Sarkar started her career thinking about nanoelectronics. A physicist and electrical engineer by training, she spent years making ever-smaller transistors, chasing increasingly low power consumption, until she recognized that the most energy-efficient computer on Earth was actually in the human skull. The brain runs on roughly as much power as a dim lightbulb, and Sarkar says modern computing systems consume about a million times that amount to do comparable work. But the lack of treatments for brain diseases got her interested in building tools to understand—and heal—the brain. She began to think about how nanoscale electronics, fused into biological structures, might do things medicine had never managed. The result, developed over more than seven years, is a platform she calls circulatronics: nanoscale electronic devices capable of navigating the body’s fluid systems, identifying diseased tissue, and providing wireless therapeutic stimulation—no surgery, holes in the skull, or $100,000 procedure required. In collaboration with the Mayo Clinic, she’s shown in mice that precise electrical stimulation can halt tumor growth in cases where standard treatments have failed. The technology may not arrive in time for the girl whose father wrote to her. But Sarkar believes clinical trials to test the platform could begin within...

Covering quantum tech, nanoelectronics, energy, and biomedicine, LDM publishes high-impact research on 0D, 1D, and 2D materials. It focuses on innovative synthesis, advanced characterization, and tran...

By successfully wiring uncapped one-dimensional carbon chains directly to gold electrodes, Morris et al. unlocked nearly length-independent, quasi-ballistic charge transport, experimentally achieving the long-sought theoretical limit of carbyne for molecular nanoelectronics.

Single-molecule electromagnets are currently limited to generating weak magnetic fields in µT range. Shi et al. demonstrate in theory that radially π-conjugated carbon structures can sustain amplified...

Driving an electric current through a molecule can create a magnetic field. Yet in practice, such fields are often too weak to be detected experimentally. Through theoretical modeling, researchers at ...

Leakage current affects the operation and reliability of electronic devices, but obtaining accurate measurements of leakage current across two-dimensional (2D) materials has been difficult. This artic...