Gold nanoparticles quickly detect hazardous chemicals

Scientists have developed a system to quickly detect trace amounts of chemicals like pollutants, explosives or illegal drugs. The new system can pick out a single target molecule from 10,000 trillion water molecules within milliseconds, by trapping it on a self-assembling single layer of gold nanoparticles. The technology opens the way to develop devices that are compact, reusable and easy to assemble, and could have a range of uses including detecting illegal drugs, explosives, pollutants in rivers or nerve gases released into the air.

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