Guy Le Lay says he's working his way down the periodic table. In 2012, he was the senior scientist on a research team that was the first to prove it had created silicene, a one-atom-thick array of silicon atoms. Silicene is the silicon equivalent of graphene, which is a flat array of carbon atoms with a number of potential applications in super fast computing. Silicon also happens to be just below carbon on the periodic table. Now, Le Lay and his colleagues are publishing evidence that they've made germanene, a material made of a single layer of atoms of germanium, the next element down the list.

Yesterday, a post by Slate's Jude Stewart, author of ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color, revealed the history of the blue in blue jeans. The story makes a nice, if somewhat predictable, narrative, but one detail stood out to me. "Unlike most natural dyes that, when heated, penetrate cloth fibers directly," wrote Stewart, "indigo binds externally to the cloth's threads, coaxed by a chemical agent called a mordant."

"Everything, when miniaturized to the sub-100-nanometre scale, has new properties, regardless of what it is," says Chad Mirkin, professor of chemistry (and materials science, engineering, medicine, biomedical engineering and chemical and biological engineering) at Northwestern University. This is what makes nanoparticles the materials of the future. They have strange chemical and physical properties compared to their larger-particle kin. The thing that matters about nanoparticles is their scale.