Iron is a bioactive trace element in seawater that regulates photosynthetic carbon dioxide drawdown and export from surface waters by phytoplankton in upward of 40% of the world's oceans. While autonomous sensor arrays are beginning to provide high-resolution data on temporal and spatial scales for some key oceanographic parameters, current analytical methods for iron are not amenable to autono...

We extend the recently developed near-field (NF) method to include an arbitrary number of dielectrics. NF assumes that the dipoles and fields respond instantaneously to the density, without retardation. The central task in NF is the solution of the Poisson equation for every time step, which is here done by a conjugate gradient method which handles any dielectric distribution. The optical respo...

Breast cancer accounted for 15 per cent of total cancer deaths in female patients in 2010. Although significant progress has been made in treating early-stage breast cancer patients, there is still no effective therapy targeting late-stage metastatic breast cancers except for the conventional chemotherapy interventions. Until effective therapy for later-stage cancers emerges, the identification...

Nanomechanical Properties of Cementitious Materials Paramita Mondal Although cementitious construction materials are mainly used in a large scale and in huge quantities, fundamental properties such as strength, ductility, creep, shrinkage, and fracture behavior depend, to a great extent, on structural elements and phenomena which are effective at the microand nanoscale. This research involves c...

Here a luminescent hybrid nanostructure based on functionalized quantum dots (QDs) is used as a fluorescent imaging agent able to target selectively mitochondria thanks to the molecular recognition of the translocator protein (TSPO). The selective targeting of such an 18 kDa protein mainly located in the outer mitochondrial membrane and overexpressed in several pathological states including neu...

In this work, we have obtained nanoplasmonic silver structures deposited on the glass substrates by combining sol-gel technology and direct silver ion reduction on the film surfaces. The key point of the work was the usage of polyethylene glycol 400 (PEG 400) both as the pore former and reducing agent for silver ions. We have investigated the influence of PEG 400 amount on the formation of silv...

This themed issue continues the focus on the recent developments of nanoscaled theranostic systems for early and accurate disease diagnosis, especially cancer diagnosis, as well as effective cancer treatment and management.

As a bi-functional cancer treatment agent, a new hybrid nanostructure is presented which can be used for photothermal therapy by exposure to one order of magnitude lower laser powers compared to similar nanostructures in addition to substantial enhancment in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast. This gold-iron oxide hybrid nanostructure (GIHN) is synthesized by a cost-effective and high yi...

This paper presents a method for measuring the optical absorption cross-sections (σ(a)) of Au-Ag nanocages and Au nanorods. The method is based on photoacoustic (PA) imaging, where the detected signal is directly proportional to the absorption coefficient (μ(a)) of the nanostructure. For each type of nanostructure, we firstly obtained μ(a) from the PA signal by benchmarking against a linear cal...

In this article, we review gas sensor application of one-dimensional (1D) metal-oxide nanostructures with major emphases on the types of device structure and issues for realizing practical sensors. One of the most important steps in fabricating 1D-nanostructure devices is manipulation and making electrical contacts of the nanostructures. Gas sensors based on individual 1D nanostructure, which w...