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You might expect something called a deep-sea dragonfish to be a fearsome leviathan of the deep, dark ocean — and it is, if you happen to be one of the thumb-size ocean critters the dragonfish calls prey. Dragonfish (genus Aristostomias) are wee (only about 6 inches long), eel-like predators with massive, fang-lined jaws that can yawn open at 120-degree angles. These gaping chompers allow dragonfish to devour prey more than half of their size, but their hunting success also depends on another near-supernatural adaptation: invisibility. While dragonfish bodies give off a faint, bioluminescent glow, their teeth are almost completely transparent,...

Chemists in Japan have created the first material that can undergo a photoreversible transition from metal to semiconductor. The breakthrough heralds applications in ultra high density data storage, with 500 times the density of a Blu-ray disc.The past decade has seen a growing interest in ways to switch the physical properties of matter. Temperature and pressure can both turn materials, say, from insulators to metals, or from non-magnetic to magnetic, but they are difficult to control in complex memory devices. As a result, researchers have been looking at photoinduced phase transitions, for which the key stimulus is laser light. Recently, laser...

American chemists have developed an 'electronic glue' to link nanocrystals together - allowing groups of the crystals to be highly conductive. Since nanocrystals have unique optical and electrical properties, this research could provide some exciting new materials for use in light-emitting devices or solar cells.Nanocrystals are crystalline nanoparticles of metals ranging from cadmium to silicon, and can be grown with precisely controlled size and shape. But despite their exciting range of optical properties, they have found few applications so far. 'The problem is getting the crystals to 'talk' to one another,' says Maksym Kovalenko, lead author on the project at the...

For more than a decade, scientists have been frustrated in their attempts to create continuously emitting light sources from individual molecules because of an optical quirk called "blinking," but now scientists at the University of Rochester have uncovered the basic physics behind the phenomenon, and along with researchers at the Eastman Kodak Company, created a nanocrystal that constantly emits light. The findings, detailed online in today's issue of Nature, may open the door to dramatically less expensive and more versatile lasers, brighter LED lighting, and biological markers that track how a drug interact with a cell at a level never...