Published in Chemistry World, 14 Aug 2009
Researchers in the US and Germany have found that the speed of synthetic ‘nanomotors’ responds to nearby concentrations of silver. The discovery suggests that nanomotors could be used to detect trace levels of silver and other toxic substances in water supplies – a practice that has previously required bulky instrumentation.
Nanomotors are nano-sized machines that can convert energy into motion. For a long time the only known nanomotors were biological and made from natural proteins, but in the last decade scientists have been able to create synthetic nanomotors with similar activity. […]
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