies are two faces of the same issue.

    • Yong-Yeol Ahn
    • , James P. Bagrow
    •  & Sune Lehmann

  • Letter |

    Interactions between microscopic particles are usually described as two-body interactions, although it has been shown that higher-order multi-body interactions could give rise to new quantum phases with intriguing properties. Here, effective six-body interactions are demonstrated in a system of ultracold bosonic atoms in a three-dimensional optical lattice.

    • Sebastian Will
    • , Thorsten Best
    •  & Immanuel Bloch

  • News & Views |

    An elastic polymer has been made whose molecular structure mimics that of titin, a protein found in muscle. The resulting material is tough, stretchy and dissipates energy — just like muscle itself.

    • Elliot L. Chaikof

  • News Feature |

    Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, largely forgotten as attention turned to biofuels and batteries, are staging a comeback. Jeff Tollefson investigates.

    • Jeff Tollefson

  • Books & Arts |

    Engineering biological systems and organisms is a costly team effort and may be incompatible with an open-source regulatory environment, finds Michael A. Goldman.

    • Michael A. Goldman

  • News & Views |

    A study of failures in interconnected networks highlights the vulnerability of tightly coupled infrastructures and shows the need to consider mutually dependent network properties in designing resilient systems.

    • Alessandro Vespignani

  • Letter |

    A challenge in the semiconductor industry is to create integrated circuits that use new physical state variables — other than charge or voltage — to offer memory and logic functions. Memristive devices, which combine the electrical properties of a memory element and a resistor, use resistance instead, and here such 'memristors' are shown to perform logic operations as well.

    • Julien Borghetti
    • , Gregory S. Snider
    •  & R. Stanley Williams

  • Letter |

    Ultracold polar molecules offer the possibility of exploring quantum gases with interparticle interactions that are strong, long-range and spatially anisotropic. Here, dipolar collisions in an ultracold gas of fermionic potassium–rubidium molecules have been experimentally observed. The results show how the long-range dipolar interaction can be used for electric-field control of chemical reaction rates in an ultracold gas of polar molecules.

    • K.-K. Ni
    • , S. Ospelkaus
    •  & D. S. Jin

  • Books & Arts |

    A proposed reinvention for urban motoring based on ultra-small electric vehicles does not address the bigger environmental or social challenges, finds Daniel Sperling.

    • Daniel Sperling

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