Self-Raising Flower

Sometimes nature reveals familiar shapes in strange places. This delicate nanoflower (artificially coloured red) is 10,000 times smaller than a rose. It’s made from organic chemicals that self-assemble in a laboratory dish, blooming in repeating patterns over a couple of hours that mimic flowers in springtime. Aside from being a perfect Valentine’s gift, nanoflowers are exciting researchers due to strange properties that are still being investigated. For example, nanoflower 'petals' vibrate and spin under certain types of radiation, quickly heating up. A bunch of nanoflowers injected into a tumour could be targeted with a blast of radiation to locally overheat the cancer without affecting the rest of the body. This is very much biomedical science of the future, but this nanoflower is the first of its kind to bloom underwater, a first step to investigating their use sloshing about in the fluid environments of the human body.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image from work by Rajesh S Bhosale and colleagues
• School of Applied Sciences, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in Scientific Reports, September 2015