During the recent Materials Research Society (MRS) spring meeting, Professor A. Paul Alivisatos of UC-Berkeley described, as part of his Kavli plenary lecture in nanosicence, recent work by his group and others on transformations in nanocrystals. Ed Korczynski, Senior Technical Editor of Solid State Technology reports on this and other happenings at the event, including nanoscale structures that can switch between measurable states to function as memory cells.