CLUMPS of wet hair could be the latest thing in nanotechnology, creating microscopic spiral structures that may form drug delivery systems and surfaces whose colour can be tuned.
While nature makes use of spiral structures of all sizes, engineers have found it hard to create small spirals. “We can make helical structures on the molecular scale and on macroscales, but at the level of nanometres and micrometres it has never been achieved,” says Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard University.
Now Aizenberg and her team have found a way to make nanospirals self-assemble. They start with an array of epoxy-resin bristles,…
