NanoComputer

Hydrogenation and hydrogenolysis reactions have huge applications in many key industrial sectors, including the petrochemical, pharmaceutical, food and agricultural industries. "In the petrochemical industry, for example, upgrading of oil to gasoline, and in making various biomass-derived products, you need to hydrogenate molecules — to add hydrogen – and all this happens through catalytic transformations," says Professor Manos  Mavrikakis. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Through an interaction with hydrogen atoms (green), a water molecule (magenta and blue) moves rapidly across a metal oxide surface. This atomic-scale speed leads to more efficient chemical reactions. 

In a recent research, Mavrikakis and Professor Besenbacher from the University of Aarhus, Denmark drew on their respective theoretical and experimental expertise to study metal oxides, a class of materials often used as catalysts or catalyst supports. They found that the presence of even the most minute amounts of water — on the order of those in an outer-space vacuum — can accelerate the diffusion of hydrogen atoms on iron oxide by 16 orders of magnitude at room temperature. In other words, water makes hydrogen diffuse 10,000 trillion times faster on metal oxides than it would have diffused in the absence of water. Without water, heat is needed to speed up that motion.

Source: http://www.news.wisc.edu/20697
Led by Manos Mavrikakis, the Paul A. Elfers professor of chemical and biological engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Flemming Besenbacher, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, the team published its findings in the May 18 issue of the journal Science. 

 A team led by materials scientist Yi Cui of Stanford and SLAC has found a solution: a cleverly designed double-walled nanostructure that lasts more than 6,000 cycles, far more than needed by electric vehicles or mobile electronics. Lithium-ion batteries are widely used to power devices from electric vehicles to portable electronics because they can store a relatively large amount of energy in a relatively lightweight package. 

The battery works by controlling the flow of lithium ions through a fluid electrolyte between its two terminals, called the anode and cathode. “This is a very exciting development toward our goal of creating smaller, lighter and longer-lasting batteries than are available today,” Cui said. 

Source: https://news.slac.stanford.edu/features/new-nanostructure-batteries-keeps-going-and-going

Ultrapowerful microscopes, computers and solar cells could result from the research on "hyperbolic metamaterials". Scientists from Purdue University have shown how to create the metamaterials without the traditional silver or gold previously required,Using the metals is impractical for industry because of high cost and incompatibility with semiconductor manufacturing processes. The metals also do not transmit light efficiently, causing much of it to be lost. The Purdue researchers replaced the metals with an "aluminum-doped zinc oxide," or AZO.

"This means we can have a completely new material platform for creating optical metamaterials, which offers important advantages," said Alexandra Boltasseva, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering."Alternative plasmonic materials such as AZO overcome the bottleneck created by conventional metals in the design of optical metamaterials and enable more efficient devices," Boltasseva adds : "We anticipate that the development of these new plasmonic materials and nanostructured material composites will lead to tremendous progress in the technology of optical metamaterials, enabling the full-scale development of this technology and uncovering many new physical phenomena."

Source: http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2012/120514BoltassevaHyperbolic.html

The semiconductor industry forecasts a doubling of  the performances of electronic components every 18 months. However, the current printing technology - lithography – has to address the physical constraints of ever-greater miniaturization of silicon chips. CEA-Leti in Paris and the french company Arkema, in association with LCPO (Laboratoire de Chimie des Polymères Organiques)  of Bordeaux – France, have succeeded in going beyond the boundaries of the infinitely small by showing the unique resolution potential of lithography based on nanostructured polymers. These initial results meet the requirements of the  next 4 generations of electronic chips. Building on this success, CEA-Leti and Arkema have  created a development platform dedicated to this technology. 

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity. The scientists tested their approach by creating a generator that produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.This research could lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs.

“More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nanodevices, and other devices based on viral electronics,” says Seung-Wuk Lee, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division and a UC Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering.

Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/05/13/electricity-from-viruses/

Scientists at the University of South California – USC, have developed a method to produce cheap, stable solar cells made from nanocrystals so small they can exist as a liquid ink and be painted or printed onto clear surfaces.The solar nanocrystals are about four nanometers in size — meaning you could fit more than 250,000,000,000 on the head of a pin — and float them in a liquid solution, so "like you print a newspaper, you can print solar cells," said Richard L. Brutchey, assistant professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. 

Brutchey and USC postdoctoral researcher David H. Webber developed a new surface coating for the nanocrystals, which are made of the semiconductor cadmium selenide. Their research is featured as a "hot article" this month in the international journal for inorganic chemistry Dalton Transactions.

Source: http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/newsroom/news_release.php?id=2707

HyperSolar, Inc. (OTCBB:  HYSR), the developer of a breakthrough technology to produce renewable hydrogen and natural gas using water and solar power,  announced specific details of its plan for the development of the world’s first nanotechnology-based, zero-carbon process for the production of renewable hydrogen and natural gas. “Our research and development to date gives us a high degree of confidence that our innovative process can achieve commercial viability,” said Tim Young, CEO of HyperSolar. “Starting with a negative value feedstock in the form of wastewater and operating in low cost reactors, we believe that our artificial photosynthesis process of extracting hydrogen from water will be cost effective.”

HyperSolar plans to unveil a robust prototype by early 2013. HyperSolar recently entered into a yearlong sponsored research agreement with the University of California, Santa Barbara to help accelerate the development process and assure that the key milestones are reached.

Source: http://www.hypersolar.com/news_detail.php?id=35

A carbon nanotube sponge that can soak up oil in water with unparalleled efficiency has been developed with help from computational simulations performed at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Oak Ridge National Laboratory.Further experiments showed the team's material, which is visible to the human eye, is extremely efficient at absorbing oil in contaminated seawater because it attracts oil and repels water."It loves carbon because it is primarily carbon," Sumpter said.

"Depending on the density of oil to water content and the density of the sponge network, it will absorb up to 100 times its weight in oil." The material's mechanical flexibility, magnetic properties, and strength lend it additional appeal as a potential technology to aid in oil spill cleanup, Sumpter says. "You can reuse the material over and over again because it's so robust," he said.

Source: http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20120510-00

Researchers at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital have shown a new category of "green" nanoparticles comprised of a non-toxic, protein-based nanotechnology that can non-invasively cross the blood brain barrier and is capable of transporting various types of drugs.In an article published May 1, 2012 online in PLoS ONE, Gordana Vitaliano, MD, director of the Brain Imaging NaNoTechnology Group at the McLean Hospital Imaging Center, reported that clathrin protein, a ubiquitous protein found in human, animal, plant, bacteria and fungi cells, can been modified for use as a nanoparticle for in-vivo studies.

"This study provides a new insight into utilizing bioengineered clathrin protein as a novel nanoplatform that passes the blood brain barrier," said Vitaliano, who successfully attached different fluorescent labels, commonly used in imaging, to functionalize clathrin nanoparticles. "We were able to show that the clathrin nanoparticles could be non-invasively delivered to the central nervous system (CNS) in animals. The clathrin performed significantly."

Source: http://www.mclean.harvard.edu/news/press/current.php?kw=mclean-hospital
-researchers-report-on-a-new-nanotechnology
-that-may-enhance-medication-delivery-and-improve-mri-performance&id=175

Why is silicone dominating in the solar industry? For one, it's an abundant material, coming from sand. Out of the different types of silicone used, the end results can create cells with efficiencies of up to 20 percent, claiming around $1 to $1.10 per watt. Others are pursuing thin-film technologies, which have much lower cost structures of around 70 to 80 cents per watt, but only exude efficiencies of around 10 to 13 percent. Other manufacturers have played around with other ideas like organic photovoltaics, but have yet to reach stable efficiencies at a low enough cost.

Meanwhile, a small team of experts who have been watching the market and landscape of the solar industry since its early beginnings have come together to develop a revolutionary idea. Using nanostructure-based coatings, Magnolia Solar, an American company  located in Albany -New-York, is working on a concept that would allow for the full absorption of all light, boasting efficiencies of 15 to 20 percent as low as 50 cents per watt—the lowest on the market. NASA, the US Air Force and the National Science Foundation have already begun funding the research and pilot programs pushing this unique concept. Though similar technologies are used for defense applications, Magnolia's mission is to bring it into the commercial market by developing them more at significantly lower costs.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Solar-Energy/Nanotechnology-Could-Make-Original-Solar-Technologies-Obsolete.html

A scientific  team is creating a synapse using carbon nanotubes. Engineering researchers of  the University of Southern California have made a significant breakthrough in the use of nanotechnologies for the construction of a synthetic brain. They have built a carbon nanotube synapse circuit whose behavior in tests reproduces the function of a neuron, the building block of the brain. (Physorg April 21.2011).
 

Meanwhile a nanocomputer research team at Harvard University  have succeeded a major milestone towards the first nancocomputer, which if  connected to medical research can produce an huge progress for humanity. predicting the feasibility of artificial brains in the future. The researchers from USC focus on biomimetic neural models and electronic circuits that implement those models.  Complexities in modeling biological neural tissue are discussed.  Estimates are given for the size of artificial neural systems based on CMOS technology in 2021, without considering interconnections. Some solutions to the problem of interconnecting neurons are proposed.

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-functioning-synapse-carbon-nanotubes.htm

Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University have now introduced a new bubble-free, high efficient nanomotor system that involves the operation of a miniaturized copper-platinum nanobattery. Their work has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) ("Autonomous Nanomotor Based on Copper–Platinum Segmented Nanobattery"). In this paper, first-authored by Ran Liu, a Ph.D. researcher in Ayusman Sen's group, they demonstrate that this motor system is significantly more efficient than the previously described bimetallic systems, such as platinum-gold segmented nanorod in hydrogen peroxide.

 Click on the picture to see the astonishing video!

The nanomotor described by Liu and Sen is based on self-propelling of template-synthesized copper-platinum bimetallic nanowires in either bromine or iodine diluted solutions. The motion is due to self-electrophoresis induced by the redox reaction occurring at the two electrodes of the copper-platinum nanobattery.

Scientists in Duke University have managed to create a reusable DNA chip from which DNA building blocks may be photocopied and used to create unique nanoscale structures.  Ishtiaq Saaem, a biomedical engineering researcher at Duke, commented: “We found we had an “immortal” DNA chip on our hands. Essentially, we were able to do the biological copying process to release material off the chip tens of times". "The process seems to work even using a chip that we made, used, stored in -20C for a while, and brought out and used again". “I would not be surprised if this methodology is used to fabricate the next generation of microprocessors that can push Moore’s law even further.”

Duke University researchers have used an inkjet printer head to place droplets of chemicals on the plastic chip, slowly building a DNA strand of various length and composition. The researchers were surprised, subsequently discovered the chip could be reused.
http://www.duke.edu/

Berkeley Lab chemist Jay Groves and his team successfully tested  hybrid membranes on a line of breast cancer cells known as MDA-MB-231 that is highly invasive. The team demonstrated that in the absence of cell adhesion molecules, the membrane remained essentially free of the cancer cells, but when both the gold nanoparticles and the lipid were functionalized with molecules that promote cell adhesion, the cancer cells were found all over the surface. Gold nanoparticle membranes are used to study both cancer metastasis and T cell immunology.

Biology is a game of nanometers, where spatial differences of only a few nanometers can determine the fate of a cell – whether it lives or dies, remains normal or turns cancerous. Groves  and his group have used supported membranes to demonstrate that living cells not only interact with their environment through chemical signals but also through physical force.
Source: Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division and the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Chemistry Department 

Collecting solar energy to convert to electricity is not a new concept. However, there are significant advantages to space solar power compared to ground solar power. Solar energy in space is seven times greater per unit area than on the ground. The collection of solar space energy is not disrupted by nightfall and inclement weather, thus avoiding the need for expensive energy storage. You can see the findings from The National Space Society (NSS)   pusblished a few months ago, a ground-breaking space solar power study conducted by the  International Academy of Astronautics (IAA).

With space solar power technology, energy can be collected from space and transmitted wirelessly anywhere in the world,” said Mark Hopkins, the leading Executive Officer of the National Space Society. “This technology could be the answer to our energy crisis. We look forward to sharing the results of the IAA’s study, and exploring the potential that space solar power has for creating thousands of green energy jobs,” he added.

Source: http://blog.nss.org/
http://www.nss.org/settlement/ssp/library/SSPprizes2011.pdf 

A protein that plays a major role in tumour spread at nanoscale could pave the way to new cancer treatments, research suggests. In laboratory tests, scientists showed that blocking the protein, periostin, prevented the formation of secondary cancers. Rather than focusing on cancer cells themselves, the researchers looked at the environment around tumours.They found several conditions necessary for "metastatic" – or spreading – cancer to propagate.

"In particular, we were able to isolate a protein, periostin, in the niches where metastases develop," said study leader Dr Joerg Huelsken, from the Swiss Centre for Experimental Cancer Research in Lausanne. "Without this protein, the cancer stem cell cannot initiate metastasis; instead, it disappears or remains dormant."

Source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10694.html

One of the problems affecting the human nervous system is dopamine deficiency. But testing of dopamine concentration is costly and requires sophisticated equipment not available in a doctor's office. Enter a team of Polish scientists who developed a method enabling the detection of dopamine in solutions both easily and cheaply, even in the presence of interferences. The study is an outcome of the NOBLESSE ('Nanotechnology, biomaterials and alternative energy source for the European Research Area (ERA)) and is  published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Scientists at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPC PAS) in Warsaw coated new electrodes with carbon nanoparticles deposited on silicate submicroparticles to get the targeted result. They applied the electrodes so as to determine dopamine concentration in solutions in the presence of uric and ascorbic acids, and paracetamol, substances that get in the way of dopamine analysis.

This latest development to detect dopamine could clear the path for securing fast and inexpensive medical tests that doctors can use even in their offices. This information will help physicians determine the likelihood of a patient suffering from popular nervous system disorders including Parkinson's disease.

Source; http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?id=/research/headlines/news/article_11_11_28_en.html&item=Infocentre&artid=23333

Using clever but elegant design, University at Buffalo chemists have synthesized tiny, molecular cages that can be used to capture and purify nanomaterials. Sculpted from a special kind of molecule called a "bottle-brush molecule," the traps consist of tiny, organic tubes whose interior walls carry a negative charge. This feature enables the tubes to selectively encapsulate only positively charged particles.

A transmission electron microscopy image of the organic nanotube traps, with color added through digital enhancement.

In addition, because UB scientists construct the tubes from scratch, they can create traps of different sizes that snare molecular prey of different sizes. The level of fine tuning possible is remarkable: In the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the researchers report that they were able to craft nanotubes that captured particles 2.8 nanometers in diameter, while leaving particles just 1.5 nanometers larger untouched.

Source: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/13057
Contact;: Charlotte Hsu – chsu22@buffalo.edu - tel; 716-645-4655

In the next 15 years, the nanotechnology  industry will be doing business in trillions". said  Prof CNR Rao, chairman of the scientific advisory council of  the fourth edition of Bangalore Nano in India.  .Customers can buy  already indian products in the chemical and cosmetic industry that use this technology. "But it is going be big in the health industry. It will be used in procedures like tissue engineering," he added.

At a press conference Prof Rao added , "The other forums of nano-technology focus mainly on the science behind it, but this event brings in the industry as well,". The scientist concluded: "India cannot afford to miss the nano-technology bus.".
The 4th edition of Bengalore Nano is an initiative by the state government's department of science and technology under the guidance of Vision Group on nano-technology

Source: http://www.bangalorenano.in/nano_2011/index.php

A team of scientists, led by Guillaume Gervais from McGill’s Physics Department and Mike Lilly from Sandia National Laboratories, has engineered one of the world's smallest electronic circuits. It is formed by two wires separated by only about 150 atoms or 15 nanometers (nm).

This discovery, published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, could have a significant effect on the speed and power of the ever smaller integrated circuits of the future in everything from smartphones to desktop computers, televisions and GPS systems.

Source: http://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/news/item/?item_id=212756

In early 2011, the The Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structuresab (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) in Switzerland, unveiled the potential of molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂), a relatively abundant, naturally occurring mineral. Its structure and semi-conducting properties make it an ideal material for use in transistors. It can thus compete directly with silicon, the most highly used component in electronics, and on several points it also rivals graphene.

"The main advantage of MoS₂ is that it allows us to reduce the size of transistors, and thus to further miniaturize them," explains Andreas Kis, LANES director, who recently published two articles on the subject in the scientific journal ACS Nano. It has not been possible up to this point to make layers of silicon less than two nanometers thick, because of the risk of initiating a chemical reaction that would oxidize the surface and compromise its electronic properties. Molybdenite, on the other hand, can be worked in layers only three atoms thick, making it possible to build chips that are at least three times smaller. At this scale, the material is still very stable and conduction is easy to control.

Source; http://pubs.acs.org/action/doSearch?action=search&searchText=molybdenum+disulfide+&qsSearchArea
=searchText&type=within&publication=40025957

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have invented a new type of electronic switch that performs electronic logic functions within a single molecule. The incorporation of such single-molecule elements could enable smaller, , faster and more  energy-efficient electronics.

"This new switch is superior to existing single-molecule concepts," said Hrvoje Petek, principal investigator and professor of physics and chemistry in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and codirector of the Petersen Institute for NanoScience and Engineering (PINSE) at Pitt. "We are learning how to reduce electronic circuit elements to single molecules for a new generation of enhanced and more sustainable technologies."

The research findings, supported by a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, were published online in the Nov. 14 issue of Nano Letters.
Source: http://www.news.pitt.edu/molecularswitch

Researchers  from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have reported the first solar cell that produces a photocurrent that has an external quantum efficiency greater than 100 percent when photoexcited with photons from the high energy region of the solar spectrum. The external quantum efficiency reached a peak value of 114 percent.

The newly reported work marks a promising step toward developing Next Generation Solar Cells for both solar  and solar fuels that will be competitive with, or perhaps less costly than, energy from fossil or nuclear fuels

Source: http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2011/1667.html
A paper on the breakthrough appears in the Dec. 16 issue of Science Magazine. 

The tiny hairs on the abdomen of a cricket have inspired researchers at the University of Twente in Nederlands, to make a new type of sensor which is ultra sensitive to air flows. These synthetic cricket hairs can now also be tuned very precisely for a certain range of frequencies: the hairs are 10 times more sensitive in this range.

These hairs enable the cricket to feel/hear the approach of its enemies and estimate their distance and direction unerringly. These characteristics can be simulated by making a hair that is suspended in a flexible microsystem. The hair is made of polymer SU8, is 0.9 millimetre in length and is thicker at the base than at the top. The smallest movements are registered by the flexibly-suspended plate to which the hair is attached; the electrical capacity changes as a result and gives a measure for the movement. Potential applications include direction sensors used by robots and the study of very specific air flows. In the longer term, the synthetic hairs could also be used in hearing aids. The hairs can be made extra sensitive to certain frequencies in all these applications.
The researchers of the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology are presenting these new results in the scientific journal Applied Physics Letters..
Source: http://www.utwente.nl/organization/stories/synthetic-cricket-pricks-up-its-ears

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a promising new inexpensive technique for fabricating large-scale flexible and stretchable backplanes using semiconductor-enriched carbon nanotube solutions that yield networks of thin film transistors with superb electrical properties, including a charge carrier mobility that is dramatically higher than that of organic counterparts.
To demonstrate the utility of their carbon nanotube backplanes, the researchers constructed an artificial electronic skin (e-skin) capable of detecting and responding to touch. mong the applications that have been envisioned are electronic pads that could be folded away like paper, coatings that could monitor surfaces for cracks and other structural failures, medical bandages that could treat infections and food packaging that could detect spoilage. From solar cells to pacemakers to clothing, the list of smart applications for so-called “plastic electronics” is both flexible and stretchable. First, however, suitable backplanes must be mass-produced in a cost-effective way.

Optical image of flexible and stretchable thin film transistor array covering a baseball shows the mechanical robustness of this backplane material for future plastic electronic devices.

Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2011/12/13/flex-and-stretch-electronics/

Imec, Polyera and international chemical group Solvay have achieved a new world-record efficiency of 8.3% for polymer-based single junction organic solar cells in an inverted device stack. These excellent performance results represent a crucial step towards successful commercialization of organic photovoltaic cells.

Solar power is gradually becoming cost-competitive with traditional mainstream energy sources such as coal, oil, and nuclear. Continued reduction of manufacturing and installation costs of solar panels will further drive this cost-competitiveness. Organic solar cells are holding the promise of addressing these issues, due to their potential to be manufactured on large-areas at high-throughput, and on lightweight, flexible substrates (like plastic or textiles), significantly reducing transportation and installation costs. This, along with optical translucency, gives organic solar cells the potential to be cheaply integrated into everything from clothing to building facades and windows.

Source: http://www2.imec.be/be_en/press/imec-news/imecpolyerasolvayopv.html
 

CelluForce announces  the start of operations at the first manufacturing plant for NanoCrystalline Cellulose (NCC) in the world..Recyclable and renewable, NCC is an advanced material derived from wood fibre.It  improves strength, durability and toughness, and can reduce damage caused by wear, abrasion and light. This nanomaterial can also be incorporated into systems to make structures that are light reflective (tunable from ultraviolet to infrared), impermeable to gas and stable over time. The remarkable properties of this advanced material derived from wood fibre will lead to commercial applications largely exceeding those of traditional wood fibre products.

 A high-value nanomaterial, NCC is capable of transforming the performance of existing products and creating new unique and improved products for numerous industrial sectors.

Source: http://celluforce.com/en/medias_press_releases.php

Researchers from Bristol University in Great Britain, who have been developing quantum photonic chips for the past six years, are now working on scaling up the complexity of this device, and see this technology as the building block for the quantum computers of the future.“In order to build a quantum computer, we not only need to be able to control complex phenomena such as entanglement and mixture, but we need to be able to do this on a chip, in much the same way as the modern computers we have today,” says Professor Jeremy O'Brien, Director of the Centre for Quantum Photonics. ”Our device enables this and we believe it is a major step forward towards optical quantum computing.”

“It isn’t ideal if your quantum computer can only perform a single specific task”, explains Peter Shadbolt, lead author of the study, which is published in the journal Nature Photonics.  “We would prefer to have a reconfigurable device which can perform a broad variety of tasks, much like our desktop PCs today – this reconfigurable ability is what we have now demonstrated. This device is approximately ten times more complex than previous experiments using this technology.”
Source: http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2011/8109.html

Researchers from the  Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, produced a  synthetic vaccine based on nanotechnology which holds out the promise of halting autoimmune diseases such as Crohn's and rheumatoid arthritis. Early research has shown that the molecular principle behind the approach works, at least in mice. Scientists are excited by the findings, which hold out the prospect of new treatments for a broad range of conditions including the spread of cancer. However, much more work is needed before experts can be sure the therapy is safe for humans – today it works with mice -.
The vaccine tricks the immune system into producing antibodies that target an enzyme at the heart of autoimmune diseases. Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) cut through structural materials such as collagen to assist cellular mobilisation and wound healing. When some members of the enzyme family, especially the enzyme MMP9, get out of control they can promote autoimmune disease and the spread of cancer around the body.

Professor Irit Sagi, from the Weizmann Institute said: "We are excited not only by the potential of this method to treat Crohn's, but by the potential of using this approach to explore novel treatments for many other diseases."

The research is published in the journal 'Nature Medicine'.
Source: http://www.weizmann.ac.il/Biological_Regulation/IritSagi//home.html

A Leuven, Belgium-based R&D lab for nanoelectronics has come up with a process that might bring holographic to everyday life. Scientists at Imec believe, as do other researchers, that holographic images are the answer toward resolving the eye strain and headaches that go along with present-day 3-D viewing. Their work involves creating moving pixels. They are constructing holographic displays by shining lasers on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) platforms that can move up and down like small, reflective pistons. “Holographic visualization promises to offer a natural 3-D experience for multiple viewers, without the undesirable side-effects of current 3D stereoscopic visualization (uncomfortable glasses, strained eyes, fatiguing experience),” the company states.

Click on the image to see the video

In their nanoscale system, they work with chips made by growing a layer of silicon oxide on to silicon wafer. They etch square patches of the silicon oxide. The result is a checkerboard-like pattern where etched-away pixels are nanometers lower than their neighbors. A reflective aluminum coating tops the chip. When laser light shines on the chip, it bounces off of the boundary between adjacent pixels at an angle. Diffracted light interferes constructively and destructively to create a 3-D picture where small mirrored platforms are moving up and down, many times a second, to create a moving projection. The process can also be described as the pixels closer to the light interfering with it one way and those further off, in another. The small distances between them generate the image that the eye sees. Imec hopes to construct the first, proof-of-concept moving structures by mid-2012.” .
Source: http://www2.imec.be/be_en/research/imaging-systems/holographic-displays.html

Many of the current experimental "invisibility cloaks" are based around the same idea - light coming from behind an object is curved around it and then continues on forward to a viewer. That person is in turn only able to see what's behind the object, and not the object itself. Scientists from Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have applied that same principle to sound waves, and created what could perhaps be described as a "silence cloak." For the experiments, Dr. Nicolas Stenger, from KIT,  constructed a relatively small, millimeter-thin plate, made of both soft and hard microstructured polymers. Different rings of material within the plate resonated at different frequencies, over a range of 100 Hertz.

When viewed from above, it was observed that sound wave vibrations were guided around a central circular area in the plate, unable to either enter or leave that region. "Contrary to other known noise protection measures, the sound waves are neither absorbed nor reflected," said Stenger's colleague, Prof. Martin Wegener. "It is as if nothing was there."

Source; http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v107/i17/e173901

Researchers at Harvard University, United States, have announced that they have taken a big step toward being able to sequence anybody’s genome for less than US$1,000. One of the candidate technologies for achieving this goal is “nanopore sequencing,” in which an electric field pulls ions in the water and strands of DNA through a nanopore in a solid-state membrane. Each of the four nucleic acids in DNA – G, T, C and A – can be identified by their distinct effect on the current. The current, however, is very small, and the DNA passes through the nanopore at a rapid clip, making it difficult to distinguish the signal in so short a time.

One approach has been to try to slow the speed at witch the DNA moves through the nanopore. Harvard researchers instead decided to try and boost the signal. Their device consists of a chip with a transistor that amplifies the change in current. Current nanopore systems measure signals from tens of picoamps to a few nanoamps. Now, says Ping Xie, a postdoctoral researcher, “…we can measure tens of nanoamps to hundreds of nanoamps.” 
Source; http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/01/reading-life%E2%80%99s-building-blocks/

Scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, have found that mesoporous silica nanoparticles are able to store and deliver biocides in a controlled manner over time. The discovery could help the timber industry control termites. Termites cause  tens of billions dollars  in damage each year around the world, and are considered to be a significant threat to the timber industry throughout the tropics and subtropics. Conventional methods of eradicating the pests use agrochemical biocides that cause environmental damage via bioaccumulation.

The new method uses the pore structure of the mesoporous silica nanoparticles to adsorb biocides, which are then released in a controlled manner. The slow release means the termites will feed on and transfer the substance to other termites, resulting in eventual colony destruction. The team, said Zhang Qiao, who is heading up the research, is investigating how to further control the release of the biocide, saying the nanoparticles need to be coated with other chemicals in order to effectively deliver their cargo. They are investigating a biodegradable polymer coating.

Source: http://nanomac.uq.edu.au/Qiao.html

 

“Solar photovoltaics still remains one of the fastest growing industries in the world. To enable more efficient  utilization of this free, clean energy, the efficiencies of the solar cells have to increase and their manufacturing costs decrease.  ROD-SOL’s silicon nanorod cell concept shows promising potential to this, and we at Picosun have been especially satisfied of the ALD’s central role in realizing this novel, innovative, high efficiency solar electricity converter”, states Picosun’s Managing Director Juhana Kostamo.

Source: http://www.picosun.com/pdf/Picosun_Press_Release_RODSOL_Eng_FINAL_31st_Dec_2011.pdf

Microsoft and the University of Washington are in the final stages of development for a new augmented reality project that may change the way people see the world. Early last year, the duo announced that they were working on an augmented reality contact lens. The lens could be used to enhance human vision like normal contact lenses, but it could also augment a person’s vision with digital information. Microsoft claims that the project will show just how practical augmented reality really is. 

Augmented reality is commonly used in the marketing and gaming fields. The technology has, thus far, been considered little more than a novelty. Most mobile devices equipped with AR browsers are used to find directions to certain locations or to find deals at local retail stores. Microsoft says that their AR lens will be much more practical, as it will give wearers tools that are not found in mobile devices.
The lens is equipped with facial recognition technology, which allows users to find information on a specific person, such as name and age. The lens will also be able to interface with Windows platforms and other mobile devices, allowing users to access information stored in computers in, literally, the blink of an eye.

The project is in its final stages. The lens has been tested on rabbits and is expected to move to human testing within the next few months.

Source: http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

Let's remind that APPLE has last year produced already a first prototype of Nanocomputer iLens : http://www.nanocomputer.com/?page_id=563

Picture a world where your jeans or coat can generate enough energy to charge the battery on your mobile phone or a future where the curtains in your living room help power your lamps. Well it could be closer than you think.” Scientists from th Center  for  nanotechnology and smart materials – CENTI -, located in Portugal,  are working on the development of photovoltaic textiles based on novel fibers and  their project DEPHOTEX has been selected  by the European Commission  among 450 projects and was one of the 50 projects on display in the exhibition "Innovation convention" held in last december. The goal of the project is to research and develop textile solar cells in order to get flexible photovoltaic textiles based on novel fibres allowing taking benefit from the solar radiation so as to turn it into energy. Photovoltaic solar energy is being widely studied as one of the sources of renewable energy with major application potential, being considered a real alternative to fossil fuels. Since the development of first photovoltaic cells, solar energy is being an object of continuous research focused on improving the energy efficiency as well as the structure of photovoltaic cells.

Source; http://www.centi.pt/

Researchers from the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics –  MANA- have developed the world's highest performance thin-film capacitors using a new high-permittivity (high-k) dielectric sheet with molecular-level thickness (~1 nm). This technology may revolutionize the next-generation electronics. 

The announcement of this breakthrough comes from a research group led by MANA Scientist Dr. Minoru Osada and Principal Investigator Dr. Takayoshi Sasaki of the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA) at the National Institute for Material Science (NIMS) in Japan. Good insulating, high-k nanofilms are expected to be key to future applications as predicted by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). 

Source: http://www.nims.go.jp/mana/

As a supramolecular chemist, Hanadi Sleiman found herself strongly drawn to manmade DNA structures. 'We think of DNA as the most programmable structure there is. 'What is really beautiful about DNA structures is the fact that you can control every single aspect of them,' she exclaims. I thought – if it is – let me try to incorporate it into regular supramolecular structures,' says the professor at McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Sleiman is one of an increasing number of chemists who have turned to DNA nanotechnology. Some pin their hopes on using DNA in nanoelectronics or for drug delivery, while others are excited about its potential as an analytical tool.

Source: http://aoc.mcgill.ca/news/channels/2010/march/3/dna-nanotechnology-breakthrough-offers-promising-applications-medicine

A new form of graphene created by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin could prevent laptops and other electronics from overheating, ultimately, overcoming one of the largest hurdles to building smaller and more powerful electronic devices. The research team, which includes colleagues at The University of Texas at Dallas, the University of California-Riverside and Xiamen University in China, published its findings online today in the Advance Online Publication of Nature Materials. The study will also appear in the print journal of Nature Materials. Led by Professor Rodney S. Ruoff in the Cockrell School's Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Materials Science and Engineering Program, the research demonstrates for the first time that a type of graphene created by the University of Texas researchers is 60 percent more effective at managing and transferring heat than normal graphene.

"This demonstration brings graphene a step closer to being used as a conductor for managing heat in a variety of devices. The potential of this material, and its promise for the electronic industry, is very exciting," said Ruoff, a physical chemist and Cockrell Regents Family Chair, who has pioneered research on graphene-based materials for more than 12 years.

Source: http://www.me.utexas.edu/directory/faculty/ruoff/rodney/

Honing chemotherapy delivery to cancer cells is a challenge for many researchers. Getting the cancer cells to take the chemotherapy "bait" is a greater challenge. But perhaps such a challenge has not been met with greater success than by the nanotechnology research team of Omid Farokhzad, MD, Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH)- Department of Anesthesiology Perioperative and Pain Medicine and Research.
In their latest study with researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Massachusetts General Hospital, the BWH team created a drug delivery system that is able to effectively deliver a tremendous amount of chemotherapeutic drugs to prostate cancer cells.

The process involved is akin to building and equipping a car with the finest features, adding a passenger (in this case the cancer drug), and sending it off to its destination (in this case the cancer cell).

Source: http://www.healthnoise.com/articles/getting-cancer-cells-to-swallow-poison
MIT; http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/61142

 Engineering researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, New-York, USA) have developed a new method for creating advanced nanomaterials that could lead to highly efficient refrigerators and cooling systems requiring no refrigerants and no moving parts.

The key ingredients for this innovation are a dash of nanoscale sulfur and a normal, everyday microwave oven.  You do not need to spend more than 40$!

Source: http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2971&setappvar=page(1)

The narrowest conducting wires in silicon ever produced are shown to have the same electric current arrying capability as copper. This means electrical interconnects in silicon can be shrunk to the atomic-scale without losing their functionality - Ohm's law holds true at the atomic-scale. The University of New South Wales  (UNSW) researchers will use these wires to address individual atoms – a key step in realising a scalable nanocomputer."Interconnecting wiring of this scale will be vital for the development of future atomic-scale electronic circuits," says the lead author of the study, Bent Weber, a PhD student in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at UNSW, in Sydney, Australia, supervised by Dr Michelle Simmmons.

Driven by the semiconductor industry, computer chip components continuously shrink in size allowing ever smaller and more powerful computers,” Simmons says. “Over the past 50 years this paradigm has established the microelectronics industry as one of the key drivers for global economic growth.  A major focus of the Centre of Excellence at UNSW is to push this technology to the next level to develop a silicon-based nanocomputer, where single atoms serve as the individual units of computation,” she says. “It will come down to the wire. We are on the threshold of making transistors out of individual atoms. But to build a practical quantum computer we have recognised that the interconnecting wiring and circuitry also needs to shrink to the atomic scale.”

Source: http://www.science.unsw.edu.au/news/

The wires were made by precisely placing chains of phosphorus atoms within a silicon crystal, according to the study, which includes researchers from the University of Melbourne and Purdue University in the US.

In the images of fruit flies, clusters of neurons are all lit up, forming a brightly glowing network of highways within the brain. It's exactly what University at Buffalo researcher Shermali Gunawardena was hoping to see: It meant that ORMOSIL, a novel class of nanoparticles, had successfully penetrated the insects' brains. And even after long-term exposure, the cells and the flies themselves remained unharmed.

The particles, which are tagged with fluorescent proteins, hold promise as a potential vehicle for drug delivery. Each particle is a vessel, containing cavities that scientists could potentially fill with helpful chemical compounds or gene therapies to send to different parts of the human body. Gunawardena is particularly interested in using ORMOSIL — organically modified silica — to target problems within neurons that may be related to neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease.

Source: : http://www.buffalo.edu/news/13116

Scientists from IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) have built the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit. It uses just twelve atoms per bit, the basic unit of information, and squeezes a whole byte (8 bit) into as few as 96 atoms. A modern hard drive, for comparison, still needs more than half a billion atoms per byte. The team present their work in the weekly journal Science (13 January 2012). CFEL is a joint venture of the research centre Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg, the Max-Planck-Society (MPG) and the University of Hamburg.  "With CFEL the partners have established an innovative institution on the DESY campus, delivering top-level research across a broad spectrum of disciplines," says DESY research director Edgar Weckert.

 An illustration of I.B.M.'s technique for storing data on a single atom. An iron atom on a copper surface could store a single bit of binary data, with "0" or "1" indicated by the orientation of the atom's magnetic field. 

Source: http://www.desy.de/information__services/press/pressreleases/@@news-view?id=2141&lang=eng

How noisy is a walking flea? What sort of sound waves are caused by motile bacteria? Phycisists at the Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM) have managed for the first time to detect sound waves at such minuscule lengh scales. Their nanoear is a single gold nanoparticle that is kept in a state of levitation by a laser beam. Upon weak acoustic excitation the particle oscillates parallel to the direction of sound propagation. The scientists led by Dr. Adurey Lutich, who is member of Prof. Jochen Feldmann's group at LMU Munich, managed to detect such tiny displacements using a dark-field microscope and an ordinary video camera. The nanoear is capable of detecting sound levels of approximatively *60dB. Thus, it is about a million times more sensitive than the hearing threshold of the human ear, which by convention is set at 0 dB.

Trapped gold nanoparticle (left) acts as nanoear

The new method realized by the Munich physicists opens a new world to scientists: for the first time, otherwise imperceptibly weak motions – minuscule sound waves – can be visualized. The researchers developed the nanoear in two stages. “First, we validated the basic principle using a relatively strong sound source” group leader Andrey Lutich explains. “In the second step we were able to detect significantly weaker acoustic excitations.” The main element in both cases is a gold nanoparticle, 60 nm in diameter, which is kept in levitation by a so-called optical trap us­ing a red laser. Each of the experiments was done in a small water drop on a cover slide. 
Source: http://www.nano-initiative-munich.de/en/news/news/article/1/a-nanoear-to-listen-into-the-s/

By shining infrared light on specially designed, gold-filled silicon wafers, scientists at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute (Houston, Texas) have successfully targeted and burned breast cancer cells. If the technology is shown to work in human clinical trials, it could provide patients a non-invasive alternative to surgical ablation, and could be used in conjunction with traditional cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy, to make those treatments more effective.

"Hollow gold nanoparticles can generate heat if they are hit with a near-infrared laser," said Research Institute Assistant Member Haifa Shen, M.D., Ph.D., the report's lead author. "Multiple investigators have tried to use gold nanoparticles for cancer treatment, but the efficiency has not been very good — they'd need a lot of gold nanoparticles to treat a tumor. "Instead, Shen and his colleagues turned to a technology developed by the study's principal investigator, Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D., to amplify the gold particles' response to infrared light.

"We developed a system based on Dr. Ferrari's multi-stage vector technology platform to treat cancers with heat," Shen said. "We found that heat generation was much more efficient when we loaded gold nanoparticles into porous silicon, the carrier of the multistage vectors."

The research is presented in the first issue of the new Advanced Healthcare Materials, a Wiley journal.

Source: http://www.methodisthealth.com/breast-cancer-cells-targeted-then-burned-by-gold-filled-silicon-wafers

Dreamweaver International Inc, an US company based  in Greenville, South Carolina, has developed a new non woven battery separator made from a combination of nanofibers that provides 300% higher power. The technology allows  higher transmission of electricity in the battery, improving the power available in electric vehicles, power tools and other high power applications. 

The job of a battery separator is to be a perfect barrier between the electrodes, while also acting as a perfect window to the electrolyte. Because of the above attributes, the technology allows for thinner, lighter and smaller batteries.

Source: http://www.dreamweaverintl.com/

 In the super-small world of nanostructures, a team of polymer scientists and engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered how to make nano-scale repairs to a damaged surface equivalent to spot-filling a scratched car fender rather than re-surfacing the entire part. The work builds on a theoretical prediction by chemical engineer and co-author Anna Balazs at the University of Pittsburgh. Their discovery is reported this week in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

The new technique has many practical implications, especially that repairing a damaged surface with this method would require significantly smaller amounts of material, avoiding the need to coat entire surfaces when only a tiny fraction is cracked, says team leader and UMass Amherst polymer scientist Todd Emrick. "This is particularly important because even small fractures can then lead to structural failure but our technique provides a strong and effective repair. The need for rapid, efficient coating and repair mechanisms is pervasive today in everything from airplane wings to microelectronic materials to biological implant devices," he adds. 

Source: http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/newsreleases/articles/144533.php

By tweaking the smallest of parts, a trio of  engineers is hoping to dramatically increase the amount of sunlight that solar cells convert into electricity. The researchers from the University at Buffalo, Army Research Laboratory and Air Force Office of Scientific Research have developed a new, nanomaterials-based technology that has the potential to increase the efficiency of photovoltaic cells up to 45 percent.

Specifically, the scientists have shown that embedding charged quantum dots into solar cells can improve electrical output by enabling the cells to harvest infrared light, and by increasing the lifetime of photoelectrons. The technology can be applied to many different photovoltaic structures.

A new company the researchers founded, OPtoElectronic Nanodevices LLC. (OPEN LLC), is commercializing this technology.

Source: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/13138

Workers with existing allergic conditions could have worse reactions when exposed to nanoparticles (http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1452). Worse, nanomedecine portends the release of dangerous nanoparticles, nanorobots or nanoelectronic devices that will wreak havoc in the body (http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=990). For instance, scientists from Brown University say that nanoparticules of nickel  may trigger cancer (http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=446).
When human lung epithelial cells are exposed to equivalent doses of nano-sized (left) or micro-sized (right) metallic nickel particles, activated HIF-1 alpha pathways (stained green) appear mostly with the nanoparticles.

 In a project funded by the Danish Environemntal Protection Agency (EPA), the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and National Research Centre for the Working Environment have initiated the development of a  screening tool called NanoRiskCat (NRC) for the evaluation of exposure and hazard of nanomaterials contained in products for professional and private use. Authored by Steffen Foss Hansen and Anders Braun from DTU's Department of Environmental Engineering and Keld Alstrup-Jensen from the National Research Centre for the Working Environment Environmental Project, the 268-page report on the NanRiskCat screening tool can be downloaded as a PDF file from the Danish EPA's website.The project's aim was to identify, categorize and rank the possible exposure and hazards associated with a nanomaterial in a product.

Source: http://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2011/12/978-87-92779-11-3.pdf

Instead of oversized virtual reality helmets, digital images are projected onto tiny-full-color displays, that are very near the eye. These novel contact lenses allow users to focus simultaneously on objects that are close up and far away. This could improve ability to use tiny portable displays while still interacting with the surrounding environment. It is developed as part of DARPA's Soldier Centric Imaging via Computational Cameras (SCENICC) program. DARPA is the acronym for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency which aims to "create and prevent strategic surprise". Researchers are located at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks branch (http://innovega-inc.com/press-2012.php).

SCENICC's objecive is to eliminate the ISR capability gap that exists at the individual Soldier level. The program seeks to develop novel computational imaging capabilities and explore joint design of hardware and software that give warfighters access to systems that greatly enhance their awareness, security and survivability. Let's remind that the companies Apple and Microsoft are competing to put on the market  their own nanocomputer lenses very soon  (http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1512). 

Source: http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/01/31.aspx

Raytheon Company has developed a counter measure system using quantum dots to protect space assets such as satellites from missile attacks. They have developed a decoy consisting of quantum dots of different sizes and shapes that are engineered to emit radiation having a radiation profile similar to that of the asset.

The decoy is found to be more accurate in mimicking the radiation profile of the asset from the target  diverting the anti-satellite weapons more efficiently than the existing conventional counter measure systems.
Let's remember that  In January 2007, China successfully tested an Anti-satellite (ASAT) missile system by destroying their own defunct LEO satellite, which generated huge amounts of space debris. This ASAT test raised worldwide concerns about the vulnerability of satellites and other space assets and possibility of triggering an arms race in space. In order to meet emerging challenges posed by such ASAT missile systems, military strategists and researchers are developing novel technologies to protect their space assets.

Source: http://nanolity.com/index.php/nanomaterials/nanomaterials-news/quantum-dots

Raytheon is an US company based in  Waltham, Massachusett,  a major American defense contractor.

Porofessor Yu Sun and his team at the Advanced Micro and Nanosystems Laboratory, University of Toronto, Canada,  have developed an automated vision-based nanomanipulation technique that, when used in conjunction with existing large-scale nano-assembly methods, is capable of precisely controlling the number of nanowires incorporated into each device. Reporting their findings in the January 17, 2012 online edition of Nanotechnology ("Automated nanomanipulation for nanodevice construction"), the team developed an automated visual serving algorithm for physically removing individual nanowires from an array of multi-nanowire transistor devices.

Click on the image to see lab's videos

.The batch microfabrication process we used is wafer-scale but has an uncontrolled number of bridging nanowires that also have significantly varying diameters," explains Yanliang Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow in Sun's group at the time of this work and the paper's first author. "Nanorobotic selective nanowire removal, despite being a serial process, permits precision control of the number and diameter of nanowires. Experimental results demonstrate that the nanorobotic system has a nano-FET device post-processing success rate of 95% (versus 48.3% for manual nanomanipulation) and has a speed of 1 min/device (versus 10.3 min/device)", he added.
Source: http://amnl.mie.utoronto.ca/index.php?page=videos&part=6

 A new form of proteins discovered by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin could drastically improve treatments for cancer and other diseases. The protein formulation strategy, discovered by chemical engineering faculty members and students in the Cockrell School of Engineering, University of Texas,  is unprecedented and offers a new and universal approach to drug delivery — one that could revolutionize treatment of cancer, arthritis and infectious disease. 

“We believe this discovery of a new highly concentrated form of proteins — clusters of individual protein molecules — is a disruptive innovation that could transform how we fight diseases,” said Keith P. Johnston, a chemical engineering professor and member of the National Academy of Engineering. “It required integration of challenging contributions in fundamental science and engineering from three of our chemical engineering research groups.”

The research, led by Johnston, Chemical Engineering Professor Thomas Truskett and Assistant Professor Jennifer Maynard, was published online recently ahead of a print version to appear soon in the ACS Nano journal.

Source: http://www.utexas.edu/news/2012/02/01/nano_protein_clusters/

Barry D. Bruce, professor of biochemistry, cellular and molecular biology, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,  and a team of researchers have developed a system that taps into photosynthetic processes to produce efficient and inexpensive energy.

“Because the system is so cheap and simple, my hope is that this system will develop with additional improvements to lead to a green, sustainable energy source,” said Bruce, noting that today’s fossil fuels were once, millions of years ago, energy-rich plant matter whose growth also was supported by the sun via the process of photosynthesis. “This system is a preferred method of sustainable energy because it is clean and it is potentially very efficient, he added. As opposed to conventional photovoltaic solar power systems, we are using renewable biological materials rather than toxic chemicals to generate energy. Likewise, our system will require less time, land, water and input of fossil fuels to produce energy than most biofuels.”

Bruce collaborated with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ecole Polytechnique Federale in Switzerland to develop a process that improves the efficiency of generating electric power using molecular structures extracted from plants. Their findings are in the current issue of Nature: Scientific Reports.

Source: http://www.utk.edu/tntoday/2012/02/02/biosolar-breakthrough/

An innovative low-cost smart paint that can detect microscopic faults in wind turbines, mines and bridges before structural damage occurs is being developed by researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Grreat Britain.

The environmentally-friendly paint uses nanotechnology to detect movement in large structures, and could shape the future of safety monitoring. Traditional methods of assessing large structures are complex, time consuming and use expensive instrumentation, with costs spiraling into millions of pounds each year. However, the smart paint costs just a fraction of the cost and can be simply sprayed onto any surface, with electrodes attached to detect structural damage long before failure occurs. 

Dr Mohamed Saafi, of the University's Department of Civil Engineering, said: "The development of this smart paint technology could have far-reaching implications for the way we monitor the safety of large structures all over the world. "There are no limitations as to where it could be used and the low-cost nature gives it a significant advantage over the current options available in the industry. The process of producing and applying the paint also gives it an advantage as no expertise is required and monitoring itself is straightforward."

Source: http://www.strath.ac.uk/press/newsreleases/headline_583703_en.html

Water desalination is an important approach to provide fresh water around the world, although its high energy consumption, and thus high cost, call for new, efficient technology. Here, scientists  demonstrate the novel concept of a “desalination battery”, which operates by performing cycles in reverse on the previously reported mixing entropy battery. Rather than generating electricity from salinity differences, as in mixing entropy batteries, desalination batteries use an electrical energy input to extract sodium and chloride ions from seawater and to generate fresh water.

 Researchers have now demonstrate the novel concept of a "desalination battery", which operates by performing cycles in reverse on the previously reported mixing entropy battery." Fabio La Mantia, who leads the Semiconductor & Energy Conversion research group at the Center for Electrochemical Sciences at Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, explains: "By using electric energy, the device is able to capture the salt from a sea water stream, and release it in another sea water stream. Our technology is, in this very early stage, very near in efficiency of reverse osmosis, one of the most efficient techniques available today."

Reporting their findings in the January 23, 2012 online edition of Nano Letters ("A Desalination Battery"), La Mantia's team reversed the previously proposed four step cycle of their mixing entropy battery ("Batteries for Efficient Energy Extraction from a Water Salinity Difference".-  http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl203889e)
Source: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ces/Excellenz_eng.html

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in California and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology have developed a “biological computer” made entirely from biomolecules that is capable of deciphering images encrypted on DNA chips. Although DNA has been used for encryption in the past, this is the first experimental demonstration of a molecular cryptosystem of images based on DNA computing.

Scientists have developed a “biological computer” capable of deciphering images encrypted on DNA chips. As a proof of concept, the scientists encrypted the Scripps Research and Technion logos on a single DNA chip and, using software, decrypted the separate fluorescent images. (Image courtesy of the Keinan lab.)
Instead of using traditional computer hardware, a group led by Professor Ehud Keinan of Scripps Research and the Technion created a computing system using bio-molecules. When suitable software was applied to the biological computer, it could decrypt, separately, fluorescent images of The Scripps Research Institute and Technion logos. Instead of using traditional computer hardware, a group led by Professor Ehud Keinan of Scripps Research and the Technion created a computing system using bio-molecules. 
The study was published in a recent online-before-print edition of the journal Angewandte Chemie.
Source: http://www.scripps.edu/news/press_releases/20120207keinan.html

Scientists have developed a new kind of tiny motor — which they term a “microrocket” — that can propel itself through acidic environments, such as the human stomach, without any external energy source, opening the way to a variety of medical and industrial applications.  NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang  from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and colleagues explain that self-propelled nano- or microscale motors could have applications in targeted drug delivery or imaging in humans or as a way to monitor industrial applications, such as semiconductor processing. 

 Their report in the Journal of the American Chemical Society describes the microrockets traveling at virtual warp speed for such devices. A human moving at the same speed would have to run at a clip of 400 miles per hour.

Source: http://cse-ece-ucsd.blogspot.com/2012/01/microrockets-take-off-in-acid-joseph.html

 http://portal.acs.org/portal/acs/corg/content?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=PP_ARTICLEMAIN&node_id=223&content_id=CNBP_029267&use_sec=true&sec_url_var=region1&__uuid=96996c92-1151-4248-b179-70caa354ae77

In a paper published in Nature Communications, a team of engineers at Stanford describes how it has created tiny hollow spheres of photovoltaic nanocrystalline-silicon and harnessed physics to do for light what circular rooms do for sound. The results, say the engineers, could dramatically reduce materials usage and processing cost.

“Nanocrystalline-silicon is a great photovoltaic material. It has a high electrical efficiency and is durable in the harsh sun,” said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and co-author of the paper. “Both have been challenges for other types of thin solar films.” The downfall of nanocrystalline-silicon, however, has been its relative poor absorption of light, which requires thick layering that takes a long time to manufacture. By depositing two or even three layers of nanoshells atop one another, the team teased the absorption of light  higher still. With a three-layer structure, they were able to achieve total absorption of 75% of light in certain important ranges of the solar spectrum.

Source: http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/nanoshell-whispering-galleries-improve-thin-solar-panels

One area of intensive research at the nanoscale is the creation of electrically conductive meshes made of metal nanowires. Promising exceptional electrical throughput, low cost and easy processing, engineers foresee a day when such meshes are common in new generations of touch-screens, video displays, light-emitting diodes and thin-film solar cells.; At the heart of the technique is the physics of plasmonics, the interaction of light and metal in which the light flows across the surface of the metal in waves, like water on the beach.

“When two nanowires lie crisscrossed, we know that light will generate plasmon waves at the place where the two nanowires meet, creating a hot spot. The beauty is that the hot spots exist only when the nanowires touch, not after they have fused. The welding stops itself. It’s self-limiting,” explained Mark Brongersma, an associate professor of materials science engineering at Stanford and an expert in plasmonics. Brongersma is one of the study’s senior authors.
“The rest of the wires and, just as importantly, the underlying material are unaffected,” noted Michael McGehee, a materials engineer and also senior author of the paper. “This ability to heat with precision greatly increases the control, speed and energy efficiency of nanoscale welding.”

Source: https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/stanford-engineers-weld-nanowires-light

Researchers at the University of Washington found that the wall of the aorta, the largest blood vessel carrying blood from the heart, exhibits ferroelectricity, a response to an electric field known to exist in inorganic and synthetic materials. "The result is exciting for scientific reasons,” said lead author Jiangyu Li, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering. “But it could also have biomedical implications.”

A ferroelectric material is an electrically polar molecule with one side positively charged and the other negatively charged, whose polarity can be reversed by applying an electrical field. Ferroelectricity is common in synthetic materials and used for displays, memory storage, and sensors. (Related research by Li and colleagues seeks to exploit ferroelectric materials for tiny low-power, high-capacity computer memory chips.)

In the new study, Li collaborated with co-author Katherine Zhang at Boston University to explore the phenomenon in biological tissues. The only previous evidence of ferroelectricity in living tissue was reported last year in seashells. Others had looked in mammal tissue, mainly in bones, but found no signs of the property. The new study shows clear evidence of ferroelectricity in a sample of a pig aorta.  Researchers believe the findings would also apply to human tissue.

Source: http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/ferroelectric-switching-discovered-for-first-time-in-soft-biological-tissue

How to kill cancer cells? To be effective, the drug carrier system needs to be able to identify and reach its target, and it needs to be able to release its payload at the target at the right time, or over a longer period of time.

Xian-Zheng Zhang, the Director of the Key Laboratory of Biomedical Polymers of Ministry of Education and a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Wuhan University in China, said, ."It is of great importance to design intelligent drug carriers that can specifically respond to physiopathological signals and allow explosive release of the loaded drugs while entrapping the drugs efficiently during the process of blood circulation," 

" Zhang and his team have designed and fabricated a system that could effectively keep the drug entrapped in its carrier in the blood and normal tissues, but would allow explosive drug release under the right physiopathological stimuli – an acidic environment – once the drug carrier reaches the cancerous tissue.

Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.201102132/full.

According to a new technical market research report,  the global market for nanophotonic devices was valued at nearly $2.5 billion in 2011 and is expected to increase to $10.9 billion in 2016, a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34.8%. The global market for nanophotonic devices can be separated into nine segments: nanophotonic diodes, near-field optics, solar cells, optical switches, nanophotonic ICs, holographic memory, nano-optical sensors, optical amplifiers, and add/drop filters. 

Nanophotonics involve the interaction of light with nanoscale structures and materials.  “Nanoscale” is defined as having at least one dimension measuring less than 100 nanometers, or billionths of a meter. At this scale, the properties that characterize larger systems do not necessarily apply – a fact that gives nanophotonics devices their unique properties.

Source: NANOTECHNOLOGY FOR PHOTONICS: GLOBAL MARKETS (NAN036B) from BCC Research  www.bccresearch.com.

A new, single-step of  fabricating microcapsules, which have potential commercial applications, in industries, including medicine, agriculture and diagnostics, have been developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, England. The findings are published in the journal Science.
The ability to enclose materials in capsules between 10 and 100 micrometres in diameter, while accurately controlling both the capsule structure and the core contents, is a key concern in biology, chemistry, nanotechnology and materials science.

“This method provides several advantages over current methods as all of the components for the microcapsules are added at once and assemble instantaneously at room temperature,” said lead author Jing Zhang, a PhD student in Professor Abell’s research group. “A variety of ‘cargos’ can be efficiently loaded simultaneously during the formation of the microcapsules. The dynamic supramolecular interactions allow control over the porosity of the capsules and the timed release of their contents using stimuli such as light, pH and temperature.”

Source: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/smart-microcapsules-in-a-single-step/

"The basic problem with current meat production is that it's inefficient". Instead of getting meat from animals raised in pastures, Professor Mark Post from Maastricht University in  Netherlands wants to grow steaks in lab conditions, directly from muscle stem cells. If successful, the technology will transform the way we produce food. "We want to turn meat production from a farming process to a factory process," he explained.

As head of the department of vascular physiology, he is in the vanguard of a new wave of research to create a way of producing meat that cuts out the need for animal husbandry altogether.

Source: http://www.maastrichtuniversity.nl/web/Main/Research.htm

Clck here to get a video interview about Mark Post researches

Dr William Parnell’s team from the  School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, England, have been working on the theory of invisibility cloaks which, until recently, have been merely the subject of science fiction. In recent times, however, scientists have been getting close to achieving ‘cloaking’ in a variety of contexts. The work from the team at Manchester focuses on the theory of cloaking devices which could eventually help to protect buildings and structures from vibrations and natural disasters such as earthquakes.

According to the mathematician, “This research has shown that we really do have the potential to control the direction and speed of elastic waves. This is important because we want to guide such waves in many contexts, especially in nano-applications such as in electronics for example. 

“If the theory can be scaled up to larger objects then it could be used to create cloaks to protect buildings and structures, or perhaps more realistically to protect very important specific parts of those structures.”, he added. This ‘invisibility’ could prove to be of great significance in safeguarding key structures such as nuclear power plants, electric pylons and government offices from destruction from natural or terrorist attacks.You can read old posts from nanocomputer.com, relating researches about 'invisble sounds' and objects.
http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1464
http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=716
http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1168

Source: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=7968

Aurora Clark, an associate professor of chemistry at Washington State University, has adapted Google’s PageRank software to create moleculaRnetworks, which scientists can use to determine molecular shapes and chemical reactions without the expense, logistics and occasional danger of lab experiments."What’s most cool about this work is we can take technology from a totally separate realm of science, computer science, and apply it to understanding our natural world,” says Clark. Google’s PageRank software, developed by its founders at Stanford University, uses an algorithm—a set of mathematical formulas—to measure and prioritize the relevance of various Web pages to a user’s search.

Click on the picture of Aurora to get the video demonstration

Clark and colleagues from the University of Arizona discuss the software in a recent online article in The Journal of Computational Chemistry. Their work is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences program.

Source: http://news.wsu.edu/pages/publications.asp?Action=Detail&PublicationID=30228

Micro-engineering, physicists from the University of South Wales in Australia – UNSW - have created a working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal. The tiny electronic device, described today in a paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, uses as its active component an individual phosphorus atom patterned between atomic-scale electrodes and electrostatic control gates. This unprecedented atomic accuracy may yield the elementary building block for a future quantum computer ( or nanocomputer) with unparalleled computational efficiency. Until now, single-atom transistors have been realised only by chance, where researchers either have had to search through many devices or tune multi-atom devices to isolate one that works.

“But this device is perfect”, says Professor Michelle Simmons, group leader and director of the ARC Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at UNSW. “This is the first time anyone has shown control of a single atom in a substrate with this level of precise accuracy.” The microscopic device even has tiny visible markers etched onto its surface so researchers can connect metal contacts and apply a voltage, says research fellow and lead author Dr Martin Fuechsle from UNSW.

“Our group has proved that it is really possible to position one phosphorus atom in a silicon environment – exactly as we need it – with near-atomic precision, and at the same time register gates,” he says. 

Source: http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-technology/single-atom-transistor-%E2%80%9Cperfect%E2%80%9D

Dr. Saeed Sarkar from the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council announced that over 2,600 university lecturers have so far worked on nanotechnology in their articles and theses, and there are more than 12,000 nanotechnology experts at the MSc and PhD levels in Iran. 

Investigation by researchers with California University showed that Iran ranked 4th in a 2010 world’s ranking which indicates the portion of nanotech-related scientific articles (out of total scientific publications) published by the researchers of a country. The study also reported that about 12% of the international journal papers of Iranian researchers are connected to nanotechnology. On another investigation which assessed countries by the total number of nanotech scientific published articles, Iran managed to rank 14th.

A different concern: Western countries have to think that nanotechnology could be developed as well for war purposes. See the spybird drone developed by the US Defense agency DARPA: http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=242

:Source: http://en.nano.ir/index.php/news/show/2544

Simply by touching a small piece of Power Felt – a promising new thermoelectric device developed by scientists, Corey Hewitt (Ph.D. graduate student)  has converted his body heat into an electrical current. Comprised of tiny carbon nanotubes locked up in flexible plastic fibers and made to feel like fabric, Power Felt uses temperature differences – room temperature versus body temperature, for instance – to create a charge. The research team  is  from Wake Forest University, North Carolina, , Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials..

“We waste a lot of energy in the form of heat. For example, recapturing a car’s energy waste could help improve fuel mileage and power the radio, air conditioning or navigation system,” Hewitt says. “Generally thermoelectrics are an underdeveloped technology for harvesting energy, yet there is so much opportunity.”

Cost has prevented thermoelectrics from being used more widely in consumer products. Standard thermoelectric devices use a much more efficient compound called bismuth telluride to turn heat into power in products including mobile refrigerators and CPU coolers, but it can cost $1,000 per kilogram. Like silicon, researchers liken its affordability to demand in volume and think someday Power Felt would cost only $1 to add to a cell phone cover.

Source: http://news.wfu.edu/2012/02/22/power-felt-gives-a-charge/

The development of polymer film loaded with antibodies that can capture tumor cells shows promise as a diagnostic tool. Cancer cells that break free from a tumor and circulate through the bloodstream spread cancer to other parts of the body. But this process, called metastasis, is extremely difficult to monitor because the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) can account for as few as one in every billion blood cells.

The polymer film forms nanodots: tiny bumps that can be functionalized with antibodies to grab passing cancer cells.

Scientists tested several types of tumor cells on films with various sizes and densities of nanodots, and used a microscope to observe how well they captured the cells. The most effective film, with nanodots measuring about 230 nanometers across and containing about 8 dots per square micrometer, captured roughly 240 breast-cancer cells per square millimeter of film

Research led by scientists at the RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Wako – Japan, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Institute of Chemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, has produced a polymer film that can capture specific CTCs1. With further development, the system could help doctors to diagnose an advancing cancer and assess the effectiveness of treatments.

One month ago a research team from Switzerland has demonstrated a new way to block the spreading of metastasis in the human body.

http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1241

Source: http://www.rikenresearch.riken.jp/eng/research/6850

Nanowires — microscopic fibers that can be “grown” in the lab — are a hot research topic today, with a variety of potential applications including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and sensors. Now, a team of MIT researchers has found a way of precisely controlling the width and composition of these tiny strands as they grow, making it possible to grow complex structures that are optimally designed for particular applications.

Nanowires fabricated using the new techniques developed by Silvija Gradečak and her team can have varying widths, profiles and composition along their lengths, as illustrated here, where different colors are used to indicate compositional variations. 

Silvija Gradečak, professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts  Insitute of Technology, and her team,  were able to control and vary both the size and composition of individual wires as they grew. Nanowires are grown by using “seed” particles, metal nanoparticles that determine the size and composition of the nanowire. By adjusting the amount of gases used in growing the nanowires, Gradečak was  able to control the size and composition of the seed particles and, therefore, the nanowires as they grew. “We’re able to control both of these properties simultaneously,” she says.

The results are described in a new paper authored by Silvija Gradečak and her team, published in the journal Nano Letters.
Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/controlled-nanowire-growth-0222.html

All over the world scientists are using nanotechnology to create new treatments for diabetes. For years, researchers and patients have been dreaming of an insulin pill that could save diabetics from frequent injections. But the fact that digestive acids in the stomach destroys the insulin before it can enter the bloodstream has been a major obstacle until now. Portuguese researchers from the University of Coimbra  have overcome that obstacle with the development of a biodegradable polymer-based nanoparticle. The main challenge scientists face now surrounds the size and strengh of the pill.   

Source: http://www.uc.pt/en
https://woc.uc.pt/ffuc/person/ppgeral.do?idpessoa=18

Click on the video to see the demonstration

 Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corporation (Nasdaq:TKMR) (TSX:TKM), a leading developer of RNA interference (RNAi) therapeutics, announced today that it is adding a new RNAi therapeutic targeting ALDH2 for the treatment of alcohol dependence (AD) to its product pipeline.

"We are excited to add TKM-ALDH2 to Tekmira's product pipeline. ALDH2 is a validated target with both genetic and pharmacological data supporting its role as a key player in alcohol avoidance. Alcohol dependence is a serious medical problem, afflicting approximately 10 million people in the US. Over one million people seek treatment in specialty clinics each year, and they are in need of pharmacological support to break their dependence on alcohol," said Dr. Mark J. Murray, Tekmira's President and CEO.

"Our new TKM-ALDH2 program aims to address the limitations of existing treatments of alcohol dependence, such as low response rates and poor patient compliance. This is a very unique application of RNA interference, which addresses a significant unmet medical need, and does not require lifelong therapy," added Dr. Murray.

Source: http://investor.tekmirapharm.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=653067

Global Industry Analysts  announces the release of a comprehensive global outlook on the Nanotechnology Industry. Nanotechnology products present potential for cheaper, faster, and more environmental friendly applications. Backed by huge number of Government sponsored projects, demand for nanotechnology enabled products is strong.

Nanotechnology is a well funded industry, mainly  Government funding and corporate research and development spending.. Funds from venture capitalists is however low. The US government leads other governments in terms of nanotechnology spending, followed by the Japanese and German governments.  One of the prominent factors hampering rapid commercialization of nanotechnology is the time delay in establishing labs for the necessary R&D. Besides, after obtaining funds, a minimum of another year-and-a-half is consumed in establishing a full-fledged nanotech research laboratory.

Chemical industry currently dominates the Nanotech arena in terms of maturity of R&D efforts and actual product commercialization. Among the product segments, Nanomaterials are emerging as the most lucrative segment. Nanofilms are making rapid strides in the global market driven by their expanding application in  high efficiency solar cells, light-emitting diodes, photonics, wireless communications, and semiconductor technology. While the US and Europe continue to remain the major geographic markets for nanotechnology industry until 2015,  the share of Asia Pacific in the nanotechnology market is expected to grow substantially.
The research report titled "Nanotechnology: A Global Outlook" is  announced by Global Industry Analysts, Inc.

By copying some of the body’s own delivery systems, it may be easier to combat a whole range of diseases. Researchers at the Wooley Laboratory have had some new success in using polymers to mimic the characteristics and actions of certain biological nanoparticles and structures, such as proteins, lipoproteins, and viruses. These synthetic recreations not only travel the blood and body in the same way as their biological counterparts, but also gain access to cells in the same way, potentially allowing a whole new range of diagnostic and treatment modalities with vast implications. In addition to allowing the delivery of nucleic acids, drugs, genes, and chemotherapies, the nanostructures can also help diagnose disease by delivering dyes and imaging probes.

One of the main challenges in development of these therapeutic nanoparticles has been the premature release of the enclosed drug, due to breakdown of the particle itself. The new research finds a way around this by making the particles more stable through a technique called shell- and core-crosslinking—building up a small particle into a larger polymerized object and slowing down the release of any enclosed drugs. In fact, drugs and other therapeutics delivered via these polymers have been observed being released over a timeframe as long as several days, while minimizing damage to healthy tissues.

Source: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pola.25955/abstract;jsessionid=B63C566F9D1D092BA746F7199F0E878C.d01t04

Engineers at the University of California, Davis, have invented a superthin “nanoglue” that could be used in new-generation microchip fabrication.

In this graphic, clockwise from top: the glue can be printed in a pattern on a surface, treated to make it sticky (red) and then a new layer stuck on top. The background is a patterned nanoglue on a surface. (Tingrui Pan/UC Davis photo)

“The material itself (say, semiconductor wafers) would break before the glue peels off,” said Tingrui Pan, professor of biomedical engineering. He and his fellow researchers have filed a provisional patent. Conventional glues form a thick layer between two surfaces. Pan’s nanoglue, which conducts heat and can be printed, or applied, in patterns, forms a layer the thickness of only a few molecules. The nanoglue is based on a transparent, flexible material called polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS.
The nanoglue could be used to stick silicon wafers into a stack to make new types of multilayered computer chips. Pan said he thinks it could also be used for home applications — for example, as double-sided tape or for sticking objects to tiles. The glue only works on smooth surfaces and can be removed with heat treatment.

Source:  http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=10171

Two new studies performed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have revealed a new pathway for materials scientists to use previously unexplored properties of nanocrystalline-diamond thin films. While the properties of diamond thin films are relatively well-understood, the new discovery could dramatically improve the performance of certain types of integrated circuits by reducing their "thermal budget."

While diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, they’re also well-loved by scientists working to enhance the performance of electronic devices. Two new studies performed at Argonne have revealed a new pathway for materials scientists to use previously unexplored properties of nanocrystalline-diamond thin films.

For decades, engineers have sought to build more efficient electronic devices by reducing the size of their components. In the process of doing so, however, researchers have reached a "thermal bottleneck," said Argonne nanoscientist Anirudha Sumant

Source: http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/News/2012/news120312.html

Nanotechnologies could be game changers in how we diagnose, monitor and treat cancer, according to Mark Davis, Professor of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, and a member of the Experimental Therapeutics Program of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the City of Hope. Focusing on nanoparticles, Davis said, "We're trying to create these nanoscale particles for solid tumors [and] there really is, in my opinion, a very high potential to create new types of therapies."

Davis elaborated, saying, "What's really exciting to me is the patient evidence that reveal nanoparticles are actually going into tumor cells and releasing their payloads…

According to Michael Phelps, Norton Simon Professor, and Chair of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at the University of California Los Angeles, another promising technology is PET molecular imaging probes, which can rapidly search for cancer throughout all tissues of the body, as well as characterize each cancer lesion it detects within an individual patient. "All cancer treatments are in need of better molecular diagnostics… to better characterize the biology of cancer," said Phelps. Anna Barkerf, former Deputy Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and current Director of Arizona State University's Transformative Healthcare Networks, she said, "The nanotechnologies that are currently in use in the cancer community are actually making cancer therapies safer. They are uniformly increasing the efficiency, while reducing the toxicity for patients."

Source: http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/nanoscience-fighting-cancer-nanotechnology

Imec, a belgian world-leading research company in nano-electronics. today announces that it has released an early-version PDK (process development kit) for 14nm logic chips. This PDK is the industry’s first to address the 14nm technology node. It targets the introduction of a number of new key technologies, such as FinFET technology and EUV lithography. The PDK is made available to Imec’s partners, and will be followed by incremental updates. Imec and its partners are developing a 14nm test chip to be released in the 2^nd half of 2012 using this PDK.

A well-made process design kit (PDK) can assist an integrated circuit (IC) designer to reach that goal by maximizing design productivity and providing a portal to the foundry where the IC will be fabricated.

This first 14nm PDK contains all elements for design assessment of the 14nm node through device compact models, parasitic extraction, design rules, parameterized cells (pcells), and basic logic cells. Starting from the PDK, Imec and its partners are now designing a first test chip.

Source: http://www2.imec.be/be_en/press/imec-news/14nm.html

Engineers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, known as PNNL, in Richland, WA – USA,, are conducting research that could go a long way toward making the cars more affordable — not necessarily to buy, but to operate. And that could ultimately make the cars more popular with the public. While internal-combustion engines generate a lot of heat, making it easy to heat the passenger cabin in winter, electric vehicles produce very little excess heat. As a result, providing electricity for the same amount of cabin heat can reduce their driving range by up to 40 percent. The researchers want to create a new, 5-pound molecular heat pump, the size of a 2-liter bottle, that would handle both heating and cooling and allow the cars to travel longer distances before they'd need to be plugged in again.

 Instead of using a conventional heat pump to control heating and air conditioning, the cars would be heated and cooled with a new class of nanomaterial — or an "electrical metal organic framework" 

"We're really just barely under way," said Pete McGrail, of Pasco, a laboratory fellow and engineer who has worked at PNNL for 29 years. "The vehicle is going to be more attractive because it's going to be able to travel longer distances on the same charge you're putting in overnight," McGrail said. "So it's going to make it more marketable, more attractive, and it's going to take less energy."
Source: http://energytech.pnnl.gov/research_areas/research_area_description.asp?id=202

Printing three dimensional objects with incredibly fine details is now possible using “two-photon lithography”. With this technology, tiny structures on a nanometer scale can be fabricated. Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) have now made a major breakthrough in speeding up this printing technique: The high-precision-3D-printer  is orders of magnitude faster than similar devices (see video). This opens up completely new areas of application, such as in medicine.

The video shows the 3d-printing process in real time. Due to the very fast guiding of the laser beam, 100 layers, consisting of approximately 200 single lines each, are produced in four minutes.
CLICK HERE TO ENJOY THE VIDEO DEMONSTRATION

This amazing progress was made possible by combining several new ideas. “It was crucial to improve the control mechanism of the mirrors”, says Jan Torgersen (TU Vienna). The mirrors are continuously in motion during the printing process. The acceleration and deceleration-periods have to be tuned very precisely to achieve high-resolution results at a record-breaking speed.

Source: http://www.tuwien.ac.at/en/news/news_detail/article/7444/

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).are working on superior new organic electronic devices . At the Lab's Molecular Foundry, a DOE nanoscience center, the team has provided the first experimental determination of the pathways by which electrical charge is transported from molecule-to-molecule in an organic thin film. Their results also show how such organic films can be chemically modified to improve conductance.

Electron diffraction patterns provide a wealth of information about the morphology, structure and quality of monolayer organic thin films.

"We have shown that when the molecules in organic thin films are aligned in particular directions, there is much better conductance," says Miquel Salmeron, a leading authority on nanoscale surface imaging who directs Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and who led this study. 
Organic electronics, also known as plastic or polymer electronics, are devices that utilize carbon-based molecules as conductors rather than metals or semiconductors. They are prized for their low costs, light weight and rubbery flexibility. Organic electronics are also expected to play a big role in molecular computing, but to date their use has been hampered by low electrical conductance in comparison to metals and semiconductors.

Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2012/03/20/better-organic-electronics/

Imagine a world where the windows of high-rise office buildings are powerful energy producers, offering its inhabitants much more than some fresh air, light and a view. For the past four years a team of researchers from Flinders University has been working to make this dream a reality – and now the notion of solar-powered windows could be coming to a not too distant future near you. As part of his just-completed PhD, Dr Mark Bissett from the School of   Chemical and Physical Sciences - Australia, has developed a revolutionary solar cell using carbon nanotubes. A promising alternative to traditional silicon-based solar cells, carbon nanotubes are cheaper to make and more efficient to use than their energy-sapping, silicon counterparts.

“Solar power is actually the most expensive type of renewable energy – in fact the silicon solar cells we see on peoples’ roofs are very expensive to produce and they also use a lot of electricity to purify,” Dr Bissett said. He added that  the new, low-cost carbon nanotubes are transparent, meaning they can be “sprayed” onto windows without blocking light, and they are also flexible so they can be weaved into a range of materials including fabric – a concept that is already being explored by advertising companies.

Source: http://blogs.flinders.edu.au/flinders-news/2012/03/19/solar-cell-turns-windows-into-generators/

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas and Virginia Tech have created an undersea vehicle inspired by the common jellyfish that runs on renewable energy and could be used in ocean rescue and surveillance missions. In a study published this week in Smart Materials and Structures, scientists created a robotic jellyfish, dubbed Robojelly, that feeds off hydrogen and oxygen gases found in water.

“We’ve created an underwater robot that doesn’t need batteries or electricity,” said Dr. Yonas Tadesse, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UT Dallas and lead author of the study. “The only waste released as it travels is more water.” These muscles are made of a nickel-titanium alloy wrapped in carbon nanotubes, coated with platinum and housed in a pipe. As the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen encounters the platinum, heat and water vapor are created. That heat causes a contraction that moves the muscles of the device, pumping out the water and starting the cycle again. “It could stay underwater and refuel itself while it is performing surveillance,” Tadesse said.
CLICK HERE TO ENJOY THE VIDEO DEMONSTRATION

source: http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2012/3/22-16551_Researchers-Unveil-Robot-Jellyfish-That-Runs-on-Na_article-wide.html

 Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have developed a new catalyst that reversibly converts hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide to a liquid under very mild conditions. The work — described in a paper published online March 18, 2012, in Nature Chemistry — could lead to efficient ways to safely store and transport hydrogen for use as an alternative fuel.

“This is not the first catalyst capable of carrying out this reaction, but it is the first to work at room temperature, in an aqueous (water) solution, under atmospheric pressure — and that is capable of running the reaction in forward or reverse directions depending on the acidity of the solution,” said Brookhaven chemist Etsuko Fujita, who oversaw Brookhaven’s contributions to this research. “When the release of hydrogen is desired for use in fuel cells or other applications, one can simply flip the ‘pH switch’ on the catalyst to run the reaction in reverse,” said Brookhaven chemist James Muckerman, a co-author on the study. He noted that the liquid formic acid might also be used directly in a formic-acid fuel cell.

Source: http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=1400&template=Today

Researchers at CRANN, the Science Foundation Ireland funded nanoscience institute based in Trinity College Dublin (TCD), have discovered a new material that could transform the quality, lifespan and efficiency of flat screen computers, televisions and  solar cells.  The research team was led by Prof Igor Shvets, a CRANN, a  Principal Investigator who comments: "this is an exciting development with a range of applications and we are hopeful this initial research will attract commercial interest in order to explore its industrial use.  The new material could lead to innovations such as window-integrated flat screens and to increase the efficiency of certain solar cells, thus significantly impacting on the take-up of solar cells, which can help us to reduce carbon emissions.”

Devices that the new material could be used with such as solar cells, flat screen TVs, computer monitors, LEDs all utilise materials that can conduct electricity and at the same time are see-through.  These devices currently use transparent conducting oxides, which are a good compromise between electrical conductivity and optical transparency. They all have one fundamental limitation: they all conduct electricity through the movement of electrons

Source: http://apl.aip.org/resource/1/applab/v99/i11/p111910_s1?isAuthorized=no

 For the past 40 years, radiation has been the most effective method for treating deadly brain tumors called glioblastomas. But, although the targeting technology has been refined, beams of radiation still must pass through healthy brain tissue to reach the tumor, and patients can only tolerate small amounts before developing serious side effects.
A group of researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio have developed a way to deliver nanoparticle radiation directly to the brain tumor and keep it there. The method doses the tumor itself with much higher levels of radiation — 20 to 30 times the current dose of radiation therapy to patients — but spares a much greater area of brain tissue.

The study, published today in the journal Neuro-Oncology, has been successful enough in laboratory experiments that they’re preparing to start a clinical trial at the Cancer Therapy & Research Center, said Andrew Brenner, M.D., Ph.D., the study’s corresponding author and a neuro-oncologist at the CTRC who will lead the clinical trial.
“We saw that we could deliver much higher doses of radiation in animal models,” Dr. Brenner said. “We were able to give it safely and we were able to completely eradicate tumors.”

Source: http://www.uthscsa.edu/hscnews/singleformat2.asp?newID=4107

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have found new evidence to explain how cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) mediates the transfer of cholesterol from “good” high density lipoproteins (HDLs) to “bad” low density lipoproteins (LDLs). These findings point the way to the design of safer, more effective next generation CETP inhibitors that could help prevent the development of heart disease.

Gang Ren, a materials physicist and electron microscopy expert with Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, a DOE nanoscience research center, led a study in which the first structural images of CETP interacting with HDLs and LDLs were recorded. The images and structural analyses support the hypothesis that cholesterol is transferred from HDLs to LDLs via a tunnel running through the center of the CETP molecule. “Our images show that CETP is a small (53 kilodaltons) banana-shaped asymmetric molecule with a tapered N-terminal domain and a globular C-terminal domain,” Ren says. “We discovered that the CETP’s N-terminal penetrates HDL and its C-terminal interacts with LDL forming a ternary complex. Structure analyses lead us to hypothesize that the interaction may generate molecular forces that twist the terminals, creating pores at both ends of the CETP. These pores connect with central cavities in the CETP to form a tunnel that serves as a conduit for the movement of cholesterol from the HDL.”

Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/02/21/how-good-cholesterol-turns-bad/

Researchers at Brown University and Hasbro Children’s Hospital have traced the molecular interactions that allow the protein survivin to escape the nucleus of a breast cancer cell and prolong the cell’s life. That  may help in the development of better therapies and prognostics.The study’s senior author Dr. Rachel Altura, associate professor of pediatrics in The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and a pediatric oncologist at Hasbro Children’s Hospital reports: “You always have to worry about all the things you don’t know that you are targeting,”. “If we can target HDAC6, we can maybe block survivin from coming out of the nucleus and maintain it in its good state.” The present strategy is to block CRM1, Altura said, an idea she is pursuing with a pharmaceutical company in breast cancer cells in the lab. She said preliminary experiments look promising in keeping survivin inside the nucleus and making cancer cells more susceptible to dying.

Best kept behind barsInside the nucleus, survivin behaves. If it escapes, it can give a cancer cell great longevity. Three proteins conspire to help survivin break out of the nucleus. The darker area around the nucleus, above, is HDAC6, one of the conspirators. 

Source: http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2012/03/survivin

At the heart of the immune system that protects our bodies from disease and foreign invaders is a vast and complex communications network involving millions of cells, sending and receiving chemical signals that can mean life or death. At the heart of this vast cellular signaling network are interactions between billions of proteins and other biomolecules. These interactions, in turn, are greatly influenced by the spatial patterning of signaling and receptor molecules.   Biology is a game of nanometers, where spatial differences of only a few nanometers can determine the fate of a cell – whether it lives or dies, remains normal or turns cancerous. A scientific team led by chemist Jay Groves (Berkeley Lab and the University of California – UC- Berkeley) has used supported membranes to demonstrate that living cells not only interact with their environment through chemical signals but also through physical force.

click here to enjoy the video demonstration

The ability to observe signaling spatial patterns in the immune and other cellular systems as they evolve, and to study the impact on molecular interactions and, ultimately, cellular communication, would be a critical tool in the fight against immunological and other disorders that lead to a broad range of health problems including cancer.  
Such a tool is now at hand.

Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2012/03/23/a-shiny-new-tool-for-imaging-biomolecules/

Researchers have devised a nanoscale sensor to electronically read the sequence of a single DNA molecule, a technique that is fast and inexpensive and could make DNA sequencing widely available. The technique could lead to affordable personalized medicine, potentially revealing predispositions for afflictions such as cancer, diabetes or addiction.

"There is a clear path to a workable, easily produced sequencing platform," said Jens Gundlach, a University of Washington physics professor who leads the research team. "We augmented a protein nanopore we developed for this purpose with a molecular motor that moves a DNA strand through the pore a nucleotide at a time."The researchers previously reported creating the nanopore by genetically engineering a protein pore from a mycobacterium. The nanopore, from Mycobacterium smegmatis porin A, has an opening 1 billionth of a meter in size, just large enough for a single DNA strand to pass through.

Source: http://www.washington.edu/news/articles/tiny-reader-makes-fast-cheap-dna-sequencing-feasible

Want a see-through cellphone you can wrap around your wrist? Such a thing may be possible before long, according to Rice University chemist James Tour, whose lab has developed transparent, flexible memories using silicon oxide as the active component. 

“Generally, you can’t see a bit of memory, because it’s too small,” said Tour,  T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry at Rice University as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science. “But silicon itself is not transparent. If the density of the circuits is high enough, you’re going to see it.”.  The new type of memory could combine with the likes of transparent electrodes developed at Rice for flexible touchscreens and transparent integrated circuits and batteries developed at other labs in recent years.

Source: http://news.rice.edu/2012/03/27/transparent-memory-chips-are-coming-2/

The lab of a University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering   plans to commercialize with a private company his research focused on using mobile devices, such as cell phones, to detect harmful airborne substances in real-time.

The technology being developed by Nosang Myung , professor and chair of the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, and  the private company Innovation Economy Corporation has the potential to be adapted in many industries. These include agriculture (detecting concentrations of pesticides), industry (monitoring evaporation and leaks when using or storing combustible gases), homeland security (warning systems for bio-terrorism) and the military (detecting chemical warfare agents).

Source: http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/4551

Cell phones last a few days on a single battery; laptop computers, two to three hours. If you could have a pocket-sized personal computer with a cell-phone sized battery, how long do you think it would last? Just long enough to check your e-mail, or play a game of solitaire? It’s a sad but unavoidable fact that the more complicated an electronic device gets, the less efficient it is. Researchers Kenneth Lux and Karien Rodriguez, at the University of WisconsIn, came up with an exciting new approach to the problem. Their method not only improves the performance of nano-scale fuel cells, but completely sidesteps the need for industrial-strength technology.

“Even the best electrocatalysts, on a flat surface, give only hundreds of microamps per square centimeter. What you really want is … to increase the surface area by orders of magnitude.” Lux explains to PhysOrg.com, “To do this you need a three-dimensional structure.” To compress more power into smaller volumes, researchers have begun to build fuel cells on the fuzzy frontier of nanotechnology. Silicon etching, evaporation, and other processes borrowed from chip manufacturers have been used to create tightly packed channel arrays to guide the flow of fuel through the cell.

Fuel cells come with an energy capacity at least ten times greater than that of conventional batteries. Where a lithium-ion battery can provide 300 Watt-hours per liter, the methanol in a fuel cell has a theoretical capacity of up to 4800 Watt-hours per liter! Imagine your laptop running for a full day without needing to recharge, and you can see why industry leaders such as Toshiba, IBM, and NEC have been pouring funds into fuel cell research.If fuel-cell technology can be perfected, we might be looking at a future of cheap, disposable battery packs for our favorite electronic gadgets.

Source: http://phys.org/news11654.html

Many modern data storage devices, like hard disk drives, rely on the ability to manipulate the properties of tiny individual magnetic sections, but their overall design is , computer processinglimited by the way these magnetic 'domains' interact when they are close together.Now, researchers from Imperial College London have demonstrated that a honeycomb pattern of nano-sized magnets, in a material known as spin ice, introduces competition between neighbouring magnets, and reduces the problems caused by these interactions by two-thirds. They have shown that large arrays of these nano-magnets can be used to store computable information. The arrays can then be read by measuring their electrical resistance.

The scientists have so far been able to 'read' and 'write' patterns in the magnetic fields, and a key challenge now is to develop a way to utilise these patterns to perform calculations, and to do so at room temperature. At the moment, they are working with the magnets at temperatures below minus 223°C.

Source: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/
newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_30-3-2012-15-43-46

If you venture into a coffee shop in the coming months and see someone with a pair of futuristic glasses that look like a prop from “Star Trek,” don’t worry. It’s probably just a Google employee testing the company’s new augmented-reality glasses. Google company is the last to declare its interest for augmented reality. Apple with its nanocomputer iLens one year ago, Microsoft lately, and the American Army (DARPA) secretely, have been  working hard in this specific research field. In a a post shared on Google Plus, employees in the Google company laboratory known as Google X, including Babak Parviz, Steve Lee and Sebastian Thrun, asked people for input about the prototype of Project Glass. 

Click to enjoy the video demonstration.

 “We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input,” the three employees wrote. “Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?”

See more on DARPA, Apple and Microsoft projects:
http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1703
http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1512
http://www.nanocomputer.com/?page_id=563

Improve balance and overall mobility for people suffering from Parkinson's disease? Now it is possible with taylor made videogames on existing commercial platform! 

Click to enjoy the video demonstration
 Esther Smits, Movement scientist at the University Medical Centre Groningen - Netherlands, explains: “We have to measure muscle activity so we can see what happens in muscles when volunteers are moving their arms to make the drawings.”
Rutger Zietsma, coordinator of the project, adds: “We have built on previous techniques for recording handwriting and motion. Starting with digitising tablets for recording handwriting, also using motion analysis systems to look at upper body motion and limb motion. ‘Then we built a pen system with  different sensors and data analysis techniques. We developed algorithms that would automatically analyse motion, the control behind that motion in the nervous systems of the users”.
Finally, researchers then developed tailor made video games on existing commercial platforms. Games allow Parkinson’s patients to improve balance and overall mobility.

Source: http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?id=/research/star/index
_en.cfm?p=124&calledby=infocentre&item=Infocentre&artid=24474

Nanomedicine research at the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT funded by a $5 million grant from the Prostate Cancer Foundation (PCF) has delivered the first nanomedicine shown to successfully target prostate cancer cells and deliver docetaxel chemotherapy in high concentrations in Phase I clinical trials. Docetaxel is used in prostate cancer patients who have failed hormone therapy and is currently delivered via infusion which floods the body and  affects both cancerous and healthy cells. By using targeted nanoparticles to deliver the therapeutic, healthy cells are widely spared from undesired side effects of treatment.

The trial demonstrated safety,  tolerability and showed evidence of anti-tumor activity with six of 17 patients suffering from advanced or metastatic solid tumor cancers.

Source: http://www.pcf.org/site/c.leJRIROrEpH/b.8043719/k.F697/Novel_
Prostate_Nanomedicine_Delivers_High_Drug_Concentration
_Directly_and_Safely_to_Tumors_in_Phase_I_Trials.htm

The extremely sharp blades, finely crafted with nanotechnology, provide a super-close, clean shave every time. The digital LCD panel indicates when it's time to recharge and clean. Just rinse under running water. Runs on one included lithium-ion battery. The first Panasonic electric shaver to feature four blades, will be exclusively sold through The Sharper Image. The addition of the fourth blade provides a broader cutting surface, allowing more whiskers to be cut on the first pass. 

Extra-sharp Nanotech razor blades on independently floating shaver heads are designed to provide a close shave, reaching hair growing in any direction.
The floating heads closely follow facial contours, while the specially-calibrated blades are honed at a 30-degree angle to produce a clean, efficient cut.

Source: http://shop.panasonic.com/shop/model/ES8228S

University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy without using fossil fuels and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Deli Wang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego  Jacobs School of Engineering says that current technology uses fossil fuels to convert/separate hydrogen. The new method will not produce any greenhouse gases.

Electronic microscopic image of a nanoforest, or “3D branched nanowire array.” Green tint added for contrast. Image credit: Wang Research Group, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Their "3D branched nanowire array" uses a process called photoelectrochemical water-splitting to produce hydrogen gas. The arrays are made of zinc-oxide and silicon which are cheap abundant elements.

Why use nanowire forests? Wang says there are two reasons. The first reason is because forests tend to absorb solar energy while flat deserts and oceans tend to reflect it. When the light gets trapped in the forest the energy is used to separate the water into its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. The technology is similar to a retinal photoreceptor cells in the human eye.

Soure: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1177

Using light-harvesting nanoparticles to convert laser energy into “plasmonic nanobubbles,” researchers at Rice University,in Houston, USA,  the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) are developing new methods to inject drugs and genetic payloads directly into cancer cells. In tests on drug-resistant cancer cells, the researchers found that delivering chemotherapy drugs with nanobubbles was up to 30 times more deadly to cancer cells than traditional drug treatment and required less than one-tenth the clinical dose.

Click here to enjoy the video demonstration

“We are delivering cancer drugs or other genetic cargo at the single-cell level,” said Rice’s Dmitri Lapotko, a biologist and physicist whose plasmonic nanobubble technique is the subject of four new peer-reviewed studies, including one due later this month in the journal Biomaterials and another published April 3 in the journal PLoS ONE. “By avoiding healthy cells and delivering the drugs directly inside cancer cells, we can simultaneously increase drug efficacy while lowering the dosage,” he said.

Source: http://news.rice.edu/2012/04/09/nanobubbles-plus-chemotherapy-equals-single-cell-cancer-targeting/

Nanoresearchers at the Methodist Neurological Institute and Rice University   have developed a way to selectively kill brain cancer cells by using a tiny syringe to deliver a combination of chemotherapy drugs directly in the cells.
"Without our nano-delivery system, we know that current drug delivery would be highly toxic to patients if we tried to deliver all three of these drugs at once," said David Baskin, M.D., neurosurgeon at the Methodist Neurological Institute, who began his nanomedicine research in 2004 with the late Nobel laureate and Rice chemist Richard Smalley. "But delivered in combination using these nano-syringes, our research demonstrated extreme lethality, with at least a three-fold increase in the number of dead cancer cells following treatment. The nano-syringes selectively deliver these drugs only to cancer cells, and appear not to be toxic to normal neurons and other non-cancerous brain cells." 

In a study published online April 15 in Nature Medicine, a second  team led by Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, professor and chair of radiology, showed that the minuscule nanoparticles engineered in his lab homed in on and highlighted brain tumors, precisely delineating their boundaries and greatly easing their complete removal. The new technique could someday help improve the prognosis of patients with deadly brain cancers. 

Human brain scans. Like special-forces troops laser-tagging targets for a bomber pilot, tiny particules that can be imaged three different ways at once have enabled Stanford Univeristy School of Medicine to remove brain tumors from mice with unprecedented accuracy.

"With brain tumors, surgeons don't have the luxury of removing large amounts of surrounding normal brain tissue to be sure no cancer cells are left," said Gambhir, who is the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Clinical Investigation in Cancer Research and director of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford. "You clearly have to leave as much of the healthy brain intact as you possibly can."

Source: http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2012/april/nanoparticle.html

It seems like an ordinary morning at first, but when you go to the kitchen for breakfast, something is wrong. Your toast is burned but the toaster is cold. “This is a new phenomenon we’re observing, exclusively at the nanoscale, and it is completely contrary to our intuition and knowledge of Joule heating at larger scales—for example, in things like your toaster,” says Baloch, who conducted the research while a graduate student at the University of Maryland. “The nanotube’s electrons are bouncing off of something, but not its atoms. Somehow, the atoms of the neighboring materials—the silicon nitride substrate—are vibrating and getting hot instead.”

 
“We now know that silicon nitride can absorb energy from a current-carrying nanotube in this way, but we would like to test other materials, such as semiconductors and other insulators,” Cumings explains.  “If we can really understand how this phenomenon works, we could start engineering a new generation of nanoelectronics with integrated thermal management.”

Source: http://www.eng.umd.edu/html/news/news_story.php?id=6398

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) have provided the first evidence that engineered nanoparticles are able to accumulate within plants and damage their DNA. In a recent paper, the team led by NIST chemist Bryant C. Nelson showed that under laboratory conditions, cupric oxide nanoparticles have the capacity to enter plant root cells and generate many mutagenic DNA base lesions.

The team tested the human-made, ultrafine particles between 1 and 100 nanometers in size on a human food crop, the radish, and two species of common groundcovers used by grazing animals, perennial and annual ryegrass. This research is part of NIST's work to help characterize the potential environmental, health and safety (EHS) risks of nanomaterials, and develop methods for identifying and measuring them.

Source: http://www.nist.gov/mml/biochemical/nanoparticles-041712.cfm

A team of researchers from Taiwan and the University of California, Berkeley, has harnessed nanodots to create a new electronic memory technology that can write and erase data 10-100 times faster than today's mainstream charge-storage memory products. The new system uses a layer of non-conducting material embedded with discrete (non-overlapping) silicon nanodots, each approximately 3 nanometers across.

"The metal-gate structure is a mainstream technology on the path toward nanoscale complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) memory technology," said co-author Jia-Min Shieh, researcher, National Nano Device Laboratories, Hsinchu, Taiwan. "Our system uses numerous, discrete silicon nanodots for charge storage and removal. These charges can enter (data write) and leave (data erase) the numerous discrete nanodots in a quick and simple way."

Source: http://www.ndl.narl.org.tw/web/eng/Hsinchu/hsinchu_intro.php

Researchers from CNRS  and the Université de Strasbourg - France , headed by Nicolas Giuseppone  and Bernard Doudin, have succeeded in making highly conductive plastic fibers that are only several nanometers thick. These nanowires, for which CNRS has filed a patent, "self-assemble” when triggered by a flash of light.

 Inexpensive and easy to handle, unlike carbon nanotubes (3), they combine the advantages of the two materials currently used to conduct electric current: metals and plastic organic polymers (4). In fact, their remarkable electrical properties are similar to those of metals.

Source: http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.1332.html

Using a novel nanotechnology-based approach the californian company Medistem Inc. in San Diego,  has disclosed  a new approach to stimulating the immune system to kill tumor cells. Medistem and a team of collaborators demonstrated that nanoparticles could be used to deliver molecules found on tumors to specific cells of the immune system called “dendritic cells.” These nanoparticle-loaded dendritic cells were then able to stimulate other cells of the immune system to directly kill tumors in the test tube and also in mice bearing prostate cancer.

“Cellular therapy is a clinical reality, for example, the company Dendreon developed the first therapeutic FDA-approved cancer vaccine Sipuleucel-T (Provenge) that is currently being used for treatment of patients with hormone-resistant prostate cancer. The data we published today provides ways of optimizing treatments such as Provenge,” said Dr. Vladimir Bogin, President and Chairman of Medistem. “By using nanotechnology to specifically educate dendritic cells to activate the immune system in patients, it may be possible to develop more effective ways of treating cancer by leveraging the body’s own resources.”

Source:  PLGA nanoparticle-mediated delivery of tumor antigenic peptides elicits effective immune responses. International Journal of Nanomedicine, 7: 1475, 2012 
Link: http://medisteminc.com/2012/medistem-industryacademia-collaboration-leads-to-nanotechnology-based-cancer-vaccine/

A new x-ray microscope probes the inner intricacies of materials smaller than human cells and creates unparalleled high-resolution 3D images. By integrating unique automatic calibrations, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory are able to capture and combine thousands of images with greater speed and precision than any other microscope. The direct observation of structures spanning 25 nanometers – or 25 billionths of a meter – will offer fundamental advances in many fields, including energy research, environmental sciences, biology, and national defense. This innovative full field transmission x-ray microscope (TXM), was developed at Brookhaven Lab’s National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS). A paper published in the April 2012 Applied Physics Letters details the experimental system that rapidly combines 2D images taken from every angle to form digital 3D constructs.

This 3D reconstruction of a lithium-ion battery electrode, composed of 1,441 individual images captured and aligned by the TXM, reveals nano-scale structural details to help guide future energy research.

“We can actually see the internal 3D structure of materials at the nanoscale,” said Brookhaven physicist Jun Wang, lead author of the paper and head of the team that first proposed this TXM. “The device works beautifully, and it overcomes several major obstacles for x-ray microscopes. We’re excited to see the way this technology will push research.”

Source: http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/PR_display.asp?prID=1406&template=Today

A metal cube the size of a toaster, created at the University of Alberta (U of A) in Canada, is capable of performing the same genetic tests as most fully equipped modern laboratories—and in a fraction of the time.

 Plastic chip that can perform 20 genetic tests from a single drop of blood: a kind of a lab-on-a-chip

At its core is a small plastic chip developed with nanotechnology that holds the key to determining whether a patient is resistant to cancer drugs or has viruses like malaria. The chip can also pinpoint infectious diseases in a herd of cattle.

Source: http://www.news.ualberta.ca/article.aspx?id=0EC281968D4C4F15A76D0E6D088C4F55

Could engineered human stem cells hold the key to cancer survival? Scientists at the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) in Singapore, have discovered that neural stem cells possess the innate ability to target tumor cells outside the central nervous system. This finding, which was demonstrated successfully on breast cancer cells, was recently published in leading peer reviewed journal, Stem Cells.

A team of researchers led by IBN Group Leader, Dr Shu Wang, has made a landmark discovery that neural stem cells (NSCs) derived from human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells could be used to treat breast cancer. The effectiveness of using NSCs, which originate from the central nervous system, to treat brain tumors has been investigated in previous studies. This is the first study that demonstrates that iPS cell-derived NSCs could also target tumors outside the central nervous system, to treat both primary and secondary tumors.

Source: http://www.a-star.edu.sg/?TabId=828&articleType=ArticleView&arti, cell stemcleId=1626

To support nuclear-surveillance capabilities, researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are developing ways to enhance the radiation-detection devices used at ports, border crossings, airports and elsewhere. The aim is to create technologies that will increase the effectiveness and reliability of detectors in the field, while also reducing cost. The work is co-sponsored by the US Nuclear Defense Office of the Department of Homeland Security and by the National Science Foundation.

 Technology that can effectively detect smuggled radioactive materials is considered vital to U.S. security.

"U.S. security personnel have to be on guard against two types of nuclear attack – true nuclear bombs, and devices that seek to harm people by dispersing radioactive material," said Bernd Kahn, a researcher who is principal investigator on the project. "Both of these threats can be successfully detected by the right technology."

Source: http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/casestudy/homeland-defense-radiation-detection-surveillance

The first self- propelled microsubmarine has been designed in the laboratory of the Jacobs School of Nanoengineering (University of South California at San Diego)  by Dr Joseph Wang and his team.  The task of these microsubmarines is  to pick up droplets of oil from contaminated waters and transport them to collection facilities. The report concludes that these tiny machines could play an important role in cleaning up oil spills, like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico.

Joseph Wang and colleagues explain that different versions of microengines have been developed, including devices that could transport medications through the bloodstream to diseased parts of the body. But no one has ever shown that these devices – which are about 10 times smaller than the width of a human hair — could help clean up oil spills. There is an urgent need for better ways of separating oil from water in the oceans and inside factories to avoid releasing oil-contaminated water to the environment. Wang's team developed so-called microsubmarines, which require very little fuel and move ultrafast, to see whether these small engines could help clean up oil.
Source: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn301175b
To contact Joseph Wang: http://ne.ucsd.edu/~joewang/

Let's remind that a month ago a team from the University of Texas has experimented a nanotechnology based robot jellyfish. To see more click here.

A team of bioengineers at the University of Maryland, led by Professor Huakun Xu announced that they had successfully tested an alternative to conventional mercury cavity filling, comprised of silver nanoparticles, which not only kill unwanted microbes, but also regenerate tooth enamel. The entire materials science of nanomaterials is a still-growing field, because otherwise normal materials like silver often have fantastic physical and electrical properties when you shave them down to the nanometer scale, and quantum effects become immediately relevant. Basically, a chunk of silver acts nothing like a nanoparticle of silver – and this goes for any other nanomaterial.

The silver nanoparticles kill the bacteria by getting down to their level and attaching to their cell walls like a key with a perfect fit. This physical breach allows external matter to get inside, which disrupts the internal functions of the cell, eventually killing the bacterium. It's worth a mention that nanosilver can't do this to human cells!

Source: http://www.dental.umaryland.edu/dentaldepts/epod/
Biomaterials%20and%20Tissue%20Engineering/hxu/bio.html

The most transparent, lightweight and flexible material ever for conducting electricity has been invented by a team from the University of Exeter – Great Britain. Called  GraphExeter , the material could revolutionise the creation of wearable electronic devices, such as clothing containing computers, phones and MP3 players.

GraphExeter could also be used for the creation of ‘smart’ mirrors or windows, with computerised interactive features. Since this material is also transparent over a wide light spectrum, it could enhance by more than 30% the efficiency of solar panels

Source: http://emps.exeter.ac.uk/physics-astronomy/news/title_206443_en.html