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Scientists have created the world's thinnest balloon, made of a single layer of carbon just one atom thick.The fabric that the balloon is made of is leakproof to even the tiniest airborne molecules. It could find use in "aquariums" smaller than a red blood cell, through which scientists could peer at molecules, researchers suggested.The balloon is made of graphite, as found in pencils, which is made of atom-thin sheets of carbon stacked on top of each other known. The sheets are known as graphene.Graphene is highly electrically conductive, and scientists are feverishly researching whether it could find use in advanced circuitry and other devices."We were studying little graphene trampolines, and by complete accident, we made a graphene sheet over a hole. Then we started studying it, and saw that it was trapping gas inside," said researcher Paul McEuen, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.By experimenting further with bubbles made of graphene, McEuen...

Nanotechnology companies need to do more to understand potential toxic effects of their products, a senior UK researcher has warned. Professor Anthony Seaton, of Aberdeen University, said "very little" was still known about the health impacts of particles engineered at small scales. His concern over nanoparticles covered production and lab workers as well as consumers, he told a conference. Businesses counter by saying there are already strict safety regulations. "It's not like nanotechnology is appearing totally out of the blue in a completely non-regulated framework," said Dr Paul Reip, interim spokesperson for the Nanotechnology Industry Association (NIA) and founder of Qinetiq Nanomaterials. "We're concerned as anybody else about the safety of our colleagues, workers and the products that we sell," he told the BBC News website. Some of those existing regulations are imposed by the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), which is...

When light passes through material such as glass, a portion of its energy is lost as it reflects off the material’s surface. Researchers at Japan’s Institute of Physical and Chemical Research ( Riken ) have come up with a theoretical design for preventing this phenomenon from occurring. The researchers have designed a prism of engineered material — metamaterial comprised of an arrangement of nano-coils of precious metals such as gold or silver — embedded in a solid glass-like material. The prism structure has a negative refractive index, which makes it truly transparent to light, allowing it to pass freely through with no reflection. In the future, this type of metamaterial prism could lead to improvements in low-loss fiber optic communications, the development of telescopes and cameras well-suited for dark subjects, and the emergence of optical equipment we have never seen before. [ PinkTentacle ]