NanoComputer

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) are the first to report that synthetic silicate nanoplatelets (also known as layered clay) can induce stem cells to become bone cells without the need of additional bone-inducing factors. Synthetic silicates are made up of simple or complex salts of silicic acids, and have been used extensively for various commercial and industrial applications, such as food additives, glass and ceramic filler materials, and anti-caking agents.

“With an aging population in the US, injuries and degenerative conditions are subsequently on the rise,” said Ali Khademhosseini, PhD, BWH Division of Biomedical Engineering, senior study author. “As a result, there is an increased demand for therapies that can repair damaged tissues. In particular, there is a great need for new materials that can direct stem cell differentiation and facilitate functional tissue formation. Silicate nanoplatelets have the potential to address this need in medicine and biotechnology.”
The study has been published online May 13, 2013 in Advanced Materials.

Source: http://www.brighamandwomens.org/

With the hand of nature trained on a beaker of chemical fluid, the most delicate flower structures have been formed in a Harvard laboratory—and not at the scale of inches, but microns. These minuscule sculptures, curved and delicate, don’t resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that’s what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule at a time.By simply manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid, Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and lead author of a paper appearing on the cover of Science, has found that he can control the growth behavior of these crystals to create precisely tailored structures.

“For at least 200 years, people have been intrigued by how complex shapes could have evolved in nature. This work helps to demonstrate what’s possible just through environmental, chemical changes,” says Noorduin.
Source: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/

In the wake of the sobering news that atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at its highest level in at least three million years, an important advance in the race to develop carbon-neutral renewable energy sources has been achieved. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have reported the first fully integrated nanosystem for artificial photosynthesis. While “artificial leaf” is the popular term for such a system, the key to this success was an “artificial forest.”

Schematic shows TiO2 nanowires (blue) grown on the upper half of a Si nanowire (gray) and the two absorbing different regions of the solar spectrum

“Similar to the chloroplasts in green plants that carry out photosynthesis, our artificial photosynthetic system is composed of two semiconductor light absorbers, an interfacial layer for charge transport, and spatially separated co-catalysts,” says Peidong Yang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, who led this research. “To facilitate solar water- splitting in our system, we synthesized tree-like nanowire heterostructures, consisting of silicon trunks and titanium oxide branches. Visually, arrays of these nanostructures very much resemble an artificial forest.”
Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/

Researchers at Queen’s University Belfast have devised a ‘magic bullet’ nanomedicine which could become the first effective treatment for Acute Lung Injury or ALI, a condition affecting 20 per cent of all patients in intensive care. Many with the condition die as a result of lung failure.
ALI patients can become critically ill and develop problems with breathing when their lungs become inflamed and fill with fluid. The new drug, a nanoparticle, measuring around one billionth of a metre. could revolutionise clinical management of patients in intensive care units. The patient can inhale it, taking the drug directly into the lungs and to the point of inflammation. Current treatments are unable to target directly the inflammation and can result in unpleasant side effects.

“Nanoparticles are perhaps one of the most exciting new approaches to drug development. Most research in the area focuses on how the delivery of drugs to the disease site can be improved in these minute carriers. Our own research in this area focuses on how nanoparticles interact with cells and how this can be exploited to produce therapeutic effects both in respiratory disease and cancer.”, said Professor Chris Scott from the School of Pharmacy, who is leading the research.

Source: http://www.qub.ac.uk/

Northwestern University scientists have struck gold in the laboratory. They have discovered an inexpensive and environmentally benign method that uses simple cornstarch – instead of cyanide — to isolate gold from raw materials in a selective manner. This green method extracts gold from crude sources and leaves behind other metals that are often found mixed together with the crude gold. The new process also can be used to extract gold from consumer electronic waste. Current methods for gold recovery involve the use of highly poisonous cyanides, often leading to contamination of the environment. Nearly all gold-mining companies use this toxic gold leaching process to sequester the precious metal.

A modern day gold rush! A new method developed at Northwestern bypasses the use of toxic cyanide for gold purification by using an eco-friendly sugar (cyclodextrin) derived from starch
“The elimination of cyanide from the gold industry is of the utmost importance environmentally,” said Sir Fraser Stoddart, the Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. “We have replaced nasty reagents with a cheap, biologically friendly material derived from starch.”
Source: http://www.northwestern.edu/

Solar panels as inexpensive as paint? Researchers at University at Buffalo are helping develop a new generation of photovoltaic cells that produce more power and cost less to manufacture. Today the major impediment is the cost to manufacture, install and maintain solar panels. Simply put, most people and businesses cannot afford to place them on their rooftops. One of the more promising efforts, which Qiaoqiang Gan, assistant professor from University at Buffalo is working on, involves the use of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials. These devices don’t match traditional solar cells in terms of energy production but they are less expensive and – because they are made (or processed) in liquid form - can be applied to a greater variety of surfaces.

Gan detailed the progress of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials in the May 7 edition of the journal Advanced Materials. Co-authors include Filbert J. Bartoli, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Lehigh University, and Zakya Kafafi of the National Science Foundation.

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

Using the SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) model in Chinese macaques, a research group headed by Jean-Marie Andrieu from University PARIS V – France – with Wei Lu from University of Montpellier were able to suppress the initial activation of SIV- positive CD4+ T-lymphocytes in vivo which is the crucial step that allows SIV to initiate replication and to establish infection. They used an oral vaccine made of inactivated SIVmac239 associated with a common commensal bacterium of the digestive tract known as Lactobacillus plantarum which is known to induce immunological tolerance to foreign antigens.
In contrast to what happens with all anti-viral vaccines, this oral
tolerogenic vaccine elicited neither anti-SIV antibodies nor cytotoxic
T-lymphocytes but induced instead a previously unrecognized class of
SIV- specific, non-cytolytic CD8+ T-regulatory cells which prevented SIV+ CD4+ T-cell activation and suppressed SIV replication.
By blocking SIV reverse transcription in CD4+ T-cells, the initial burst of virus replication was prevented and the vaccinated macaques were protected from infection. Of the 16 vaccinated macaques that were challenged intra-rectally 3 to 14 months later with the homologous SIV strain as well as with the heterologous strainSIV-B670, 15 were solidly protected from SIV challenge.

Since CD4+ T-cell activation
drives both the initial SIV and HIV-1 replication in macaques and
humans respectively, it is plausible that such a tolerogenic vaccine may
also be effective against HIV-1 in humans and this will be certainly be
investigated in the near future, either as a preventive or therapeutic
vaccine..

Test on humans will start by the end of this year.
Source: http://www.parisdescartes.fr/
In english: Ask for PDF document at:
Alice Tschudy
Press Officer
Université Paris Descartes
+33 1 76 53 18 63 / 17 98
presse@parisdescartes.fr

Researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) looked to nature for inspiration, and they are now developing a new technology that makes it possible to use plants to generate electricity. The sun provides the most abundant source of energy on the planet. However, only a tiny fraction of the solar radiation on Earth is converted into useful energy. Plants are the undisputed champions of solar power. After billions of years of evolution, most of them operate at nearly 100 percent quantum efficiency, meaning that for every photon of sunlight a plant captures, it produces an equal number of electrons. Converting even a fraction of this into electricity would improve upon the efficiency seen with solar panels, which generally operate at efficiency levels between 12 and 17 percent. During photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to split water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen, which produces electrons. These newly freed electrons go on to help create sugars that plants use much like food to support growth and reproduction.

“We have developed a way to interrupt photosynthesis so that we can capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make these sugars,” said Ramajara Ramasamy, an assitant Professor in the UGA College of Engineering and member of UGA’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.
“Clean energy is the need of the century,” added Ramaraja Ramasamy, corresponding author of a paper describing the process in the Journal of Energy and Environmental Science. “This approach may one day transform our ability to generate cleaner power from sunlight using plant-based systems.”
Source: http://sustainability.uga.edu

Researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology – Korea – (UNIST) demonstrated high-performance polymer solar cells (PSCs) with power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 8.92% which is the highest values reported to date for plasmonic PSCs using metal nanoparticles (NPs).

“This is the first report introducing metal NPs between the hole transport layer and active layer for enhancing device performance. The multipositional and solutions-processable properties of our surface plasmon resonance (SPR) materials offer the possibility to use multiple plasmonic effects by introducing various metal nanoparticles into different spatial location for high-performance optoelectronic device via mass production techniques.” said Prof. Jin Young Kim who led the study with Prof.Soojin Park from UNIST. “Our work is meaningful to develop novel metal nanoparticles and almost reach 10% efficiency by using these materials. If we continuously focus on optimizing this work, commercialization of PSCs will be a realization but not dream,” added Prof. Park.

A polymer solar cell is a type of thin film solar cells made with polymers that produce electricity from sunlight by the photovoltaic effect. Most current commercial solar cells are made from a highly purified silicon crystal. The high cost of these silicon solar cells and their complex production process has generated interest in developing alternative photovoltaic technologies.

Source: http://www.unist.ac.kr

Chemical engineering researchers have identified a new mechanism to convert natural gas into energy up to 70 times faster, while effectively capturing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2).

“This could make power generation from natural gas both cleaner and more efficient,” says Fanxing Li, co-author of a paper on the research and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. “Improving this process hopefully moves us closer to commercial applications that use chemical looping, which would help us limit greenhouse gas emissions,” Li says.
At issue is a process called chemical looping, in which a solid, oxygen-laden material – called an “oxygen carrier” – is put in contact with natural gas. The oxygen atoms in the oxygen carrier interact with the natural gas, causing combustion that produces energy.
Source: http://web.ncsu.edu/

Take a swab of saliva from your mouth and within minutes your DNA could be ready for analysis and genome sequencing with the help of a new device. Now University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods. The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.

Hand-held device for extracting DNA
“It’s very complex to extract DNA,” said Jae-Hyun Chung, a UW associate professor of mechanical engineering who led the research. “When you think of the current procedure, the equivalent is like collecting human hairs using a construction crane.”
The small, box-shaped kit now is ready for manufacturing, then eventual distribution to hospitals and clinics.

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

In a promising development for diabetes treatment, researchers have developed a network of nanoscale particles that can be injected into the body and release insulin when blood-sugar levels rise, maintaining normal blood sugar levels for more than a week in animal-based laboratory tests. The work was done by researchers at North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Children’s Hospital Boston.

The nano-network releases insulin in response to changes in blood sugar

“We’ve created a ‘smart’ system that is injected into the body and responds to changes in blood sugar by releasing insulin, effectively controlling blood-sugar levels,” says Dr. Zhen Gu, lead author of a paper describing the work and an assistant professor in the joint biomedical engineering program at NC State and UNC Chapel Hill. “We’ve tested the technology in mice, and one injection was able to maintain blood sugar levels in the normal range for up to 10 days.”
Source: http://news.ncsu.edu/

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have fabricated arrays of piezotronic transistors capable of converting mechanical motion directly into electronic controlling signals. The arrays could help give robots a more adaptive sense of touch. Mimicking the sense of touch electronically has been challenging, and is now done by measuring changes in resistance prompted by mechanical touch. The devices developed By Georgia Tech scientists rely on a different physical phenomenon – tiny polarization charges formed when piezoelectric materials such as zinc oxide are moved or placed under strain. In the piezotronic transistors, the piezoelectric charges control the flow of current through the wires just as gate voltages do in conventional three-terminal transistors.

“Any mechanical motion, such as the movement of arms or the fingers of a robot, could be translated to control signals,” explained Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents’ professor and Hightower Chair in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This could make artificial skin smarter and more like the human skin. It would allow the skin to feel activity on the surface.”
Source: http://www.gatech.edu/

Scientists at Princeton University used off-the-shelf printing tools to create a functional ear that can “hear” radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability. The researchers’ primary purpose was to explore an efficient and versatile means to merge electronics with tissue. The scientists used 3D printing of cells and nanoparticles followed by cell culture to combine a small coil antenna with cartilage, creating what they term a bionic ear.

“In general, there are mechanical and thermal challenges with interfacing electronic materials with biological materials,” said Michael McAlpine, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton and the lead researcher. “Previously, researchers have suggested some strategies to tailor the electronics so that this merger is less awkward. That typically happens between a 2D sheet of electronics and a surface of the tissue. However, our work suggests a new approach — to build and grow the biology up with the electronics synergistically and in a 3D interwoven format.”

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Researchers from Purdue University have found a way to see synthetic nanostructures and molecules using a new type of super-resolution optical microscopy that does not require fluorescent dyes, representing a practical tool for biomedical and nanotechnology research.

A new type of super-resolution optical microscopy takes a high-resolution image (at right) of graphite “nanoplatelets” about 100 nanometers wide. The imaging system, called saturated transient absorption microscopy, or STAM, uses a trio of laser beams and represents a practical tool for biomedical and nanotechnology research.

“Super-resolution optical microscopy has opened a new window into the nanoscopic world,” said Ji-Xin Cheng, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and chemistry at Purdue University.”The diffraction limit represents the fundamental limit of optical imaging resolution,” Cheng said. “Stefan Hell at the Max Planck Institute and others have developed super-resolution imaging methods that require fluorescent labels. Here, we demonstrate a new scheme for breaking the diffraction limit in optical imaging of non-fluorescent species. Because it is label-free, the signal is directly from the object so that we can learn more about the nanostructure.”

Source: http://www.purdue.edu/

University of Florida researchers have developed a “DNA nanotrain” that fast-tracks its payload of cancer-fighting drugs and bioimaging agents to tumor cells deep within the body. The nanotrain’s ability to cost-effectively deliver high doses of drugs to precisely targeted cancers and other medical maladies without leaving behind toxic nano-clutter has been the elusive Holy Grail for scientists studying the teeny-tiny world of DNA nanotechnology.

“Most nanotechnology relies on a nanoparticle approach, and the particles are made of inorganic materials; after they’ve been used as a carrier for the drug, they’ll be left inside the body,” said the study’s lead investigator, Weihong Tan, a UF distinguished professor of chemistry, professor of physiology and functional genomics, and a member of the UF Shands Cancer Center and the UF Genetics Institute. “Compared to existing nanostructures, our nanotrain is easier and cheaper to make, is highly specific to cancer cells, has a lot of drug-loading power and is very much biocompatible.”

DNA nanotechnology holds great promise as a new way to deliver chemotherapy directly to cancer cells, but until now, scientists have not been able to direct nanotherapies to consistently differentiate cancer cells from healthy ones. Other limiting factors include high costs, too-small amounts of drugs delivered and potential toxic side effects.
Source: http://news.ufl.edu/

Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston have developed a gene therapy approach that may one day stop Parkinson’s disease (PD) in it tracks, preventing disease progression and reversing its symptoms. Each year, 60,000 adults are newly diag­nosed with Parkinson’s dis­ease, a neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­order that causes a slew of symp­toms, including tremors, slowed move­ments, and changes in speech. The drugs cur­rently avail­able to treat PD patients help them regain some of the motor con­trol lost through the dis­ease, but don’t treat the under­lying cause, said Bar­bara Waszczak, a pro­fessor of phar­ma­ceu­tical sci­ences in the Bouvé Col­lege of Health Sci­ences.

“Parkinson’s is caused by the death of dopamine neu­rons in a key motor area of the brain called the sub­stantia nigra,” said Waszczak. If you want to treat PD at its roots, she added, then you have to stop the death of these neural cells. In research reported ear­lier this week at the Exper­i­mental Biology 2013 con­fer­ence in Boston, Waszczak and grad­uate stu­dent Brendan Harmon pro­posed a treat­ment approach that does exactly that. What’s more, the method is simple and easy to use.“If we can get at it in the early stages of the dis­ease, when patients are just starting to develop symp­toms, then we might be able to stop the dis­ease from get­ting worse or at least delay the onset of severe symp­toms,” Waszczak explained.

Source: http://www.northeastern.edu/
AND
http://www.eurekalert.org/

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory describe details of a low-cost, stable, effective catalyst that could replace costly platinum in the production of hydrogen. The catalyst, made from renewable soybeans and abundant molybdenum metal, produces hydrogen in an environmentally friendly, cost-effective manner, potentially increasing the use of this clean energy source.
Their ultimate goal is to find ways to use solar energy — either directly or via electricity generated by solar cells — to convert the end products of hydrocarbon combustion, water and carbon dioxide, back into a carbon-based fuel. Dubbed “artificial photosynthesis,” this process mimics how plants convert those same ingredients to energy in the form of sugars. One key step is splitting water, or water electrolysis.

“By splitting liquid water (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen, the hydrogen can be regenerated as a gas (H2) and used directly as fuel,” explains Etsuko Sasaki, member of the Broohaven team.
“A very promising route to making a carbon-containing fuel is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide (or carbon monoxide) using solar-produced hydrogen,” adds Fujita, who leads the artificial photosynthesis group in the Brookhaven Chemistry Department.

Source: http://www.bnl.gov/

University of Nebraska-Lincoln materials engineers have developed a structural nanofiber that is both strong and tough, a discovery that could transform everything from airplanes and bridges to body armor and bicycles. Their findings are featured on the cover of this week’s April issue of the American Chemical Society’s journal, ACS Nano.

“Whatever is made of composites can benefit from our nanofibers,” said the team’s leader, Yuris Dzenis, McBroom Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and a member of UNL‘s Nebraska Center for Materials and Nanoscience. “Our discovery adds a new material class to the very select current family of materials with demonstrated simultaneously high strength and toughness.”
Source: http://newsroom.unl.edu/

An Indiana University School of Medicine breast cancer surgeon is pursuing research that will utilize glass, gold, nanotechnology and Greek mythology hoping to vanquish breast cancer that has metastasized to the brain. Susan E. Clare, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of surgery at the IU School of Medicine, is the initiating principal investigator for a $573,000 Department of Defense grant that will allow her to explore a new approach to delivering therapy to brain metastases from primary breast cancer. As did the Greeks of old, Dr. Clare hopes to covertly deliver “warriors” to the enemy stronghold, in this case a metastatic brain tumor. Her research will explore using a cell from the body’s immune system to deliver chemotherapy directly to the brain metastases. The drug or other therapeutic is attached to the nanospheres, which are carried within the immune cell, much as soldiers were carried within the Trojan Horse. The immune cells travel in the bloodstream and release the drug when it has reached the tumor site.

“The problem for almost all drugs, and HER2-targeted drugs are no exception, is that the blood-brain barrier is a significant impediment to delivering therapies in concentrations that can be effective,” Dr. Clare said.

That biological issue caused Dr. Clare to explore other methods of delivering drugs to metastatic brain tumors. Using nanoparticles called “nanoshells,” developed by Naomi J. Halas, Ph.D., D.Sc., director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University, Dr. Clare hopes to target the brain tumors with lapatinib at a dose sufficient to shut down the signaling pathway needed for the cancer cells to proliferate.

Source: http://news.medicine.iu.edu

Researchers at the University of Exeter – United Kingdom – have developed a new photoelectric device that is both flexible and transparent. The device, described in a paper in the journal ACS Nano, converts light into electrical signals by exploiting the unique properties of the recently discovered materials graphene and graphExeter. GraphExeter is the best known room temperature transparent conductor and graphene is the thinnest conductive material. At just a few atoms thick, the newly developed photoelectric device is ultra-lightweight. This, along with the flexibility of its constituent graphene materials, makes it perfect for incorporating into clothing. Such devices could be used to develop photovoltaic textiles enabling clothes to act as solar panels and charge mobile phones while they are being worn.

Saverio Russo, Professor of Physics at the University of Exeter said: “This new flexible and transparent photosensitive device uses graphene and graphExeter to convert light into electrical signals with efficiency comparable to that found in opaque devices based on graphene and metals.
“We are only just starting to explore the interfaces between different materials at very small scales and, as this research shows, we are revealing unique properties that we never knew existed. Who knows what surprises are just around the corner.”

Source: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/

Though they be but little, they are fierce. The most powerful batteries on the planet are only a few millimeters in size, yet they pack such a punch that a driver could use a cellphone powered by these batteries to jump-start a dead car battery – and then recharge the phone in the blink of an eye.
Mechanical science and engineering professor William P. King led a group that developed the most powerful microbatteries ever documented.
Developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the new microbatteries out-power even the best supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.

The graphic illustrates a high power battery technology from the University of Illinois. Ions flow between three-dimensional micro-electrodes in a lithium ion battery.

“Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery – until now,” King said. “Consider personal medical devices and implants, where the battery is an enormous brick, and it’s connected to itty-bitty electronics and tiny wires. Now the battery is also tiny.”
Now, the researchers are working on integrating their batteries with other electronics components, as well as manufacturability at low cost.

“Now we can think outside of the box,” said James Pikul, a graduate student and first author of the paper. “It’s a new enabling technology. It’s not a progressive improvement over previous technologies; it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It’s allowing us to do different, new things.”

Source: http://news.illinois.edu/

Throughout decades of research on solar cells, one formula has been considered an absolute limit to the efficiency of such devices in converting sunlight into electricity: Called the Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit, it posits that the ultimate conversion efficiency can never exceed 34 percent for a single optimized semiconductor junction. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT – have shown that there is a way to blow past that limit as easily as today’s jet fighters zoom through the sound barrier — which was also once seen as an ultimate limit. Their work appears this week in a report in the journal Science.

singlet exciton fission. (An exciton is the excited state of a molecule after absorbing energy from a photon.)
While today’s commercial solar panels typically have an efficiency of at most 25 percent, a silicon solar cell harnessing singlet fission should make it feasible to achieve efficiency of more than 30 percent, Baldo says — a huge leap in a field typically marked by slow, incremental progress. In solar cell research, he notes, people are striving “for an increase of a tenth of a percent.”

Solar panel efficiencies can also be improved by stacking different solar cells together, but combining solar cells is expensive with conventional solar-cell materials. The new technology instead promises to work as an inexpensive coating on solar cells.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Kansas State University have demonstrated a spray-on mixture of carbon nanotubes and ceramic that has unprecedented ability to resist damage while absorbing laser light.*
Coatings that absorb as much of the energy of high-powered lasers as possible without breaking down are essential for optical power detectors that measure the output of such lasers, which are used, for example, in military equipment for defusing unexploded mines. The new material improves on NIST‘s earlier version of a spray-on nanotube coating for optical power detectors** and has already attracted industry interest.
Micrograph of one strand of a new spray-on super-nanotube composite developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Kansas State University. The multi-wall nanotube core is surrounded by a ceramic shell. The composite is a promising coating for laser power detectors.
“It really is remarkable material,” NIST co-author John Lehman says. “It’s a way to make super-nanotubes. It has the optical, thermal and electrical properties of nanotubes with the robustness of the high-temperature ceramic.”
Source: http://www.nist.gov/

Researchers are developing a new type of semiconductor technology for future computers and electronics based on “two-dimensional nanocrystals” layered in sheets less than a nanometer thick that could replace today’s transistors. New technologies will be needed to allow the semiconductor industry to continue advances in computer performance driven by the ability to create ever-smaller transistors.

“We are going to reach the fundamental limits of silicon-based CMOS technology very soon, and that means novel materials must be found in order to continue scaling,” said Saptarshi Das, who has completed a doctoral degree, working with Joerg Appenzeller, a professor and scientific director of nanoelectronics at Purdue‘s Birck Nanotechnology Center. “I don’t think silicon can be replaced by a single material, but probably different materials will co-exist in a hybrid technology.”

Source: http://www.purdue.edu/

UCLA researchers led by Professor Dean Ho from the Jane and Jerry Weintraub Center for Reconstructive Biotechnology, have developed a potentially more effective treatment for breast cancer. Doctors have begun to categorize breast cancers into four main groups according to the genetic makeup of the cancer cells. Which category a cancer falls into generally determines the best method of treatment. But cancers in one of the four groups — called “basal-like” or “triple-negative” breast cancer (TNBC) — have been particularly tricky to treat because they usually don’t respond to the “receptor-targeted” treatments that are often effective in treating other types of breast cancer. TNBC tends to be more aggressive than the other types and more likely to recur, and can also have a higher mortality rate. Using nanodiamonds between 4 and 6 nanometers in diameter and shaped like tiny soccer balls, the researchers form clusters following drug binding that have the ability to precisely deliver cancer drugs to tumors, significantly improving the drugs’ desired effect. In the UCLA study, the nanodiamond delivery system has been able to home in on tumor masses in mice with triple negative breast cancer.

“This study demonstrates the versatility of the nanodiamond as a targeted drug-delivery agent to a tumor site,” said Ho, who is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and the UCLA Department of Bioengineering. “The agent we’ve developed reduces the toxic side effects that are associated with treatment and mediates significant reductions in tumor size.”
Findings from the study are published online April 15 in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Materials.
Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego have invented a “nanosponge” capable of safely removing a broad class of dangerous toxins from the bloodstream – including toxins produced by MRSA, E. coli, poisonous snakes and bees. These nanosponges, which thus far have been studied in mice, can neutralize “pore-forming toxins,” which destroy cells by poking holes in their cell membranes. Unlike other anti-toxin platforms that need to be custom synthesized for individual toxin type, the nanosponges can absorb different pore-forming toxins regardless of their molecular structures. In a study against alpha-haemolysin toxin from MRSA, pre-innoculation with nanosponges enabled 89 percent of mice to survive lethal doses. Administering nanosponges after the lethal dose led to 44 percent survival. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infection is caused by a strain of staph bacteria that’s become resistant to the antibiotics commonly used to treat ordinary staph infections.

“One of the first applications we are aiming for would be an anti-virulence treatment for MRSA. That’s why we studied one of the most virulent toxins from MRSA in our experiments,” said “Jack” Che-Ming Hu, the first author on the paper. The team, led by nanoengineers at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, published the findings in Nature Nanotechnology April 14.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Genes from the family of bacteria that produce vinegar, Kombucha tea and nata de coco have become stars in a project that would turn algae into solar-powered factories for producing the “wonder material” nanocellulose. Reports on advances in getting those genes to produce fully functional nanocellulose were part of the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society.

“If we can complete the final steps, we will have accomplished one of the most important potential agricultural transformations ever,” said R. Malcolm Brown, Jr., Ph.D. “We will have plants that produce nanocellulose abundantly and inexpensively. It can become the raw material for sustainable production of biofuels and many other products. While producing nanocellulose, the algae will absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas linked to global warming.”

Most cellulose consists of wood fibers and cell wall remains. Very few living organisms can actually synthesize and secrete cellulose in its native nanostructure form of microfibrils. At this level, nanometer-scale fibrils are very hydrophilic and look like jelly. A nanometer is one-millionth the thickness of a U.S. dime. Nevertheless, cellulose shares the unique properties of other nanometer-sized materials — properties much different from large quantities of the same material. Nanocellulose-based materials can be stronger than steel and stiffer than Kevlar. Great strength, light weight and other advantages has fostered interest in using it in everything from lightweight armor and ballistic glass to wound dressings and scaffolds for growing replacement organs for transplantation.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Better integration of photonic and electronic components in nanoscale devices may now become possible, thanks to work by Khuong Phuong Ong and Hong-Son Chu from the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing and their co-workers in Singapore and the US. From computer simulations, they have identified that the compound BiFeO3 has the potential to be used to efficiently couple light to electrical charges through light-induced electron oscillations known as plasmons. The researchers propose that this coupling could be activated, controlled and switched off, on demand, by applying an electrical field to an active plasmonic device based on this material. If such a device were realized on a very small footprint it would give scientists a versatile tool for connecting components that manipulate light or electric currents.

Thin poles standing in water barely affect waves rolling past them. Similarly, nanostructured devices typically do not interact with light waves

Many devices used in everyday life — whether they be televisions, mobile phones or barcode scanners — are based on the manipulation of electric currents and light. At the micro- and nano-scales, however, it is typically challenging to integrate electronic components with photonic components. At these small dimensions, the wavelengths of light become long relative to the size of the device. Consequently, the light waves are barely detectable by the device, just as passing waves simply roll past thin poles in a water body (see image).

Source: http://www.research.a-star.edu.sg/research/6656

Professor Dong Rip Kim from Hangyang University – Korea – has succeeded in fabricating peel-and-stick thin film solar cells (TFSCs) with the collaboration of Stanford team led by Professor Xiaolin Zheng. This method makes possible the overcoming of hardships related to working with traditional solar cells, namely the lack of handling, high manufacturing cost, and limited flexibility while maintaining performance. Kim is currently in charge of the Hanyang University Nanotechnology for Energy Conversion Lab. His research interests are solar cells, energy conversion devices using nanomaterials, flexible electronics, nanoelectronics, and nanosensors. Among Kim’s recent publications are “Peel-and-Stick: Fabricating Thin Film Solar Cell on Universal Substrates” in the journal of Scientific Reports, “Shrinking and Growing: Grain Boundary Density Reduction for Efficient Polysilicon Thin-Film Solar Cells” in the journal of Nano Letters, and “Thermal Conductivity in Porous Silicon Nanowire Arrays” in the journal of Nanoscale Research Letters.

“I will continue to focus on creating highly efficient but low costing energy conversion devices with nanotechnology,” Kim said. Moreover, his future research will focus on applying his method in other types of solar cells and in other applications.

Source: http://www.hanyang.ac.kr/

More powerful batteries could help electric cars achieve a considerably larger range and thus a breakthrough on the market. Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry at ETH Zurich and Empa -Switzerland – have now developed a nanomaterial which enables considerably more power to be stored in lithium ion batteries. They provide power not only for electric cars, but also for electric bicycles, smartphones and laptops; nowadays, rechargeable lithium ion batteries are the storage media of choice when it comes to supplying a large amount of energy in a small space and light weight.

Monodisperse tin nanodroplets in an electron microscopic

During the development of the nanomaterial, the issue of the ideal size for the nanocrystals arose, which also carries the challenge of producing uniform crystals. “The trick here was to separate the two basic steps in the formation of the crystals – the formation of as small as a crystal nucleus as possible on the one hand and its subsequent growth on the other,” explains Maksym Kovalenko, head of the research team at ETH Zurich. By influencing the time and temperature of the growth phase, the scientists were able to control the size of the crystals. “We are the first to produce such small tin crystals with such precision,” says the scientist.

Source: http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/

Scientists at Aalto University, Finland and Fraunhofer ISE, Germany report an efficiency of 18.7% for black silicon solar cells, the highest efficiency reported so far for a black silicon solar cell.
The researchers were able to apply a boron diffusion to create a pn-junction, maintaining the excellent optical properties of the black silicon structure. By applying atomic layer deposited Al203, an effective passivation of the nanostructured surfaces was achieved. The previous efficiency record of 18.2% was held by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) using thermal oxidation as a passivating layer.

“The quantum efficiency measurements reveal that the nanostructured front surface is of a high electrical quality comparable to a pyramidal textured surface”, says Assistant Professor Hele Savin of Aalto University.
Routes for improving the cell efficiency are already identified, and efficiencies clearly above 20% should be within reach.
Source: http://www.aalto.fi/

Researchers at the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN) at Trinity College in Dublin – Ireland – are pursuing a new nanomaterial-based approach to neural networks that combines work in nanowires and memristors (2-terminal memory devices based on resistance switching effects). They develop a new computing paradigm that mimics the neural networks of the human brain. Both nanowires and memristors are part of the history of research into neural networks and artificial intelligence (AI). Researchers have been investigating the use of nanowires in building electronic meshes on which nerve tissues can be grown; the mesh, they hope, could link nerve cells with electronics. And almost from the time memristors were first isolated and characterized, researchers have been looking at using them in chips that would lead to artificial intelligence.
Professor John Boland, director of CRANN, and his colleagues will be using the research grant to build on their previous work. They already discovered that when electricity—or other stimuli such as chemicals or light—is applied to a random network of nanowires, it generates a chemical reactions at the junctions where the nanowires cross over each other.

This phenomenon is similar to the way the brain works, in that there are bundles of nerves that cross over one another, forming junctions. Over time, the human brain begins to learn which of these junctions is important and discards the rest.
Source: http://www.tcd.ie/

A team of scientists from Polytechnique Montréal (Canada), Northwestern University (USA), and Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics (Germany) led by Professor Oussama Moutanabbir has made a fascinating discovery of a novel process to precisely functionalize nanowires. By using aluminum as a catalyst instead of the canonical gold, the team demonstrated that the growth of nanowires triggers a self-doping process involving the injection of aluminum atoms thus providing an efficient route to dope nanowires without the need of post-growth processing typically used in semiconductor industry. The scientists investigated this phenomenon at the atomistic-level using the emerging technique of highly focused ultraviolet laser-assisted atom-probe tomography to achieve three-dimensional atom-by-atom maps of individual nanowires.

The discovery provides myriad opportunities to create entirely new class of nanoscale devices by precisely tailoring shape and composition of nanowires. The results of their breakthrough will be published in Nature.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Rice University researchers have found an unexpected link between a protein that triggers the formation of blood clots and other proteins that are essential for the body’s immune system. The find could lead to new treatments for thousands of patients who suffer from inflammatory diseases and disorders that cause abnormal blood clotting.

“This link opens the door for studying severe, debilitating inflammatory disorders where the disease mechanism is still poorly understood, including lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, regional ileitis and ulcerative colitis, as well as age-related macular degeneration,” said study co-author Dr. Joel Moake, a hematologist and senior research scientist in bioengineering at Rice. “There’s clinical evidence that clotting and inflammation are somehow linked in many patients, even in the absence of an infection. This linkage could help explain some of the clinical cases that have long baffled physicians.”
The research is available online in the journal PLOS ONE.

Source: http://news.rice.edu/

Researchers in the Sheffield Centre for Robotics, jointly established by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University – United Kingdom -, have been working to program a group of 40 robots, and say the ability to control robot swarms could prove hugely beneficial in a range of contexts, from military to medical.The researchers have demonstrated that the swarm can carry out simple fetching and carrying tasks, by grouping around an object and working together to push it across a surface.The robots can also group themselves together into a single cluster after being scattered across a room, and organize themselves by order of priority. Dr Roderich Gross, head of the Natural Robotics Lab, in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering at the University of Sheffield, says swarming robots could have important roles to play in the future of micromedicine, as ‘nanobots’ are developed for non-invasive treatment of humans.

“We are developing Artificial Intelligence to control robots in a variety of ways. The key is to work out what is the minimum amount of information needed by the robot to accomplish its task. That’s important because it means the robot may not need any memory, and possibly not even a processing unit, so this technology could work for nanoscale robots, for example in medical applications.” Dr Gross said.

Source: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/

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.
What Aurora Clarck probably did not know is that the algorithm used successfully by Google founders is based mostly on a free formula developed by an Italian Professor of mathematics from the Univeristy of Padua. Now professor Massimo Marchiori has opened a new search engine on the web, with specific features that will surpass the accuracy of Google search engine. At this moment, the new search engine address is www.volunia.com.

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.

A Stanford team has designed an entirely new form of cooling panel that works even when the sun is shining. Such a panel could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by radiating sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.
In the future we can imagine homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don’t heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more.

“People usually see space as a source of heat from the sun, but away from the sun outer space is really a cold, cold place,” explained Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering and the paper’s senior author. “We’ve developed a new type of structure that reflects the vast majority of sunlight, while at the same time it sends heat into that coldness, which cools manmade structures even in the day time.”

Source: http://engineering.stanford.edu/

Early diagnosis is critical in treating Lyme disease. However, nearly one quarter of Lyme disease patients are initially misdiagnosed because currently available serological tests have poor sensitivity and specificity during the early stages of infection. Misdiagnosed patients may go untreated and thus progress to late-stage Lyme disease, where they face longer and more invasive treatments, as well as persistent symptoms. A nanotechnology-inspired technique developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania may lead to diagnostics that can detect the organism itself.

An illustration of a Lyme antibody attached to a carbon nanotube
Lyme disease is an infection transmitted by the bite of ticks carrying the spiral-shaped bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. The disease was named for Lyme, Connecticut, the town where it was first diagnosed in 1975 after a puzzling outbreak of arthritis. The organism was named for its discoverer, Willy Burgdorfer. The effects of this disease can be long-term and disabling unless it is recognized and treated properly with antibiotics.

Source: http://www.upenn.edu/

The Rice University lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan determined that Hybrid ribbons of vanadium oxide (VO2) and graphene, is a superior cathode for batteries that could supply both high energy density and significant power density. The ribbons created at Rice are thousands of times thinner than a sheet of paper, yet have potential that far outweighs current materials for their ability to charge and discharge very quickly. Cathodes built into half-cells for testing at Rice fully charged and discharged in 20 seconds and retained more than 90 percent of their initial capacity after more than 1,000 cycles.

“This is the direction battery research is going, not only for something with high energy density but also high power density,” Ajayan said. “It’s somewhere between a battery and a supercapacitor.”
These new Hybrid ribbons could be decisive to build high-power lithium-ion batteries suitable for electric cars.
The research appears online this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.
Source: http://news.rice.edu/

Scientists from the Nano-Science Center at the Niels Bohr Institut, Denmark and the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, have shown that a single nanowire can concentrate the sunlight up to 15 times of the normal sun light intensity. The results are surprising and the potential for developing a new type of highly efficient solar cells is great.

Due to some unique physical light absorption properties of nanowires, the limit of how much energy we can utilize from the sun’s rays is higher than previous believed. These results demonstrate the great potential of development of nanowire-based solar cells, says PhD Peter Krogstrup on the surprising discovery that is described in the journal Nature Photonics.
Source: http://www.nbi.ku.dk/

A research team lead by Dr Peixuan Guo from the University of Kentucky (USA) have cracked a 35-year-old mystery about the workings of the natural motors that are serving as models for development of a futuristic genre of synthetic nanomotors that pump therapeutic DNA, RNA or drugs into individual diseased cells.

The importance of nanomotors in nanotechnology is akin to that of mechanical engines to daily life. The AAA+ superfamily is a class of nanomotors performing various functions. Their hexagonal arrangement facilitates bottom-up assembly for stable structures. Bacteriophage phi29 DNA-translocation motor contains three co-axial rings and viral DNA-packaging motor has been believed to be a rotational machine. However, the researchers found a revolution mechanism without rotation. By analogy, the earth revolves around the sun while rotating on its own axis.
Click here to enjoy the video

Source University of Kentucky: http://nanobio.uky.edu/
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ACS Nano: http://pubs.acs.org

The promise of repairing damaged hearts through regenerative medicine — infusing stem cells into the heart in the hope that these cells will replace worn out or damaged tissue — has yet to meet with clinical success. But a highly sensitive visualization technique developed by Stanford University School of Medicine scientists may help speed that promise’s realization.

“All stem cell researchers want to get the cells to the target site, but up until now they’ve had to shoot blindly,” said Gambhir, who is also the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor in Cancer Research and director of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford. “With this new technology, they wouldn’t have to. For the first time, they would be able to observe in real time exactly where the stem cells they’ve injected are going and monitor them afterward. If you inject stem cells into a person and don’t see improvement, this technique could help you figure out why and tweak your approach to make the therapy better.”

Source: http://med.stanford.edu/

A multicenter team of researchers has developed biodegradable nanoparticles that are capable of delivering inflammation-resolving drugs to sites of tissue injury. The nanoparticles, which were successfully tested in mice, have potential for the treatment of a wide array of diseases characterized by excessive inflammation, such as atherosclerosis. The study was published today in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. Particpate scientists at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC), Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Collagen IV-targeted polymeric nanoparticles (shown in pink) are home to injured tissue, post-injection, in the blood.
“A variety of medications can be used to control inflammation. Such treatments, however, usually have significant side effects and dampen the positive aspects of the inflammatory response,” said co-senior author Ira Tabas, MD, PhD,at CUMC.

Source: http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/
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http://www.eurekalert.org/

Prof. Roy Bar-Ziv and his research team in the Weizmann Institute’s Materials and Interfaces Department – Israel – recently have created a two-dimensional, cell-like system on a glass chip. This system, composed of some of the basic biological molecules found in cells – DNA, RNA, proteins – carried out one of the central functions of a living cell: gene expression, the process by which the information stored in the genes is translated into proteins. More than that, it enabled the scientists, led by research student Yael Heprotein yman, to obtain “snapshots” of this process in nanoscale resolution. The system, consisting of glass chips that are only 8 nanometers thick, is based on an earlier one designed in Bar-Ziv’s lab by Dr. Shirley Daube and former student Dr. Amnon Buxboim. After being coated in a light-sensitive substance, the chips are irradiated with focused beams of ultraviolet light, which enables the biological molecules to bind to the substance in the irradiated areas. In this way, the scientists could precisely place DNA molecules encoding a protein marked with a green fluorescent marker in one area of the chip and antibodies that “trap” the colored proteins in an abutting area.

Protein interaction on a chip: Red proteins concentrated more on the right, farther from the chip-bound genes, while green proteins are more highly concentrated on the left, closer to the genes that encode them

Source: http://wis-wander.weizmann.ac.il/

Nanoparticles carrying a toxin found in bee venom can destroy human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) while leaving surrounding cells unharmed, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown. The finding is an important step toward developing a vaginal gel that may prevent the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Nanoparticles (purple) carrying melittin (green) fuse with HIV (small circles with spiked outer ring), destroying the virus’s protective envelope. Molecular bumpers (small red ovals) prevent the nanoparticles from harming the body’s normal cells, which are much larger in size.
“Our hope is that in places where HIV is running rampant, people could use this gel as a preventive measure to stop the initial infection,” says Joshua L. Hood, MD, PhD, a research instructor in medicine.
The study appears in the current issue of Antiviral Therapy.
Source: http://news.wustl.edu/

C. Shad Thaxton, of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern and member of the Northwestern University Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, and Leo Gordon, of Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, led research team that developed a biomimetic High-density lipoprotein – HDL – nanostructure. HDL is well-known for its role in protecting the body from developing coronary artery disease, but HDL also helps lymphomas and other cancers acquire the large amounts of cholesterol they need to maintain the structure of their cell membranes as they grow rapidly. Researchers at Northwestern University have taken advantage of this dependency on HDL to create an HDL-mimicking nanoparticle that starves lymphoma cells of cholesterol, triggering them to commit programmed cell death without the use of any other anticancer agent.To create their biomimetic HDL nanostructures, the researchers start with spherical gold nanoparticles that are five nanometers in diameter and add the human protein ApoA1 and two phospholipids found in native HDLs.

Drs. Thaxton and Gordon and their collaborators then treated mice with human lymphomas with the biomimetic HDL nanoparticles. This treatment stopped tumor growth when the tumors were derived from lymphoma cells.

Source: http://nano.cancer.gov/

New research from Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and the Puget Sound Blood Center (PSBC) has revealed how stresses of flow in the small blood vessels of the heart and brain could cause a common protein to change shape and form dangerous blood clots. The scientists were surprised to find that the proteins could remain in the dangerous, clot-initiating shape for up to five hours before returning to their normal, healthy shape.The study — the first of its kind — focused on a protein called von Willebrand factor, or VWF, a key player in clot formation. A team led by Rice physicist Ching-Hwa Kiang found that “shear” forces, like those found in small arteries of patients with atherosclerosis, cause snippets of nonclotting VWF to change into a clot-forming shape for hours at a time. The finding appears online in Physical Review Letters.

New research has revealed how stresses of flow in the bloodstream can cause a common protein to change shape and initiate the formation of dangerous blood clots. Rice University study co-authors include (from left) Eric Frey, Ching-Hwa Kiang, Joel Moake and Sithara Wijeratne.
“When I first heard what Dr. Kiang’s team had found, I was shocked,” said blood platelet expert Dr. Joel Moake, a study co-author who holds joint appointments at Rice and BCM. Moake, whose research group was the first to describe how high shear stress could cause platelets to stick to VWF, said, “I had thought that the condition might last for such a short time that it would be unmeasurable. No one expected to find that this condition would persist for hours. This has profound clinical implications.”

Source: http://news.rice.edu/

A team of IBM researchers working on a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded program have found a way to transmit massive amounts of data with unprecedentedly low power consumption. Scientists predict that the supercomputers of the future—so-called “exascale computers“—will enable them to model the global climate, run molecular-level simulations of entire cells, design nanostructures, and more.

“We envision machines reaching the exascale mark around 2020, but a great deal of research must be done to make this possible,” says Jonathan E. Proesel, a research staff member at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. To reach that mark, researchers must develop a way to quickly move massive amounts of data within the supercomputer while keeping power consumption in check.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

A new x-ray imaging technique yields unprecedented measurements of nanoscale structures. Now, owing to a happy accident and subsequent insight, researchers at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new and strikingly simple x-ray scattering technique—detailed in the February issue of the Journal of Applied Crystallography—to help draw nanomaterials ranging from catalysts to proteins into greater focus.
This rendering shows the high-intensity x-ray beam striking and then traveling through the gray sample material. In this new technique, the x-ray scattering—the blue and white ripples—is considerably less distorted than in other methods, producing superior images with less complex analysis.“During an experiment, we noticed that one of the samples was misaligned,” said physicist Kevin Yager, a coauthor on the new study. “Our x-ray beam was hitting the edge, not the center as is typically desired. But when we saw how clean and undistorted the data was, we immediately realized that this could be a huge advantage in measuring nanostructures.”

Source: http://www.bnl.gov/

Using cutting-edge X-ray techniques, Cornell researchers have uncovered cellular-level detail of what happens when bone bears repetitive stress over time, visualizing damage at smaller scales than previously observed. Their work could offer clues into how bone fractures could be prevented. More: from athletes to individuals suffering from osteoporosis, bone fractures are usually the result of tiny cracks accumulating over time — invisible rivulets of damage that, when coalesced, lead to that painful break.
Marjolein van der Meulen, the Swanson Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, led the study published online March 5 in PLOS One using transmission X-ray microscopy at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, part of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Transmission X-ray microscope images of damage generated in a bone sample and stained with lead-uranyl acetate. White is the staining of microdamage, gray is bone and black is background. On the left is one-time loading of the sample, and on the right is repeated loading.

“In skeletal research, people have been trying to understand the role of damage,” said van der Meulen, whose research is called mechanobiology — how mechanics intersects with biological processes. “One of the things people have hypothesized is that damage is one of the stimuli that cells are sensing.”

Source: http://www.news.cornell.edu/

A new technique developed by University of Toronto Engineering Professor Ted Sargent and his research group could lead to significantly more efficient solar cells. The solution? Spectrally tuned, solution-processed plasmonic nanoparticles. These particles, the researchers say, provide unprecedented control over light’s propagation and absorption. The new technique developed by Sargent’s group shows a possible 35 per cent increase in the technology’s efficiency in the near-infrared spectral region, says co-author Dr. Susanna Thon. Overall, this could translate to an 11 per cent solar power conversion efficiency increase, she says, making quantum dot photovoltaics even more attractive as an alternative to current solar cell technologies.

“There are two advantages to colloidal quantum dots,” Thon says. “First, they’re much cheaper, so they reduce the cost of electricity generation measured in cost per watt of power. But the main advantage is that by simply changing the size of the quantum dot, you can change its light-absorption spectrum. Changing the size is very easy, and this size-tunability is a property shared by plasmonic materials: by changing the size of the plasmonic particles, we were able to overlap the absorption and scattering spectra of these two key classes of nanomaterials.”

Source: http://media.utoronto.ca/

A researcher from North Carolina State University has developed a technique for creating high-density ceramic materials that requires far lower temperatures than current techniques – and takes less than a second, as opposed to hours. Ceramics are used in a wide variety of technologies, including body armor, fuel cells, spark plugs, nuclear rods and superconductors. At issue is a process known as “sintering,” which is when ceramic powders (such as zirconia) are compressed into a desired shape and exposed to high heat until the powder particles are bound together into a solid, but slightly porous, material. But new research from Dr. Jay Narayan, John C. Fan Distinguished Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State, may revolutionize the sintering process.

“This technique allows you to achieve ‘theoretical density,’ meaning it eliminates all of the porosity in the material,” Narayan says. “This increases the strength of the ceramic, as well as improving its optical, magnetic and other properties.”
Source: http://news.ncsu.edu/

Small particles loaded with medicine could be a future weapon for cancer treatment. A recently-published study shows how nanoparticles can be formed to efficiently carry cancer drugs to tumor cells. And because the particles can be seen in MRI images, they are traceable.
Both therapeutic and diagnostic in function, the so-called “theranostic” particles were developed by a team including KTH Professor Eva Malmström-Jonsson, from the School of Chemical Science, as well as researchers at Sweden’s Chalmer’s University and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm – Sweden. Malmström-Jonsson says that the particles, which the team developed for breast cancer treatment, are biodegradable and non-toxic. Their research was published in the science journal Particle & Particle Systems Characterization.

“By targeting groups on the surface, or by changing the size or introducing ionic groups on our nanoparticles, one can increase the selective uptake in these tumors,” says Andreas Nystrom, an associate professor of nanomedicine at the Swedish Medical Nanoscience Center and Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute.
Source: http://www.kth.se/

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is disease in which the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissues, resulting in inflammation and tissue damage. Current treatments are focused on suppression of the immune system, but these therapies can leave patients vulnerable to infection. Michael Look, Tarek Fahmy, and colleagues developed a nanogel-based delivery system that delivers an immunosuppressive drug (mycophenolic acid) directly to tissues associated with immune cells. A nanogel is composed of a polymer containing pores that can be loaded with drug compounds. Look and colleagues tested the mycophenolic acid-loaded nanogel in a mouse model of lupus. Mice treated with the nanogel lived longer than untreated mice or mice treated with mycophenolic acid alone. Additionally, the onset of kidney damage, a common complication of lupus, was delayed in nanogel-treated mice.

Nanoparticles (white spheres) are loaded with a toxic drug, mycophenolic acid (yellow-green molecule), and treat disease (in mice) with greater potency and less toxicity than conventional regimens that do not use nanoparticles. The particles are engulfed by dendritic cells (violet cell on the left) or bind CD4 T cells (purple cell on the right).

Source: http://www.jci.org/

A research team from the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Basque Public University(UPV/EHU) – Spain – is using nanotechnology to develop new formulations that can be applied to drugs and gene therapy. Specifically, they are using nanoparticles to design systems for delivering genes and drugs; this helps to get the genes and drugs to the point of action so that they can produce the desired effect. The scientists have shown that lipid nanoparticles are ideal for acting as vectors in gene therapy. Gene therapy is a highly promising alternative for diseases that so far have no effective treatment. It consists of delivering a nucleic acid, for example, a therapeutic gene, to modulate the expression of a protein that is found to be altered in a specific disease, thus reversing the biological disorder.

“Using lipid nanoparticles conducts to new formulations to deliver drugs that are not particularly soluble or which are difficult to absorb”, Dr Rodriguez explained. “40% of the new pharmacologically active molecules are reckoned to be insoluble or not very soluble in water; that prevents many of these potentially active molecules from ever reaching the clinic because of the problems involved in developing a safe, effective formulation.” explains Dr Alicia Rodriguez.

Source: http://www.basqueresearch.com/

A diagnostic “cocktail” containing a single drop of blood, a dribble of water, and a dose of DNA powder with gold particles could mean rapid diagnosis and treatment of the world’s leading diseases in the near future. The cocktail diagnostic is a homegrown brew being developed by University of Toronto’s Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) PhD student Kyryl Zagorovsky and Professor Warren Chan that could change the way infectious diseases, from HPV and HIV to malaria, are diagnosed. And it involves the same technology used in over-the-counter pregnancy tests.

“There’s been a lot of emphasis in developing simple diagnostics,” says IBBME Professor and Canada Research Chair in Nanobiotechnology, Warren Chan. “The question is, how do you make it simple enough, portable enough?” Zagorovsky’s rapid diagnostic biosensor will allow technicians to test for multiple diseases at one time with one small sample, and with high accuracy and sensitivity. The biosensor relies upon gold particles in much the same vein as your average pregnancy test. With a pregnancy test, gold particles turn the test window red because the particles are linked with an antigen that detects a certain hormone in the urine of a pregnant woman. “Gold is the best medium,” explains Chan, “because it’s easy to see. It emits a very intense colour.”
source: http://ibbme.utoronto.ca/

A novel fabrication technique developed by the University of Connecticut – UConn could provide the breakthrough technology scientists have been looking for to vastly improve today’s solar energy systems.The technology would be a vast improvement over the silicon solar panels. Even the best silicon panels collect only about 20 percent of available solar radiation, and separate mechanisms are needed to convert the stored energy to usable electricity for the commercial power grid. The panels’ limited efficiency and expensive development costs have been two of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of solar power as a practical replacement for traditional fossil fuels.

But while nanosized antennas have shown promise in theory, scientists have lacked the technology required to construct and test them. The fabrication process is immensely challenging. The nano-antennas – known as “rectennas” because of their ability to both absorb and rectify solar energy from alternating current to direct current – must be capable of operating at the speed of visible light and be built in such a way that their core pair of electrodes is a mere 1 or 2 nanometers apart, a distance of approximately one millionth of a millimeter. Nanosized antenna arrays are theoretically capable of harvesting more than 70 percent of the sun’s electromagnetic radiation and simultaneously converting it into usable electric power.
The potential breakthrough lies in a novel fabrication process called selective area atomic layer deposition (ALD) that was developed by Willis, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UConn. Willis developed the ALD process while teaching at the University of Delaware, and patented the technique in 2011.

Source: http://today.uconn.edu/

While the demand for ever-smaller electronic devices has spurred the miniaturization of a variety of technologies, one area has lagged behind in this downsizing revolution: energy-storage units, such as batteries and capacitors. Now, Richard Kaner, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Maher El-Kady, a graduate student in Kaner‘s laboratory, may have changed the game.The UCLA researchers have developed a groundbreaking technique that uses a DVD burner to fabricate micro-scale graphene-based supercapacitors — devices that can charge and discharge a hundred to a thousand times faster than standard batteries. These micro-supercapacitors, made from a one-atom–thick layer of graphitic carbon, can be easily manufactured and readily integrated into small devices such as next-generation pacemakers.The new cost-effective fabrication method, described in a study published this week in the journal Nature Communications, holds promise for the mass production of these supercapacitors, which have the potential to transform electronics .

“The integration of energy-storage units with electronic circuits is challenging and often limits the miniaturization of the entire system,” said Kaner,. “This is because the necessary energy-storage components scale down poorly in size and are not well suited to the planar geometries of most integrated fabrication processes.” “Traditional methods for the fabrication of micro-supercapacitors involve labor-intensive lithographic techniques that have proven difficult for building cost-effective devices, thus limiting their commercial application,” El-Kady said. “Instead, we used a consumer-grade LightScribe DVD burner to produce graphene micro-supercapacitors over large areas at a fraction of the cost of traditional devices. Using this technique, we have been able to produce more than 100 micro-supercapacitors on a single disc in less than 30 minutes, using inexpensive materials.”
Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/

A new method of harvesting the Sun’s energy is emerging, thanks to scientists at UC Santa Barbara‘s Departments of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, and Materials. Though still in its infancy, the research promises to convert sunlight into energy using a process based on metals that are more robust than many of the semiconductors used in conventional methods.

“When nanostructures, such as nanorods, of certain metals are exposed to visible light, the conduction electrons of the metal can be caused to oscillate collectively, absorbing a great deal of the light,” said Martin Moskovits, professor of chemistry at UCSB.. “This excitation is called a surface plasmon.”
“It is the first radically new and potentially workable alternative to semiconductor-based solar conversion devices to be developed in the past 70 years or so,” said Moskovits.
Source: http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/

A research team at the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis – Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been developing catalysts that use cheaper metals such as nickel and iron to make fuel cells more economical. The one they report here can split hydrogen as fast as two molecules per second with an efficiency approaching those of commercial catalysts. The center is one of 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers established by the DOE Office of Science across USA to accelerate basic research in energy.
Hyundai ix35 FCEV (Fuel Cell Electric Vehicle)

“A drawback with today’s fuel cells is that the platinum they use is more than a thousand times more expensive than iron,” said chemist R. Morris Bullock, who leads the research at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
such a catalyst is the first iron-based catalyst that converts hydrogen directly to electricity. The result moves chemists and engineers one step closer to widely affordable fuel cells.
Source: http://www.pnnl.gov

The body’s immune system exists to identify and destroy foreign objects, whether they are bacteria, viruses, flecks of dirt or splinters. Unfortunately, nanoparticles designed to deliver drugs, and implanted devices like pacemakers or artificial joints, are just as foreign and subject to the same response. Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science and Penn’s Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics have figured out a way to provide a “passport” for such therapeutic devices, enabling them to get past the body’s security system.

“From your body’s perspective,” said the student Rodriguez, member of the research team led by professor Dennis Discher, “an arrowhead a thousand years ago and a pacemaker today are treated the same — as a foreign invader. “We’d really like things like pacemakers, sutures and drug-delivery vehicles to not cause an inflammatory response from the innate immune system.”

Source: http://www.upenn.edu/

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new type of nanoscale structure that resembles a “nano-shish-kebab,” consisting of multiple two-dimensional nanosheets that appear to be impaled upon a one-dimensional nanowire. However, the nanowire and nanosheets are actually a single, three-dimensional structure consisting of a seamless series of germanium sulfide (GeS) crystals. The structure holds promise for use in the creation of new, three-dimensional (3-D) technologies. The researchers believe this is the first engineered nanomaterial to combine one-dimensional and two-dimensional structures in which all of the components have a shared crystalline structure.

“We think this approach could also be used to create heterostructures like these using other materials whose molecules form similar crystalline layers, such as molybdenum sulfide (MoS2),” says Dr. Linyou Cao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research. “And, while germanium sulfide has excellent photonic properties, MoS2 holds more promise for electronic applications.”
For instance it could be used to develop 3-D devices, such as next-generation sensors, photodetectors or solar cells. This 3-D structure could also be useful for developing new energy storage technologies, like Lithium-Ion batteries.

Source: http://news.ncsu.edu/

Chad A. Mirkin, a researcher from Northwestern University, has developed a completely new set of building blocks that is based on nanoparticles and DNA. Using these tools, scientists will be able to build — from the bottom up, just as nature does — new and useful structures. Using nanoparticles and DNA, Mirkin has built more than 200 different crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. Some of the lattice types can be found in nature, but he also has built new structures that have no naturally occurring mineral counterpart.

“We have a new set of building blocks,” Mirkin said. “Instead of taking what nature gives you, we can control every property of the new material we make. We’ve always had this vision of building matter and controlling architecture from the bottom up, and now we’ve shown it can be done.”

Mirkin has presented his research in a session titled “Nucleic Acid-Modified Nanostructures as Programmable Atom Equivalents: Forging a New Periodic Table” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Boston.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Utilizing optical characteristics first demonstrated by the ancient Romans, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a novel, ultra-sensitive tool for chemical, DNA, and protein analysis..
“With this device, the nanoplasmonic spectroscopy sensing, for the first time, becomes colorimetric sensing, requiring only naked eyes or ordinary visible color photography,” explained Logan Liu, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and of bioengineering at Illinois. “It can be used for chemical imaging, biomolecular imaging, and integration to portable microfluidics devices for lab-on-chip-applications“. His research team’s results were featured in the cover article of the inaugural edition of Advanced Optical Materials (AOM, optical section of Advanced Materials).

Lycurgus cups were created by the Romans in 400 A.D. Made of a dichroic glass, the famous cup exhibits different colors depending on whether or not light is passing through it; red when lit from behind and green when lit from in front. It is also the origin of inspiration for all contemporary nanoplasmonics research—the study of optical phenomena in the nanoscale vicinity of metal surfaces.
Source: http://engineering.illinois.edu/

Scientists at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin – Germany – have now been able to identify the grass pollen molecule, against which the allergic response of hay fever in children is initiated. In addition, it was shown that the first individual antibodies generated in children against individual pollen molecules can be identified even before the initial symptoms of a pollen allergy are developed. The findings of this long-term study have appeared in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. In its study, the Molecular Allergology working group headed by Adj. Professor Dr. Paolo Matricardi investigated the data and blood samples taken from 820 children. The working group was for the first time also able to examine the data using nanotechnological methods at a molecular level.

“The detection of lgE antibodies at an early stage could enhance the prospects of a successful therapeutic and even preventative intervention”, according to a confident Laura Hatzler, the first author of the study. “The investigation of allergen-specific, immunological treatments at early stages of the disease process in childhood represents the next step in our research.”

Source: http://www.charite.de/

Scientists at the University of Southampton -U.K.- have created a new method to generate bone cells which could lead to revolutionary bone repair therapies for people with bone fractures or those who need hip replacement surgery due to osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.
The research, carried out by Dr Emmajayne Kingham at the University of Southampton in collaboration with the University of Glasgow and published in the journal Small, cultured human embryonic stem cells on to the surface of plastic materials and assessed their ability to change.

“Our research may offer a whole new approach to skeletal regenerative medicine. The use of nanotopographical patterns could enable new cell culture designs, new device designs, and could herald the development of new bone repair therapies as well as further human stem cell research,” says Professor Oreffo who led the University of Southampton team.

Source: http://www.southampton.ac.uk

The Art Institute of Chicago teamed up with Argonne National Laboratory to help unravel a decades-long debate among art scholars : what kind of paint Picasso used to create his masterpieces? Thanks to nanotechnology , the results add significant weight to the widely held theory that Picasso was one of the first master painters to use common house paint rather than traditional artists’ paint. That switch in painting material gave birth to a new style of art marked by canvasses covered in glossy images with marbling, muted edges, and occasional errant paint drips, but devoid of brush marks. Fast-drying enamel house paint enabled this dramatic departure from the slow-drying, heavily blended oil paintings that dominated the art world up until Picasso’s time.

Among the Picasso paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago collection, The Red Armchair is the most emblematic of his Ripolin usage and is the painting that was examined with APS X-rays at Argonne National Laboratory. To view a larger version of the image, click on it. Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Saidenberg (AIC 1957.72) © Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
The research has been published last month in the journal Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing .

Source: http://www.anl.gov/

How to be more precise and less invasive when treating cancer tumors? A team led by researchers from the UCLA -University of California Los Angeles- Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has developed a degradable nanoscale shell to carry proteins to cancer cells and stunt the growth of tumors without damaging healthy cells. Yi Tang, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, reports developing tiny shells composed of a water-soluble polymer that safely deliver a protein complex to the nucleus of cancer cells to induce their death. The shells, which at about 100 nanometers are roughly half the size of the smallest bacterium, degrade harmlessly in non-cancerous cells.

“Delivering a large protein complex such as apoptin to the innermost compartment of tumor cells was a challenge, but the reversible polymer encapsulation strategy was very effective in protecting and escorting the cargo in its functional form,” said Muxun Zhao, lead author of the research and a graduate student in chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA.
Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/

Scientists at the Uninersity of Missouri -MU-, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville created a gold nanoparticle that can transport powerful radioactive particles directly to tumors for treatment. We’ve all heard that “it’s not wise to use a cannon to kill a mosquito.” But what if you could focus the cannon’s power to concentrate power into a tiny space? In a new study, University of Missouri researchers have demonstrated the ability to harness powerful radioactive particles and direct them toward small cancer tumors while doing negligible damage to healthy organs and tissues.

The nanoparticle that the research team led by David Robertson, director of research at the MU Research Reactor, created is multi-layered. At the core, lies the element, actinium, surrounded by four layers of material. Robertson’s team then coated the nanoparticle with gold.

“If you think of beta particles as slingshots or arrows, alpha particles would be similar to cannon balls,” said J. David Robertson, “Scientists have had some successes using alpha particles recently, but nothing that can battle different cancers. For example, a current study using radium-223 chloride, which emits alpha particles, has been fast-tracked by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because it has been shown to be effective in treating bone cancer. However, it only works for bone cancer because the element, radium, is attracted to the bone and stays there. We believe we have found a solution that will allow us to target alpha particles to other cancer sites in the body in an effective manner.”
Source: http://munews.missouri.edu/

The scientists, from Imperial College London, say their research brings them another step closer to a new kind of industrial revolution, where parts for these biological factories could be mass-produced. These factories have a wealth of applications including better drug delivery treatments for patients, enhancements in the way that minerals are mined from deep underground and advances in the production of biofuels. For instance parts made up of DNA are re-engineered by scientists and put into cells to make biological factories.

Harmless bacteria could be re-engineered into microscopic factories that could improve patient healthcare

“Before the industrial revolution most items were made by hand, which meant that they were slower to manufacture, more expensive to produce and limited in number. We are at a similar juncture in synthetic biology, having to test and build each part from scratch, which is a long and slow process. We demonstrate in our study a new method that could help to rapidly scale up the production and testing of biological parts.” says Professor Paul Freemont, Co- Director of the Centre for Synthetic Biology and Innovation at Imperial College London.

source: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/

Ali Khademhosseini,, a researcher from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a division of Harvard Medical School, has created ultra-thin cardiac patches. Now medicine is a step closer to durable, high-functioning artificial tissues that could be used to repair damaged hearts and other organs.

The cardiac tissue patches utilize a hydrogel scaffolding reinforced by nanomaterials called carbon nanotubes. To create the patches, the researchers seeded neonatal rat heart muscle tissue onto carbon nanotube-infused hydrogels.
Source: http://researchfaculty.brighamandwomens.org/
AND
http://phys.org/

Scientists in the joint research project “FUNgraphen” are pinning their hopes for new technologies on a particular form of carbon: They have developed new carbon macromolecules and molecular carbon composite materials with special properties. The molecules are derived from graphene, a substance that consists of individual layers of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like pattern. The process previously necessary to make use of this substance was complex and expensive and thus of little value for most plastics applications. A research group at the Freiburg Materials Research Center (FMF) of the University of Freiburg – Germany – led by the chemist Prof. Dr. Rolf Mülhaupt, managing director of the FMF, has now succeeded in combining graphene with polymers, making them fit for plastics applications, and preparing them for material optimization on a kilogram scale.

“The applications range from printed electronics to printed catalysts with a pore design for the production of fine chemicals with simple catalyst recovery,” says Mülhaupt.

Source: http://www.pr.uni-freiburg.de

Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology, international semiconductor consortium SEMATECH and Texas State University have demonstrated that use of new methods and materials for building integrated circuits can reduce power—extending battery life to 10 times longer for mobile applications compared to conventional transistors.

“The tunneling field effect transistors have not yet demonstrated a sufficiently large drive current to make it a practical replacement for current transistor technology,” says Sean Rommel, an associate professor of electrical and microelectronic engineering. “But this work conclusively established the largest tunneling current ever experimentally demonstrated”, providing a practical basis for low-voltage transistor technologies.

Source: http://www.rit.edu/news/

MIT researchers describe a new type of vaccine-delivery film that holds promise for improving the effectiveness of DNA vaccines. If such vaccines could be successfully delivered to humans, they could overcome not only the safety risks of using viruses to vaccinate against diseases such as HIV, but they would also be more stable, making it possible to ship and store them at room temperature.

This type of vaccine delivery would also eliminate the need to inject vaccines by syringe, says Darrell Irvine, an MIT professor of biological engineering and materials science and engineering. “You just apply the patch for a few minutes, take it off and it leaves behind these thin polymer films embedded in the skin,” he says.
Source: http://web.mit.edu/

New technology could help power portable devices like satellite phones and radios. University at Buffalo researchers demonstrate that super-small particles of silicon react with water to produce hydrogen almost instantaneously. In a series of experiments, the scientists created spherical silicon particles about 10 nanometers in diameter. When combined with water, these particles reacted to form silicic acid (a nontoxic byproduct) and hydrogen — a potential source of energy for fuel cells. The reaction didn’t require any light, heat or electricity, and also created hydrogen about 150 times faster than similar reactions using silicon particles 100 nanometers wide, and 1,000 times faster than bulk silicon, according to the study.

“When it comes to splitting water to produce hydrogen, nanosized silicon may be better than more obvious choices that people have studied for a while, such as aluminum,” said researcher Mark T. Swihart, UB professor of chemical and biological engineering and director of the university’s Strategic Strength in Integrated Nanostructured Systems. The scientists were able to verify that the hydrogen they made was relatively pure by testing it successfully in a small fuel cell that powered a fan.
Source: http://www.buffalo.edu/

Scientists at CSIRO and RMIT University in Australia have produced a new two-dimensional material that will revolutionise the electronics market, making “nano” more than just a marketing term. The researchers have adapted a revolutionary material known as graphene to create a new conductive nano-material. The material – made up of layers of crystal known as molybdenum oxides – has unique properties that encourage the free flow of electrons at ultra-high speeds.

“Within these layers, electrons are able to zip through at high speeds with minimal scattering,” Dr Zhuiykov said. “The importance of our breakthrough is how quickly and fluently electrons – which conduct electricity – are able to flow through the new material.”
RMIT’s Professor Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh said the researchers were able to remove “road blocks” that could obstruct the electrons, an essential step for the development of high-speed electronics.
“Instead of scattering when they hit road blocks, as they would in conventional materials, they can simply pass through this new material and get through the structure faster,” Professor Kalantar-zadeh said.
“Quite simply, if electrons can pass through a structure quicker, we can build devices that are smaller and transfer data at much higher speeds“.

Source: http://www.csiro.au/

A team of scientists from Tyndall National Institute at University College Cork and the National University of Singapore have found new ways to combat overheating in mobile phones and laptops, and could also aid in electrical stimulation of tissue repair for wound healing. By finding out how molecules behave in these devices, a ten-fold increase in switching efficiency was obtained by changing just one carbon atom. Dr. Damien Thompson at the Tyndall National Institute, UCC and a team of researchers at the National University of Singapore led by Prof. Chris Nijhuis designed and created the devices, which are based on molecules acting as electrical valves, or diode rectifiers.

“These molecules are very useful because they allow current to flow through them when switched ON and block current flow when switched OFF. The results of the study show that simply adding one extra carbon is sufficient to improve the device performance by more than a factor of ten. We are following up lots of new ideas based on these results, and we hope ultimately to create a range of new components for electronic devices,” explains Dr. Damien Thompson.
Source: http://www.tyndall.ie/node/23446

Looking toward improved batteries for charging electric cars and storing energy from renewable but intermittent solar and wind, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory -ORNL-have developed the first high-performance, nanostructured solid electrolyte for more energy-dense lithium ion batteries.
Today’s lithium-ion batteries rely on a liquid electrolyte, the material that conducts ions between the negatively charged anode and positive cathode. But liquid electrolytes often entail safety issues because of their flammability, especially as researchers try to pack more energy in a smaller battery volume. Building batteries with a solid electrolyte, as ORNL researchers have demonstrated, could overcome these safety concerns and size constraints.

“To make a safer, lightweight battery, we need the design at the beginning to have safety in mind,” said ORNL‘s Chengdu Liang, who led the newly published study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “We started with a conventional material that is highly stable in a battery system – in particular one that is compatible with a lithium metal anode.”

Source: http://www.ornl.gov/

How do you annihilate lymphoma without using any drugs? Starve it to death by depriving it of what appears to be a favorite food: HDL cholesterol. Northwestern Medicine® researchers discovered this with a new nanoparticle that acts like a secret double agent. It appears to the cancerous lymphoma cell like a preferred meal – natural HDL. But when the particle engages the cell, it actually plugs it up and blocks cholesterol from entering. Deprived of an essential nutrient, the cell eventually dies. A new study by C. Shad Thaxton, MD, assistant professor in urology, and Leo Gordon, MD, Abby and John Friend Professor of Oncology Research, shows that synthetic HDL nanoparticles killed B-cell lymphoma, the most common form of the disease, in cultured human cells, and inhibited human B-cell lymphoma tumor growth in mice.

Northwestern Medicine® researchers have discovered a new nanoparticle that acts like a secret double agent. The nanoparticle – originally developed by C. Shad Thaxton, MD, as a possible therapy for heart disease – closely mimics the size, shape, and surface chemistry of natural HDL particles. But it has one key difference: a five nanometer gold particle at its core. After it attaches to a lymphoma cell, the gold particle’s spongy surface helps to kill it.
“This has the potential to eventually become a nontoxic treatment for B-cell lymphoma which does not involve chemotherapy,” said Gordon, a co-corresponding author with Thaxton on the paper. “It’s an exciting preliminary finding.” The paper was published on Monday, January 21, in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: http://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/

Safety fears about carbon nanotubes, due to their structural similarity to asbestos, have been alleviated following research showing that reducing their length removes their toxic properties. A University College London - UCL -team, showed evidence that the asbestos-like reactivity and pathogenicity reported for long, pristine nanotubes can be completely alleviated if their surface is modified and their effective length is reduced as a result of chemical treatment. The finding has been published in in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

“The apparent structural similarity between carbon nanotubes and asbestos fibres has generated serious concerns about their safety profile and has resulted in many unreasonable proposals of a halt in the use of these materials even in well-controlled and strictly regulated applications, such as biomedical ones. What we show for the first time is that in order to design risk-free carbon nanotubes both chemical treatment and shortening are needed”, said Professor Kostas Kostarelos, Chair of Nanomedicine at the UCL School of Pharmacy who led the research with his long term collaborators Doctor Alberto Bianco of the CNRS in Strasbourg, France and Professor Maurizio Prato of the University of Trieste, Italy.
Source: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/

The silicon solar cells that are used to supply electricity for domestic use are relatively cheap, but inefficient because they are only able to utilise a limited part of the effect of the sunlight. The reason is that one single material can only absorb part of the spectrum of the light. Now researchers at Lund University in Sweden have shown how nanowires could pave the way for more efficient and cheaper solar cells. Research on solar cell nanowires is on the rise globally. Until now the unattained dream figure was ten per cent efficiency – but now Dr Borgström and his colleagues are able to report an efficiency of 13.8 per cent.

“Our findings are the first to show that it really is possible to use nanowires to manufacture solar cells”, says Magnus Borgström, a researcher in semiconductor physics and the principal author.
Source: http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se

Scientists at Aalto University – Finland, have demonstrated results that show a huge improvement in the light absorption and the surface passivation of silicon nanostructures. This has been achieved by applying atomic layer coating. The results advance the development of devices that require high sensitivity light response such as high efficiency solar cells.

- This method provides extremely good surface passivation. Simultaneously, it reduces the reflectance further at all wavelengths.These results are very promising considering the use of black silicon (b-Si) surfaces on solar cells to increase the efficiency to completely new levels, tells researcher scientist. Päivikki Repo.
More effective surface passivation methods than those used in the past have been needed to make black silicon a viable material for commercial applications. Good surface passivation is crucial in photonic applications such as solar cells. The research has just been published in the Journal of Photovoltaics. The research is carried out by Aalto University, Finland, together with experts from Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, Germany.
Source: http://www.aalto.fi

Researchers at Rice University and Lomonosov Moscow State University have found Graphene oxide has a remarkable ability to quickly remove radioactive material from contaminated water. This collaborative effort by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour and the Moscow lab of chemist Stepan Kalmykov determined that microscopic, atom-thick flakes of graphene oxide bind quickly to natural and human-made radionuclides and condense them into solids. The flakes are soluble in liquids and easily produced in bulk. The discovery, Tour said, could be a boon in the cleanup of contaminated sites like the Fukushima nuclear plants damaged by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. It could also cut the cost of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for oil and gas recovery and help reboot American mining of rare earth metals, he said.

“In the probabilistic world of chemical reactions where scarce stuff (low concentrations) infrequently bumps into something with which it can react, there is a greater likelihood that the ‘magic’ will happen with graphene oxide than with a big old hunk of bentonite,” said Steven Winston, a former vice president of Lockheed Martin and Parsons Engineering and an expert in nuclear power and remediation who is working with the researchers. “In short, fast is good.”

Source: http://news.rice.edu/

Researchers at North Carolina State University have come up with a technique to embed needle-like carbon nanofibers in an elastic membrane, creating a flexible “bed of nails” on the nanoscale that opens the door to development of new drug-delivery systems. The research community is interested in finding new ways to deliver precise doses of drugs to specific targets, such as regions of the brain. One idea is to create balloons embedded with nanoscale spikes that are coated with the relevant drug. Theoretically, the deflated balloon could be inserted into the target area and then inflated, allowing the spikes on the balloon’s surface to pierce the surrounding cell walls and deliver the drug. The balloon could then be deflated and withdrawn.

This image shows carbon nanofibers embedded in the elastic membrane.
“We have now developed a way of embedding carbon nanofibers in an elastic silicone membrane and ensuring that the nanofibers are both perpendicular to the membrane’s surface and sturdy enough to impale cells,” says Dr. Anatoli Melechko, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper on the work.
Source: http://news.ncsu.edu/

The design, synthesis, and running of a molecular nanovehicle on a surface assisted by proper nanocommunication channels for feeding and guiding the vehicle now constitute an active field of research and are no longer a nano-joke. In this Perspective, we describe how this field began, its growth, and problems to be solved. Better molecular wheels, a molecular motor with its own gears assembling for torque transmission must be mounted on (i.e., chemically bonded to) a good molecular chassis for the resulting covalently constructed molecular nanovehicle to run on a surface in a controlled manner at the atomic scale.

“We propose a yearly molecule concept nanocar contest to boost molecular nanovehicle research“, say Christian Joachim and Gwenael Rapenne from CEMES/CNRS, in Toulouse – France -, associated with A*Star (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) in Singapore.
source: http://www.cemes.fr/
AND
http://pubs.acs.org

Rice University’s latest nanotechnology breakthrough was more than 10 years in the making, but it still came with a shock. Scientists from Rice, the Dutch firm Teijin Aramid, the U.S. Air Force and Israel’s Technion Institute this week unveiled a new carbon nanotube (CNT) fiber that looks and acts like textile thread and conducts electricity and heat like a metal wire. In this week’s issue of Science, the researchers describe an industrially scalable process for making the threadlike fibers, which outperform commercially available high-performance materials in a number of ways.

This light bulb is powered and held in place by two thin strands of carbon nanotube fibers that look and feel like textile thread. The nanotube fibers conduct heat and electricity as well as metal wires but are stronger and more flexible.
“We finally have a nanotube fiber with properties that don’t exist in any other material,” said lead researcher Matteo Pasquali, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and chemistry at Rice. “It looks like black cotton thread but behaves like both metal wires and strong carbon fibers.”
Enjoy the video demonstration! http://www.youtube.com/

Source: http://news.rice.edu

An international team of scientists has taken the next step in creating nanoscale machines by designing a multi-component molecular motor that can be moved clockwise and counterclockwise. It’s an essential step in creating nanoscale devices—quantum machines that operate on different laws of physics than classical machines—that scientists envision could be used for everything from powering quantum computers to sweeping away blood clots in arteries.
Although researchers can rotate or switch individual molecules on and off, the new study is the first to create a stand-alone molecular motor that has multiple parts, said Saw-Wai Hla, an Ohio University professor of physics and astronomy who led the study with french researcher Christian Joachim (CEMES/CNRS) working with A*Star in Singapore and in France Gwenael Rapenne of CEMES/CNRS.

This illustration shows the structure of the molecular motors.
In the study, published in Nature Nanotechnology, the scientists demonstrated that they could control the motion of the motor with energy generated by electrons from a scanning tunneling microscope tip. The motor is about 2 nanometers in length and 1 nanometer high and was constructed on a gold crystal surface.
See other recent research by a Dutch team in this nanocomputer.com post: http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=1015
Others researches: http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=614 AND http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=421

Source: http://www.cemes.fr/
AND
http://www.ohio.edu/

The nighttime twinkling of fireflies has inspired scientists to modify a light-emitting diode (LED) so it is 55% more efficient than the original. Researchers from Belgium, France, and Canada studied the internal structure of firefly lanterns, the organs on the bioluminescent insects’ abdomens that flash to attract mates. The scientists identified an unexpected pattern of jagged scales that enhanced the lanterns’ glow, and applied that knowledge to LED design to create an LED overlayer that mimicked the natural structure. The overlayer, which increased LED light extraction by up to 55 percent, could be easily tailored to existing diode designs to help humans light up the night while using less energy. The work is published in a pair of papers today in the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal Optics Express.

“The most important aspect of this work is that it shows how much we can learn by carefully observing nature,” says Annick Bay, a Ph.D. student at the University of Namur in Belgium who studies natural photonic structures, including beetle scales and butterfly wings. When her advisor, Jean Pol Vigneron, visited Central America to conduct field work on the Panamanian tortoise beetle (Charidotella egregia), he also noticed clouds of twinkling fireflies and brought some specimens back to the lab to examine in more detail.
Studying fireflies, see research from an american team in this nancomputer.com article: http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=2833
Other research team works, mimicking dragonflies : see nanocomputer.com artlcle http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=4433
OR
The butterfly wing effect, see http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=4202
Source: http://www.osa.org/
Annick Bay: http://www.fundp.ac.be

If you want to understand a novel, it helps to start from the beginning rather than trying to pick up the plot from somewhere in the middle. The same goes for analyzing a strand of DNA. The best way to make sense of it is to look at it head to tail. Luckily, according to a new study by physicists at Brown University, DNA molecules have a convenient tendency to cooperate. The research, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, looks at the dynamics of how DNA molecules are captured by solid-state nanopores, tiny holes that soon may help sequence DNA at lightning speed. The study found that when a DNA strand is captured and pulled through a nanopore, it’s much more likely to start the journey at one of its ends, rather than being grabbed somewhere in the middle and pulled through in a folded configuration.

“We think this is an important advance for understanding how DNA molecules interact with these nanopores,” said Derek Stein, assistant professor of physics at Brown, who performed the research with graduate student Mirna Mihovilovic and undergraduate Nick Hagerty. “If you want to do sequencing or some other analysis, you want the molecule going through the pore head to tail.”
Source: http://news.brown.edu/

Working at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), a premier source of X-ray and ultraviolet light beams for research, an international team of scientists found that for highly efficient polymer/organic photovoltaic cells, size matters. The amount of solar energy lighting up Earth’s land mass every year is nearly 3,000 times the total amount of annual human energy use. But to compete with energy from fossil fuels, photovoltaic devices must convert sunlight to electricity with a certain measure of efficiency. For polymer-based organic photovoltaic cells, which are far less expensive to manufacture than silicon-based solar cells, scientists have long believed that the key to high efficiencies rests in the purity of the polymer/organic cell’s two domains – acceptor and donor. Now, however, an alternate and possibly easier route forward has been shown.

Molecular view of polymer/fullerene solar film showing an interface between acceptor and donor domains. Red dots are PC71BM molecules and blue lines represent PTB7 chains. Excitons are shown as yellow dots, purple dots are electrons and green dots represent holes.

“We’ve shown that impure domains if made sufficiently small can also lead to improved performances in polymer-based organic photovoltaic cells,” says Harald Ade, a physicist at North Carolina State University, who led this research. “There seems to be a happy medium, a sweet-spot of sorts, between purity and domain size that should be much easier to achieve than ultra-high purity.”
Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov

Advances in nanotechnology have demonstrated potential application of nanoparticles (NPs) for effective and targeted drug delivery. A research team from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine have investigated the antimicrobial and immunological properties and the feasibility of using NPs to deliver antimicrobial agents to treat a cutaneous pathogen. For instance acne is one of the most common dermatologic diseases affecting between 40-50 million people each year. While best known as bothersome part of puberty, affecting approximately 75% of teenagers, acne can persist or even first start during adulthood, causing emotional and physical distress as well as permanent disfigurement.

NPs synthesized with chitosan and alginate demonstrated a direct antimicrobial activity in vitro against Propionibacterium acnes, the bacterium linked to the pathogenesis of acne. By electron microscopy (EM) imaging, chitosan–alginate NPs were found to induce the disruption of the P. acnes cell membrane, providing a mechanism for the bactericidal effect.
Source: http://www.nature.com/

Gold has scientists excited and not for its more than $US1600 an ounce price tag.
Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor (International) Suresh Bhargava from RMIT University – Australia -says for centuries gold has been defined as a noble metal, or a stable one that’s resistant to corrosion and oxidisation. “But the same metal, when it comes to nano forms, is full of fantastic properties,” Professor Bhargava says.
Nano sizes can be easier to comprehend when people realise a human hair is about 80,000 times bigger than a nano particle, the molecular biologist says. One of Prof Bhargava’s projects is using nano-engineered flecks of gold in a sensor to attract and measure one of the world’s most poisonous air pollution substances, mercury.

“Mercury is a very toxic element. Sixty thousand babies in the US alone are born each year with mercury-related diseases,” he says.
The sensor is almost ready for commercialisation and they are also working on ways to remove the toxic element from the air.
“It is not far away,” he told AAP this week.
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.

Peter Higgs, the British physicist, has been named as a Companion of Honor in the annual list of notable achievements in the fields of art, literature, science, politics, industry or religion. Although the award confers no official title upon Higgs, the acknowledgement of his work in the study of the building blocks of life by the Queen is another feather in the cap of the 83-year-old emeritus professor of Theoretical Physics who inspired a generation of engineering research into the existence of the particle that now bears his name. His studies into the building blocks of life began to be taken seriously in the 1960s, when he and a group of other physicists proposed that there must be a mechanism to explain why elementary particles have mass, sparking a series of engineering research projects into what came to be known as the “god particle.” This particle remained elusive until earlier this year when researchers and scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider -LHC- in Switzerland announced that they had discovered a particle that was consistent with his theories. This added a final piece to the puzzle of how elements interact, with scientists naming their discovery after the man who had inspired the search.

“It’s very nice to be right sometimes,” said Higgs when the discovery was made by the team at the LHC. “At the beginning I had no idea whether a discovery would be made in my lifetime because we knew so little at the beginning about where this particle might be in mass, and therefore how high an energy machine would have to go before it could be discovered. It’s been a long wait but it might have been even longer, I might not have been still around.”
Source: BBC

A research team from the City University of New York -CUNY-, has developped a method to detect a single virus particle, which is in the size range of a nanoparticle. (About 80,000 nanoparticles side by side would have the same width as a human hair). Their work has made it possible, for the first time, to detect the smallest virus particle. Since even one viral particle can represent a deadly threat, the research likely will make an important contribution to ongoing research on early detection of such diseases as AIDS and cancer. The team’s breakthrough involved adding a nano-antenna to the light-sensing device to enhance the signal.

“The idea that light can ‘sense’ the presence of nanoparticles and respond to their arrival was groundbreaking,” Dr. Kolchenko from CUNY says. “Since all the deadliest viruses and most interesting biological molecules – proteins and DNA — belong to the nano world, our research proved truly innovative, and its promise is almost unlimited in terms of detecting pretty much everything of interest in life sciences,” he adds.
Let’ds remind that a Norwegian team has found one month ago a way to measure individual particle in the blood. SEE former article : http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=4393
Source: http://www1.cuny.edu/

The Centre of Microsystems Technology (CMST), IMEC’s associated laboratory at Ghent University – Belgium, has developed an innovative spherical curved LCD display, which can be embedded in contact lenses. The first step toward fully pixilated contact lens displays, this achievement has potential wide-spread applications in medical and cosmetic domains.
Unlike LED-based contact lens displays, which are limited to a few small pixels, imec’s innovative LCD-based technology permits the use of the entire display surface.
The first prototype presented today contains a patterned dollar sign. It can only display rudimentary patterns, similar to an electronic pocket calculator. In the future, the researchers envision fully autonomous electronic contact lenses embedded with this display. These next-generation solutions could be used for medical purposes, for example to control the light transmission toward the retina in case of a damaged iris, or for cosmetic purposes such as an iris with a tunable color. In the future, the display could also function as a head-up display, superimposing an image onto the user’s normal view.

“Normally, flexible displays using liquid crystal cells are not designed to be formed into a new shape, especially not a spherical one. Thus, the main challenge was to create a very thin, spherically curved substrate with active layers that could withstand the extreme molding processes,” said Jelle De Smet, the main researcher on the project. “Moreover, since we had to use very thin polymer films, their influence on the smoothness of the display had to be studied in detail. By using new kinds of conductive polymers and integrating them into a smooth spherical cell, we were able to fabricate a new LCD-based contact lens display.”
Let’s have a look on more advanced projects in USA and Japan that are competing to put on the market the first quantglass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuantGlass
Source: http://www.ugent.be

Alain Kaloyeros, who heads the University at Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE), said that New York is in a good position to face the mounting challenges within nanotechnology globally.
Kaloyeros, CEO of the nanocollege, writes that the cost for future nanotechnology development is rising “exponentially” and the cost for fabrication facilities, now at $5 billion, is expected to cost between $10 billion to $15 billion.
Those two factors are driving companies to join New York’s model focused on consortiums, where companies work on non-competitive research at “Switzerland-like innovation hubs.” Kaloyeros said in this model, New York acts “as the ‘referee’ by providing the leveled playing field for each consortium participant to leverage its investments and protect its competitivenes.

CNSE is based at the Albany NanoTech complex on Fuller Road in Albany, New York. The college has been the recipient of more than $14 billion in high-tech investments.
Its other sites are in Halfmoon, where it conducts solar energy research; Rochester, where its Smart System Technology and Commercialization Center of Excellence (STC) is located; and Utica, where its Center of Competency in Information Technologies is located.
The Albany NanoTech site is the epicenter of New York’s tech development. That was illustrated best last year when the state announced a $4.8 billion research project involving the world’s largest computer-chip manufacturers, including IBM, GlobalFoundries, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., and Intel.

University of Michigan engineering researchers have developed a new therapeutic ultrasound approach say it could lead to an invisible knife for noninvasive surgery.They designed a carbon-nanotube-coated lens that converts light to sound and can focus high-pressure sound waves to finer points than ever before.
Today’s ultrasound technology enables far more than glimpses into the womb. Doctors routinely use focused sound waves to blast apart kidney stones and prostate tumors, for example. The tools work primarily by focusing sound waves tightly enough to generate heat, says Jay Guo, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, mechanical engineering, and macromolecular science and engineering. Guo is a co-author of a paper on the new technique published in the current issue of Nature‘s journal Scientific Reports.

The beams that today’s technology produces can be unwieldy, says Hyoung Won Baac, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School who worked on this project as a doctoral student in Guo’s lab.
“A major drawback of current strongly focused ultrasound technology is a bulky focal spot, which is on the order of several millimeters,” Baac said. “A few centimeters is typical. Therefore, it can be difficult to treat tissue objects in a high-precision manner, for targeting delicate vasculature, thin tissue layer and cellular texture. We can enhance the focal accuracy 100-fold.”

Source: http://www.ns.umich.edu/

Investigators at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute have invented a way to directly image biological structures at their most fundamental level and in their natural habitats. The technique is a major advancement toward the ultimate goal of imaging biological processes in action at the atomic level.

A novel microfluidics platform allowed viewing of structural details of rotavirus double-layered particles; the 3-D graphic of the virus, in purple, was reconstructed from data gathered by the new technique.
“It’s sort of like the difference between seeing Han Solo frozen in carbonite and watching him walk around blasting stormtroopers,” said Deborah Kelly, an assistant professor at the VTC Research Institute and a lead author on the paper describing the first successful test of the new technique. “Seeing viruses, for example, in action in their natural environment is invaluable.”

Source: http://research.vtc.vt.edu/

According to the University of Delaware‘s Professor Bingqing Wei, stretchable electronics are the future of mobile electronics, leading giants such as IBM, Sony and Nokia to incorporate the technology into their products.
Beyond traditional electronics, potential stretchable applications include biomedical, wearable, portable and sensory devices, such as cyber skin for robotic devices and implantable electronics. All established classes of high-performance electronics exploit single-crystal inorganic materials, such as silicon or gallium arsenide, in forms (i.e., semiconductor wafers) that are fundamentally rigid and planar. The human body is, by contrast, soft and curvilinear. This mismatch in properties hinders the development of devices capable of intimate, conformal integration with biological tissues, for applications ranging from basic measurement of electrophysiological signals, to delivery of advanced therapies, to establishment of human-machine interfaces. One envisioned solution involves the use of organic electronic materials, whose flexible properties have generated interest in them for potential use in paper-like displays, solar cell, and other types of consumer electronic devices.

“Advances in soft and stretchable substrates and elastomeric materials have given rise to an entirely new field,” says Wei, a mechanical engineering professor at UD.
But even if scientists can engineer stretchable electronics — what about their energy source?
“Rechargeable and stretchable energy storage devices, also known as supercapacitors, are urgently needed to complement advances currently being made in flexible electronics,” explains Wei.
Source: http://rogers.matse.illinois.edu

Within the next 7 years, coal will replace oil as the first energy source in the world. The problem of greenhouse gas (GHG) and the global climate change has to be addressed. The Norwegian state-owned enterprise Gassnova and the Research Council of Norway have jointly established the Norwegian Research Programme for Accelerating the Commercialisation of Carbon Capture and Storage by Financial Stimulation of Research Development and Demonstration (CLIMIT) to promote and provide funding for CSS-related projects. The Research Council administers the R&D portion of the CLIMIT programme. The projects showing greatest promise include everything from large-scale demonstration facilities to research on use of tiny nanoparticles. Sound solutions for carbon capture and storage (CCS) are a key component in a carbon-neutral society. In Norway, public authorities and the R&D sector have pooled their resources in the search for effective solutions.

“One major challenge for efficient CO2 management is that the processes involved are energy-intensive and require large investments upfront. We are looking to remedy this with ground-breaking solutions,” says Special Adviser Åse Slagtern of the Research Council. “For CO2 capture to be efficient for industry and power plants, costs will have to be cut dramatically.”
Source: http://www.forskningsradet.no/
http://www.forskningsradet.no/

Ever since the Wright brothers, engineers have been working to develop bigger and better flying machines that maximize lift while minimizing drag. There has always been a need to efficiently carry more people and more cargo. And so the science and engineering of getting large aircraft off the ground is very well understood.
But what about flight at a small scale? Say the scale of a dragonfly, a bird or a bat?
Hui Hu, an Iowa State University associate professor of aerospace engineering, said there hasn’t been a need to understand the airflow, the eddies and the spinning vortices created by flapping wings and so there haven’t been many engineering studies of small-scale flight. But that’s changing. The U.S. Air Force, for example, is interested in insect-sized nano-air vehicles or bird-sized micro-air vehicles. The vehicles could fly microphones, cameras, sensors, transmitters and even tiny weapons right through a terrorist’s doorway. See former post on http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=242

So how do you design a little flier that’s fast and agile as a house fly? Hu says a good place to start is nature itself. These kinds of physics and aerodynamics lessons – and many more – need to be learned before engineers can design effective nano- and micro-scale vehicles.
Source: http://www.news.iastate.edu/

By using electric voltage instead of a flowing electric current, researchers from UCLA‘s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have made major improvements to an ultra-fast, high-capacity class of computer memory known as magnetoresistive random access memory, or MRAM.. The UCLA team’s improved memory, which they call MeRAM for magnetoelectric random access memory, has great potential to be used in future memory chips for almost all electronic applications, including smart-phones, tablets, computers and microprocessors, as well as for data storage, like the solid-state disks used in computers and large data centers.
The research team was led by principal investigator Kang L. Wang, UCLA‘s Raytheon Professor of Electrical Engineering, and included lead author Juan G. Alzate, an electrical engineering graduate student, and Pedram Khalili, a research associate in electrical engineering and project manager for the UCLA–DARPA research programs in non-volatile logic.
“The ability to switch nanoscale magnets using voltages is an exciting and fast-growing area of research in magnetism,” Khalili said. “This work presents new insights into questions such as how to control the switching direction using voltage pulses, how to ensure that devices will work without needing external magnetic fields, and how to integrate them into high-density memory arrays“.

Source: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/

University of Illinois physics team discovered how a DNA-repair protein matches up a broken DNA strand with an intact region of double-stranded DNA. Every time a human or bacterial cell divides it first must copy its DNA. Specialized proteins unzip the intertwined DNA strands while others follow and build new strands, using the originals as templates. Whenever these proteins encounter a break – and there are many – they stop and retreat, allowing a new cast of molecular players to enter the scene. Scientists have long sought to understand how one of these players, a repair protein known as RecA in bacterial cells, helps broken DNA find a way to bridge the gap. They knew that RecA guided a broken DNA strand to a matching sequence on an adjoining bit of double-stranded DNA, but they didn’t know how. In a new study, researchers report they have identified how the RecA protein does its job.

“The puzzle for scientists has been: How does the damaged DNA look for and find its partner, the matching DNA, so that it can repair itself?” said University of Illinois physics professor Taekjip Ha, who led the study. “Because the genomic DNA is millions of bases long, this task is much like finding a needle in a haystack. We found the answer to how the cell does this so quickly.”
Source: http://news.illinois.edu/

A glass plate with a nanoscale roughness could be a simple way for scientists to capture and study the circulating tumor cells that carry cancer around the body through the bloodstream. Engineering and medical researchers at the University of Michigan have devised such a set-up, which they say takes advantage of cancer cells‘ stronger drive to settle and bind compared with normal blood cells.

This false-color microscopic image shows cancer cells selectively adhering to patterned nanorough letters (UM) on a glass surface

Circulating tumor cells are believed to contribute to cancer metastasis, the grim process of the disease spreading from its original site to distant tissues. Blood tests that count these cells can help doctors predict how long a patient with widespread cancer will live. “Our system can capture the majority of circulating tumor cells regardless of their surface proteins or their physical sizes, and this could include cancer progenitor or initiating cells,” said Jianping Fu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering and a senior author of a paper on the technique published online in ACS Nano.
Source: http://ns.umich.edu/

Researchers at the *Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials (IWM) in Halle, Germany, have developed a new coating for ships keeping ship hulls free of marine organisms. “The electrochemically active coating system produces regularly changing pH values on the surface of the hull. This effectively prevents colonization without having to use any biocides“, explains Professor Manfred Füting of the IWM in Halle who is coordinating the project.

Special underwater coatings prevent shells and other organisms from growing on the hull of ships – but biocide paints are ecologically harmful. Together with the industry, researchers have developed more environmentally-friendly alternatives. If a ship is at anchor for longer periods algae, shells and barnacles will colonize it. Every year, this so-called biofouling causes economic losses of billions of Dollar. Biological growth on the underwater surface promotes corrosion. The deposits increase the roughness of the hull below the waterline which has a braking effect as the ship travels. Depending on the roughness of the basified bio layer, the consumption of fuel can increase by up to 40 percent. In the case of a large container ship this can result in additional annual costs of several millions.

*Fraunhofer is Europe’s largest application-oriented research organization. The research efforts are geared entirely to people’s needs: health, security, communication, energy and the environment.
Source: http://www.fraunhofer.de

Silicon’s crown is under threat: The semiconductor’s days as the king of microchips for computers and smart devices could be numbered, thanks to the development of the smallest transistor ever to be built from a rival material, indium gallium arsenide.

A cross-section transmission electron micrograph of the fabricated transistor. The central inverted V is the gate. The two molybdenum contacts on either side are the source and drain of the transistor. The channel is the indium gallium arsenide light color layer under the source, drain and gate.

The compound transistor, built by a team in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories, performs well despite being just 22 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in length. This makes it a promising candidate to eventually replace silicon in computing devices, says co-developer Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who built the transistor with EECS graduate student Jianqian Lin and Dimitri Antoniadis, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering.
Source: http://web.mit.edu/

Norwegian researchers have developed the world’s first sensor capable of measuring individual particles in a blood sample. This new innovation could cause a sensation in the medical world. Our blood contains several hundred different proteins that can give us a picture of our general health – and provide information about the condition of our heart or the presence of cancer.
Currently, when we give our doctor a blood sample for a ‘full check’, it can only be analysed for five or six indicators, such as blood percentages, blood sugar and infections. For other test results, the sample must be sent to a central laboratory for analysis. It can often take as long as a week before the results come back.

The SINTEF researchers have improved their sensor’s sensitivity a million fold compared with ordinary sensors. They can now measure particles down to 20 nanometres.
‘Many proteins relevant to diagnosis are in this size range, but many others are even smaller. We can currently detect individual molecules of the larger proteins.
We can also detect smaller protein molecules, but not individually, i.e. we need more protein molecules before we can detect them with our sensor. However, the aim is to perfect the sensor’s architecture so that in the long term we will also be able to detect individual molecules of even the smallest proteins,’ says Michal Mielnik from SINTEF.
Source: http://www.sintef.no/

Princeton researchers have found a simple and economical way to nearly triple the efficiency of organic solar cells, the cheap and flexible plastic devices that many scientists believe could be the future of solar power. The researchers, led by electrical engineer Stephen Chou, were able to increase the efficiency of the solar cells 175 percent by using a nanostructured “sandwich” of metal and plastic that collects and traps light. Chou said the technology also should increase the efficiency of conventional inorganic solar collectors, such as standard silicon solar panels, although he cautioned that his team has not yet completed research with inorganic devices.

“Our goal is to extend high-performance electronic and solar-cell function to longer lengths and to more flexible forms. We already have made meters-long fibers but, in principle, our team’s new method could be used to create bendable silicon solar-cell fibers of over 10 meters in length,” one of the Princeton team researcher said. “Long, fiber-based solar cells give us the potential to do something we couldn’t really do before: We can take the silicon fibers and weave them together into a fabric with a wide range of applications such as power generation, battery charging, chemical sensing and biomedical devices.”
Source: http://www.princeton.edu/

A french team led by Philippe Walter from University Pierre et Marie Curie – UPMC- in Paris , France explain that gold nanoparticles — 40,000-60,000 of which could fit across the width of a human hair — are a hot topic. Scientists are exploring uses, ranging from electronics and sensors to medical diagnostic tests and cancer treatments. Gold nanoparticles have been deposited on hair for use as electrodes, and gold nanoparticles had been used to dye wool. Walter’s team looked at a new use — dyeing hair, inspired by the ancient Greeks’ and Romans’ use of another metal, lead, to color their hair. In their discovery scientists are reporting the first synthesis of gold nanoparticles inside human hairs. Their study appears in ACS’ journal Nano Letters.

Gold nanoparticles darken hair after treatment for one day, center,
and 16 days, right (untreated hairs, left).

After soaking white hairs in a solution of a gold compound, the hairs turned pale yellow and then darkened to a deep brown. Using an electron microscope, the scientists confirmed that the particles were forming inside the hairs’ central core cortex. The color remained even after repeated washings.
Source: http://portal.acs.org

Bioinformaticians at IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute), Barcelona – Spain – and UPF (Pompeu Fabra University) have used molecular simulation techniques to explain a specific step in the maturation of the HIV virions, i.e., how newly formed inert virus particles become infectious, which is essential in understanding how the virus replicates. These results, which have been published in the latest edition of PNAS, could be crucial to the design of future antiretrovirals.
HIV virions mature and become infectious as a result of the action of a protein called HIV protease. This protein acts like a pair of scissors, cutting the long chain of connected proteins that form HIV into individual proteins that will form the infectious structure of new virions. According to the researchers of the IMIM-UPF computational biophysics group, “One of the most intriguing aspects of the whole HIV maturation process is how free HIV protease, i.e. the ‘scissors protein,’ appears for the first time, since it is also initially part of the long poly-protein chains that make up new HIV virions.”

HIV protease cutting the poly-protein chain.
Using ACEMD a software for molecular simulations and a technology known as GPUGRID.net, Gianni De Fabritiis’ group has demonstrated that the first “scissors proteins” can cut themselves out from within the middle of these poly-protein chains.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/

Using light-harvesting nanoparticles to convert laser energy into “plasmonic nanobubbles,” researchers at Rice University, 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.
“We are delivering cancer drugs or other genetic cargo at the single-cell level,” said Rice’s Dmitri Lapotko, a biologist and physicist. “By avoiding healthy cells and delivering the drugs directly inside cancer cells, we can simultaneously increase drug efficacy while lowering the dosage,” he said.

Identical cells stained red and blue were the target of research at Rice University to show the effect of plasmonic nanobubbles. The bubbles form around heated gold nanoparticles that target particular cells, like cancer cells. When the particles are hollow, bubbles form that are large enough to kill the cell when they burst. When the particles are solid, the bubbles are smaller and can punch a temporary hole in a cell wall, allowing drugs or other material to flow in. Both effects can be achieved simultaneously with a single laser pulse. After the laser pulse, red-stained cells show evidence of massive damage from exploding nanobubbles, while blue-stained cells remained intact, but with green fluorescent dye pulled in from the outside.
Source: http://news.rice.edu/

A University of Washington team has developed a versatile platform to simultaneously offer contraception and prevent HIV. Electrically spun cloth with nanometer-sized fibers can dissolve to release drugs, providing a platform for cheap, discrete and reversible protection. Until now the only way to protect against HIV and unintended pregnancy today is the condom. It’s an effective technology, but not appropriate or popular in all situations.

The electrospun fibers can release chemicals or they can physically block sperm, as shown here.
“Our dream is to create a product women can use to protect themselves from HIV infection and unintended pregnancy,” said corresponding author Kim Woodrow, a UW assistant professor of bioengineering. “We have the drugs to do that. It’s really about delivering them in a way that makes them more potent, and allows a woman to want to use it.”

The research was published this week in the Public Library of Science’s open-access journal PLoS One.
Source: http://www.washington.edu/

Researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have created more than 100 three-dimensional (3D) nanostructures using DNA building blocks that function like Lego® bricks — a major advance from the two-dimensional (2D) structures the same team built a few months ago. In effect, the advance means researchers just went from being able to build a flat wall of Legos®, to building a house. The new method, featured as a cover research article in the 30 November issue of Science, is the next step toward using DNA nanotechnologies for more sophisticated applications than ever possible before, such as “smart” medical devices that target drugs selectively to disease sites, programmable imaging probes, templates for precisely arranging inorganic materials in the manufacturing of next generation computer circuits, and more.

Wyss Institute researchers have created more than 100 three-dimensional nanostructures using DNA building blocks that function like Lego® bricks. This video illustrates how DNA is used to build these structures. Watch video…

The DNA-brick technique capitalizes on the ability of DNA strands to selectively attach to other strands, thanks to the underlying “recipe” of DNA base pairs. This animation shows how the DNA strands self-assemble to build a structure. View animation…

Source: http://wyss.harvard.edu/

To help planes fly safely through cold, wet, and icy conditions, a team of Japanese scientists has developed a new super water-repellent surface that can prevent ice from forming in these harsh atmospheric conditions. Unlike current inflight anti-icing techniques, the researchers envision applying this new anti-icing method to an entire aircraft like a coat of paint.
As airplanes fly through clouds of super-cooled water droplets, areas around the nose, the leading edges of the wings, and the engine cones experience low airflow, says Hirotaka Sakaue, a researcher in the fluid dynamics group at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). This enables water droplets to contact the aircraft and form an icy layer. If ice builds up on the wings it can change the way air flows over them, hindering control and potentially making the airplane stall. Other members of the research team are with the University of Tokyo, the Kanagawa Institute of Technology, and Chuo University.

Current anti-icing techniques include diverting hot air from the engines to the wings, preventing ice from forming in the first place, and inflatable membranes known as pneumatic boots, which crack ice off the leading edge of an aircraft’s wings. The super-hydrophobic, or water repelling, coating being developed by Sakaue, Katsuaki Morita – a graduate student at the University of Tokyo – and their colleagues works differently, by preventing the water from sticking to the airplane’s surface in the first place.
Source: http://meeting.aps.org/

Pound for pound, spider silk is one of the strongest materials known: Research by MIT’s Markus Buehler has helped explain that this strength arises from silk’s unusual hierarchical arrangement of protein building blocks. Now Buehler — together with David Kaplan of Tufts University and Joyce Wong of Boston University — has synthesized new variants on silk’s natural structure, and found a method for making further improvements in the synthetic material. And an ear for music, it turns out, might be a key to making those structural improvements.

This diagram of the molecular structure of one of the artificially produced versions of spider silk depicts one that turned out to form strong, well-linked fibers. A different structure, made using a variation of the same methods, was not able to form into the long fibers needed to make it useful. Musical compositions based on the two structures helped to show how they differed.

“We’re trying to approach making materials in a different way,” Buehler explains, “starting from the building blocks” — in this case, the protein molecules that form the structure of silk. “It’s very hard to do this; proteins are very complex”.
Source: http://web.mit.edu/

A team led by John Lewis, the Sojonky Chair in Prostate Cancer Research with the Canadian University of Alberta’s Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, and PhD student Choi Fong Cho, have authored a report about a new platform to generate nano-particles to seek out and destroy only cancer cells. “Chemotherapy … is indiscriminate,” said Lewis. “So it kills any cell that’s dividing in the body, and cancer cells are dividing but so are hair cells and immune cells – and that’s what causes the majority of side effects. So this platform will allow us then to take chemotherapies and avoid those healthy tissues that we need, and specifically kill the cancer cells.” Most of the lab testing, involving animal models, has been for prostate cancer but Lewis noted that the drugs look for a protein only in cancer cells, acting like a “homing beacon” for many different kinds of cancer.

“If we can use ‘smart‘ drugs that home in on tumours, we can dramatically decrease side effects for patients, lower the chance of recurrence, and hopefully increase the cancer survival rate.”

Sources: http://metronews.ca/
AND
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl3034043

Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have modified electrically-conductive polymers, commonly used in solar energy applications, to develop revolutionary polymer nanoparticles (PNs) for a medical application. When the nanoparticles are exposed to infrared light, they generate heat that can be used to kill colorectal cancer cells.

Levi-Polyachenko and her team discovered a novel formulation that gives the polymers two important capabilities for medical applications: the polymers can be made into nanoparticles that are easily dispersed in water and generate a lot of heat when exposed to infrared light.Results of this study showed that when colorectal cancer cells incubated with the PNs were exposed to five minutes of infrared light, the treatment killed up to 95 percent of cells. “The results of this study demonstrate how new medical advancements are being developed from materials science research,” said Levi-Polyachenko.
The study was directed by Assistant Professor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Nicole H. Levi-Polyachenko, Ph.D., and done in collaboration with colleagues at the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest University. This study was recently published online, ahead of print, in the journal, Macromolecular Bioscience (DOI: 10.1002/mabi.201200241)
Source: http://www.wakehealth.edu

In a world-first, researchers from the Australian Centre for Nanomedicine at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney – Australia – have developed a nanoparticle that could improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy for neuroblastoma by a factor of five. Neuroblastoma is an aggressive childhood cancer that often leaves survivors with lingering health problems due to the high doses of chemotherapy drugs required for treatment. Anything that can potentially reduce these doses is considered an important development. The UNSW researchers developed a non-toxic nanoparticle that can deliver and release nitric oxide (NO) to specific cancer cells in the body. The findings of their in vitro experiments have been published in the journal Chemical Communications.

“When we injected the chemo drug into the neuroblastoma cells that had been pre-treated with our new nitric oxide nanoparticle we needed only one-fifth the dose,” says co-author Dr Cyrille Boyer from the School of Chemical Engineering at UNSW.
“By increasing the effectiveness of these chemotherapy drugs by a factor of five, we could significantly decrease the detrimental side-effects to healthy cells and surrounding tissue.”

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org

Rice University scientists have unveiled a revolutionary new technology that uses nanoparticles to convert solar energy directly into steam. The new “solar steam” method from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) is so effective it can even produce steam from icy cold water. The technology has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent. Photovoltaic solar panels, by comparison, typically have an overall energy efficiency around 15 percent. However, the inventors of solar steam said they expect the first uses of the new technology will not be for electricity generation but rather for sanitation and water purification in developing countries.

Rice University graduate student Oara Neumann, left, and scientist Naomi Halas are co-authors of new research on a highly efficient method of turning sunlight into heat. They expect their technology to have an initial impact as an ultra-small-scale system to treat human waste in developing nations without sewer systems or electricity.
“This is about a lot more than electricity,” said LANP Director Naomi Halas, the lead scientist on the project. “With this technology, we are beginning to think about solar thermal power in a completely different way.”
Source: http://news.rice.edu/

A biodegradable nanoparticle, designed by a Northwestern University medicine research team, turns out to be the perfect vehicle to stealthily deliver an antigen that tricks the immune system into stopping its attack on myelin and halt a model of relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (MS) in mice. This is a breakthrough for nanotechnology and multiple sclerosis. The new nanotechnology also can be applied to a variety of immune-mediated diseases including Type 1 diabetes, food allergies and airway allergies such as asthma.

“This is a highly significant breakthrough in translational immunotherapy,” said Stephen Miller, a corresponding author of the study and the Judy Gugenheim Research Professor of Microbiology-Immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “The beauty of this new technology is it can be used in many immune-related diseases. We simply change the antigen that’s delivered.”
“The holy grail is to develop a therapy that is specific to the pathological immune response, in this case the body attacking myelin,” Miller added. “Our approach resets the immune system so it no longer attacks myelin but leaves the function of the normal immune system intact.“
Source: http://www.northwestern.edu/

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have brought new understanding to one of those secrets — how the interfaces between two carefully selected metals can absorb, or heal, radiation damage. Some nano-engineered materials are able to resist such damage and may, for example, prevent helium bubbles from coalescing into larger voids. For instance, some metallic nanolaminates—materials made up of extremely thin alternating layers of different metals—are able to absorb various types of radiation-induced defects at the interfaces between the layers because of the mismatch that exists between their crystal structures.

“When it comes to selecting proper structural materials for advanced nuclear reactors, it is crucial that we understand radiation damage and its effects on materials properties. And we need to study these effects on isolated small-scale features,” says Julia R. Greer, an assistant professor of materials science and mechanics at Caltech. With that in mind, Greer and colleagues from Caltech, Sandia National Laboratories, UC Berkeley, and Los Alamos National Laboratory have taken a closer look at radiation-induced damage, zooming in all the way to the nanoscale — where lengths are measured in billionths of meters.
Their results appear online in the journals Advanced Functional Materials and Small.

Source: http://www.caltech.edu/

Using the power of the sun and ultrathin films of iron oxide (commonly known as rust), Technion-Israel Institute of Technology researchers have found a novel way to split water molecules to hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough, published this week in Nature Materials, could lead to less expensive, more efficient ways to store solar energy in the form of hydrogen-based fuels. This could be a major step forward in the development of viable replacements for fossil fuels.

“Our approach is the first of its kind,” says lead researcher Associate Prof. Avner Rothschild, of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. “We have found a way to trap light in ultrathin films of iron oxide that are 5,000 thinner than an office paper. This enables achieving high solar energy conversion efficiency and low materials and production costs. ”
Let’s remind that two days ago Swiss Scientists from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) – Switzerland – have declared that they are producing hydrogen from sunlight, water and rust. Their prototypes shared the same basic principle: a dye-sensitized solar cell – invented by Michael Grätzel, a colleague from University of Geneva, – combined with an oxide-based semiconductor. The device is completely self-contained. More on http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=4215

Source: http://www1.technion.ac.il/

A University of Texas at Arlington physics professor has helped create a hybrid nanomaterial that can be used to convert light and thermal energy into electrical current, surpassing earlier methods that used either light or thermal energy, but not both. The team used the nanomaterial to build a prototype thermoelectric generator that they hope can eventually produce milliwatts of power. Paired with microchips, the technology could be used in devices such as self-powering sensors, low-power electronic devices and implantable biomedical micro-devices, UT Arlington associate physics professor Wei Chen said.

“If we can convert both light and heat to electricity, the potential is huge for energy production,” Chen said. “By increasing the number of the micro-devices on a chip, this technology might offer a new and efficient platform to complement or even replace current solar cell technology.”
Source: https://www.uta.edu/

Scientists from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) – Switzerland – are producing hydrogen from sunlight, water and rust. They’re paving the way for an economic and ecological solution for storing renewable energy. How can solar energy be stored so that it can be available any time, day or night, when the sun shining or not? EPFL scientists are developing a technology that can transform light energy into a clean fuel that has a neutral carbon footprint: hydrogen. The basic ingredients of the recipe are water and metal oxides, such as iron oxide, better known as rust. Kevin Sivula and his colleagues purposefully limited themselves to inexpensive materials and easily scalable production processes in order to enable an economically viable method for solar hydrogen production. The device, still in the experimental stages, is described in an article published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Their prototypes shared the same basic principle: a dye-sensitized solar cell – invented by Michael Grätzel, a colleague from University of Geneva, – combined with an oxide-based semiconductor. The device is completely self-contained.

Source: http://actu.epfl.ch/

Sensors and other electronics are usually made of rigid and stiff material such as metals and plastics. They cannot be stretched, twisted or thrown, and should be handled with care. But that is about to change. Researchers from the Institute of Textiles and Clothing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University have developed a new technology that allows electronics to drape around our body comfortably. Defying our imagination, the researchers have engineered a new fabric that can conduct electricity, paving the way for stretchable electronics.

Principal investigator Prof. Tao explained, “Our new fabric can be stretched like a rubber band and has high sensitivity to strain. We’ve also made another one that can withstand and respond to very high pressure up to 2000kPa. They are water-proof, washable and excellent in resistance to fatigue.”
Source: http://www.polyu.edu.hk

A Northwestern University research team has found a way to manufacture single laser devices that are the size of a virus particle and that operate at room temperature. These plasmonic nanolasers could be readily integrated into silicon-based photonic devices, all-optical circuits and nanoscale biosensors. Reducing the size of photonic and electronic elements is critical for ultra-fast data processing and ultra-dense information storage. The miniaturization of a key, workhorse instrument — the laser — is no exception. The results are published in the journal Nano Letters.

“Coherent light sources at the nanometer scale are important not only for exploring phenomena in small dimensions but also for realizing optical devices with sizes that can beat the diffraction limit of light,” said Teri Odom , a nanotechnology expert who led the research.

Source: http://www.northwestern.edu/

A Rice University lab, in collaboration with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, try to find novel ways to make materials more impervious to deformation or failure for stronger and lighter body armor, jet engine turbine blades for aircraft, and for cladding to protect spacecraft and satellites from micrometeorites and space junk. Their work was detailed in the online journal Nature Communications.
The researchers were inspired by their observations in macroscopic ballistic tests in which a complex multiblock copolymer polyurethane material showed the ability to not only stop a 9 mm bullet but also seal the entryway behind it.

“The polymer has actually arrested the bullet and sealed it,” Thomas said, holding a hockey puck-sized piece of clear plastic with three bullets firmly embedded. “There’s no macroscopic damage; the material hasn’t failed; it hasn’t cracked. You can still see through it. This would be a great ballistic windshield material”.
“We want to find out why this polyurethane works the way it does. Theoretically, no one understood why this particular kind of material – which has nanoscale features of glassy and rubbery domains – would be so good at dissipating energy,” he said.

Source: http://news.rice.edu/

Researchers at Rice University have refined silicon-based lithium-ion technology by literally crushing their previous work to make a high-capacity, long-lived and low-cost anode material with serious commercial potential for rechargeable lithium batteries. The team led by Rice engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and research scientist Madhuri Thakur reported in Nature’s open access journal Scientific Reports on the creation of a silicon-based anode, the negative electrode of a battery, that easily achieves 600 charge-discharge cycles at 1,000 milliamp hours per gram (mAh/g). This is a significant improvement over the 350 mAh/g capacity of current graphite anodes. That puts it squarely in the realm of next-generation battery technology competing to lower the cost and extend the range of electric vehicles.

“We previously reported on making porous silicon films,” said Biswal. “We have been looking to move away from the film geometry to something that can be easily transferred into the current battery manufacturing process. Madhuri crushed the porous silicon film to form porous silicon particulates, a powder that can be easily adopted by battery manufacturers.”

Source: http://news.rice.edu/

Fuel cells, which convert fuel directly into electricity without burning it, promise a less polluted future where cars run on pure hydrogen and exhaust nothing but water vapor. But the catalysts that make them work are still “sluggish” and worse, expensive. A research team at the Cornell Energy Materials Center has taken an important step forward with a chemical process that creates platinum-cobalt nanoparticles with a platinum enriched shell that show improved catalytic activity.

“This could be a real significant improvement. It enhances the catalysis and cuts down the cost by a factor of five,” said Héctor Abruña, the E.M. Chamot Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, senior author of a paper describing the work in the Oct. 28 issue of the journal Nature Materials. Co-authors include Francis DiSalvo, the John Newman Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and David Muller, professor of applied and engineering physics and co-director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science.

Source: http://www.emc2.cornell.edu/

Braces made from clear plastic polymer used in dental correction orthodontics have produced very good results in recent years, especially in relation to the improved esthetics when compared to metal braces, but they do present certain problems of wear and tear within the mouth. Researchers from UC3M, has produced a new material which increases mechanical as well as friction resistance, thereby maintaining the braces’ transparency. The new technique has been patented. The Polymers and Composites research group belongs to the Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical Engineering Department of the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain. Its objective is the development and characterization of polymeric materials, focussed in their reinforcement through the
dispersion of nanoparticles. Following this method, very small additions of nanoreinforcements usually improve mechanical, electrical and optical properties, as well as the service performance of these materials.

“We were estimating the friction between teeth and the brackets [braces], and it occurred to us that nanotechnology might be of use to help us resolve this issue,” remarked Juan Baselga, head of the UC3M Polymers and Composite Group.
Source: http://www.uc3m.es/

In poor countries, affordable methodologies for the detection of disease biomarkers at ultralow concentrations can potentially improve the standard of living. However, current strategies for ultrasensitive detection often require sophisticated instruments that may not be available in laboratories with fewer resources.
Now a research team from the Imperial College London -United Kingdom- reports that their visual sensor technology is ten times more sensitive than the current gold standard methods for measuring biomarkers. These indicate the onset of diseases such as prostate cancer and infection by viruses including HIV.

Professor Molly Stevens, from the Departments of Materials and Bioengineering at Imperial College London, says: “It is vital that patients get periodically tested in order to assess the success of retroviral therapies and check for new cases of infection. Unfortunately, the existing gold standard detection methods can be too expensive to be implemented in parts of the world where resources are scarce. Our approach affords for improved sensitivity, does not require sophisticated instrumentation and it is ten times cheaper, which could allow more tests to be performed for better screening of many diseases.”

Source: http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.186.html

A team of University of California Davis – UC Davis - scientists has shown in experimental mouse models that a new drug delivery system allows for administration of three times the maximum tolerated dose of a standard drug therapy for advanced bladder cancer, leading to more effective cancer control without increasing toxicity. The delivery system consists of specially designed nanoparticles that home in on tumor cells while carrying the anti-cancer drug paclitaxel. The same delivery system also was successfully used to carry a dye that lights up on imaging studies, making it potentially useful for diagnostic purposes.

“We have developed a novel, multifunctional nanotherapeutics platform that can selectively and efficiently deliver both diagnostic and therapeutic agents to bladder tumors,” said Chong-Xian Pan, principal investigator of the study and associate professor of hematology and oncology at UC Davis. “Our results support its potential to be used for both diagnostic and therapeutic applications for advanced bladder cancer.”

Source: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/publish/news/cvc/7104

Electricity and seawater are usually a bad mix. And it was thus a very big surprise when scientists from Aarhus University – Denmark – a few years ago discovered electric currents between biological processes in the seabed. Since then they have been searching for an explanation and together with partners from the University of Southern California, USA, they have solved the enigma of electric currents in the seabed sensationally discovering bacteria that function as living electrical cables. Each of the centimetre-long ‘cable bacteria’ contains a bundle of insulated wires leading an electric current from one end to the other.

“Our experiments showed that the electric connections in the seabed must be solid structures built by bacteria,” says PhD student Christian Pfeffer, Aarhus University.The bacterium is one hundred times thinner than a hair and the whole bacterium functions as an electric cable with a number of insulated wires within it. Quite similar to the electric cables we know from our daily lives. “Such unique insulated biological wires seem simple but with incredible complexity at nanoscale,” says PhD student Jie Song, Aarhus University, who used nanotools to map the electrical properties of the cable bacteria.
Source: http://scitech.au.dk/en/current-affairs/news/show/artikel/living-cables-explain-enigmatic-electric-currents/

Nature manufactures numerous machines known as “molecular”. Highly complex assemblies of proteins, they are involved in essential functions of living beings such as the transport of ions, the synthesis of ATP (the “energy molecule”), and cell division. Our muscles are thus controlled by the coordinated movement of these thousands of protein nano-machines, which only function individually over distances of the order of a nanometer. However, when combined in their thousands, such nano-machines amplify this telescopic movement until they reach our scale and do so in a perfectly coordinated manner.
For the first time, an assembly of thousands of nano-machines capable of producing a coordinated contraction movement extending up to around ten micrometers – thereby amplifying the movement by a factor of 10,000, like the movements of muscular fibers, has been synthesized by a CNRS team from the Institut Charles Sadron – France.

This discovery opens up perspectives for a multitude of applications in robotics, in nanotechnology for the storage of information, in the medical field for the synthesis of artificial muscles or in the design of other materials incorporating nano-machines (endowed with novel mechanical properties).
Source: http://www2.cnrs.fr/en/2117.htm

Severe lung diseases are among the leading causes of death worldwide. To date they have been difficult to diagnose at an early stage. Within an international collaboration scientists from Munich- Germany – now developed an X-ray technology to do just that. Now they are working on bringing the procedure into medical practice.

A combination of dark-field and conventional transmission information allows for a clear distinction of healthy versus emphysematous tissue and an assessment of the regional distribution of the disease. From such images, a doctor might in future not only see if a patient is diseased but also which parts of the lung are affected and how much.
“Especially in early stages of the disease, identification, precise quantification and localization of emphysema through the new technology would be very helpful”, says Professor Maximilian Reiser, head of the Institute for Clinical Radiology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich.

Source: http://www.munich-photonics.de

The claim that nanopore technology is on the verge of making DNA analysis so fast and cheap that a person’s entire genome could be sequenced in just minutes and at a fraction of the cost of available commercial methods, has resulted in overwhelming academic, industrial, and global interest. But a review by Northeastern University – Boston – physicist Meni Wanunu, published in a special issue on nanopore sequencing in Physics of Life Reviews, questions whether the remaining technical hurdles can be overcome to create a workable, easily produced commercial device.

Earlier this year Oxford Nanopore Technologies, one of the pioneering companies of sequencing discoveries, announced that they expect nanopore strand sequencing to achieve a 15-minute genome by 2014 at a cost of $1,500. This is a far cry from the $10 million it cost to sequence an entire genome just 5 years ago. Since the idea of nanopore sequencing was first proposed in the mid 1990s, huge advances have been made. The basic idea is exceedingly simple: a single thread of DNA is passed through a tiny molecule-sized hole—or nanopore—and the various DNA bases are identified in sequence as they move through the pore.

But according to Wanunu, the reality of manipulating technology based on pores so tiny that 25,000 of them can fit side by side on a human hair has proved a daunting task. The main challenge has been to slow the process down and control the movement of the DNA strand through the pore at a rate slow enough to make individual DNA bases readable and usable. A new approach using enzyme-controlled movement, developed to overcome this problem, has its own drawbacks including poor enzyme activity resulting in limited processivity and uncontrolled forward-reverse motion.
Source:
- http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authored_newsitem.cws_home
/companynews05_02508?navopenmenu=3
- http://www.northeastern.edu/news/2012/09/nanopores-promise-cost-savings-in-gene-sequencing/

In Harvard’s Pierce Hall, the surface of a small germanium-coated gold sheet shines vividly in crimson. A centimeter to the right, where the same metallic coating is literally only about 20 atoms thicker, the surface is a dark blue, almost black. The colors form the logo of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), where researchers have demonstrated a new way to customize the color of metal surfaces by exploiting a completely overlooked optical phenomenon. For centuries it was thought that thin-film interference effects, such as those that cause oily pavements to reflect a rainbow of swirling colors, could not occur in opaque materials. Harvard physicists have now discovered that even very “lossy” thin films, if atomically thin, can be tailored to reflect a particular range of dramatic and vivid colors.

Gold films colored with nanometer-thick layers of germanium.
The discovery is the latest to emerge from the laboratory of Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering at SEAS, whose research group most recently produced ultrathin flat lenses and needle light beams that skim the surface of metals.

Source: http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news-events/press-releases/applied-physics-as-art

Currently, large doses of chemotherapy are required when treating certain forms of cancer, resulting in toxic side effects. The chemicals enter the body and work to destroy or shrink the tumor, but also harm vital organs and drastically affect bodily functions. Now, scientists at the University of Missouri have proven that a new form of prostate cancer treatment that uses radioactive gold nanoparticles, and was developed at MU, is safe to use in dogs. Sandra Axiak-Bechtel , an assistant professor in oncology at the MU College of Veterinary Medicine , says that this is a big step for gold nanoparticle research.