Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have made tungsten disulfide nanotubes which point in the same direction when formed, for the first time. They used a sapphire surface under carefully controlled conditions to form arrayed tungsten disulfide nanotubes, each consisting of rolled nanosheets, using chemical vapor deposition. The team's technique resolves the long-standing issue of jumbled orientations in collected amounts of nanotubes, promising real world device applications for the exotic anisotropy of single nanotubes.