nanotechnology

There's currently no way to tell whether frozen food has stayed frozen during the journey from its original source to your local supermarket freezer. But a group of chemists from India has used chemistry and nanotechnology to come up with an environmentally friendly biosensor. The device may be useful in determining the integrity of frozen food by a simple color change.
One way to learn about how antibiotics work is to visualize their accumulation within bacterial cells. But this is no easy feat. So, a team of researchers from Penn State University and the pharmaceutical and biotechnology giant Novartis set about inventing a new technique.
It's widely believed that a "bed of nails" surface destroys bacteria through puncturing the cell wall. But new research, based on extensive use of various microscopy techniques, a team of Australian and Nigerian have shown that an entirely different killing mechanism may be at play.
A new nanostructured material selectively destroys bacteria, while leaving eukaryotic cells alone. Antibacterial surfaces such as this are needed for medical devices.