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/

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 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/

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/

UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano. The UCLA team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, not visible light, making the cells nearly 70% transparent to the human eye. They made the device from a photoactive plastic that converts infrared light into an electrical current.

Source. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-create-highly-236698.aspx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trapped gold nanoparticle (left) acts as nanoear

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

New processes that allow nanoparticles to assemble themselves into designer materials could solve some of today's technology challenges. Alex Travesset, Associate Professor at Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory, writes in the Journal Science (Oct. 14 issue) that  the controlled self-assembly of nanoparticles could help researchers create new materials with unique electrical, optical, mechanical or transport properties

"Nanoparticle self-assembly has entered the LEGO era," Travesset said. "You can really work with nanoparticles in the same way you can work with LEGOs. This represents a breakthrough in the way we can manipulate matter. Really revolutionary applications will come".

Let's remind how Dr Ralph Merkle presents in his blog  the new nanotechnologies:

Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged.

If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond..

If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips.

If we rearrange the atoms in dirt,  water and air we can make potatoes..

Todays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It's like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have shed light on the role of temperature in controlling a fabrication technique for drawing chemical patterns as small as 20 nanometers.

Thermal dip-pen nanolithography turns the tip of a scanning probe microscope into a tiny soldering iron that can be used to draw chemical patterns as small as 20 nanometers on surfaces. (Image courtesy of DeYoreo, et. al)

This technique could provide an inexpensive, fast route to growing and patterning a wide variety of materials on surfaces to build electrical circuits and chemical sensors, or study how pharmaceuticals bind to proteins and viruses.

Source: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/11/07/inking-nanostructures-with-tiny-%E2%80%98soldering-iron%E2%80%99/

Scientists at Northwestern University have developed a new nanomaterial that can “steer” electrical currents. The development could lead to a computer that can simply reconfigure its internal wiring and become an entirely different device, based on changing needs. As electronic devices are built smaller and smaller, the materials from which the circuits are constructed begin to lose their properties and begin to be controlled by quantum mechanical phenomena. Reaching this physical barrier, many scientists have begun building circuits into multiple dimensions, such as stacking components on top of one another.
The Northwestern team has taken a fundamentally different approach. They have made reconfigurable electronic materials: materials that can rearrange themselves to meet different computational needs at different times.

“Our new steering technology allows use to direct current flow through a piece of continuous material,” said Bartosz A. Grzybowski, who led the research. “Like redirecting a river, streams of electrons can be steered in multiple directions through a block of the material — even multiple streams flowing in opposing directions at the same time.“

Design rules will enable scientists to build desired nanomaterials for broad application of nanotechnology to address social challenges, bolstering industry and creating jobs.

Gold nanoparticles are assembled with DNA linkers into crystalline lattices.

Learning the rules for consistently arranging nanoparticles, like nature arranges atoms into molecules and materials, has been a goal of scientists for quite some time because doing so is essential to capitalize on nanotechnology’s potential for broad application. This challenge has now been met for a class of materials. The discovery is detailed in the Oct. 14, 2011 issue of the journal Science. Specifically, lead author Chad Mirkin of Northwestern University and his team developed rules that enable scientists to make any structure for almost any application.

The new World Trade Center in New York is nearly set up and the City  just enjoyed more good news. New York has emerged victorious in its bid to secure a landmark private investment from five of the world’s leading technology firms that will bring USD 4.4 billion of private funds into developing the state’s nanotechnology sector, defeating bids from nations in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. It was a huge win for the Empire State, which has been struggling with an unemployment rate that has been stuck between 8 and 9 percent since early 2009. “These companies could have gone anywhere on the globe,” said New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo at the New York Open for Business Statewide Conference in Albany. 

The companies in the deal are: Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, based in Santa Clara, California; IBM, the technology giant based in Armonk, New York, which is America’s 7th most profitable company; Samsung, a multinational conglomerate corporation based in Seoul, Korea; GlobalFoundries, the world’s third largest independent semiconductor foundry, created by the divestiture of AMD‘s manufacturing arm, based in Milpitas, California; and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s first dedicated semiconductor foundry, based in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
New York seems to come back to its legendary optimism, full of energy and creativity.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have built a very simple nanoantenna that directs red and blue colours in opposite directions, even though the antenna is smaller than the wavelength of light. The findings – published in the online journal Nature Communications this week – can lead to optical nanosensors being able to detect very low concentrations of gases or biomolecules.

It is easy to build this kind of nanoantenna; the researchers have shown that the antennas can be fabricated densely over large areas using cheap colloidal lithography. The research field of nanoplasmonics is a rapidly growing area. Optical sensors, where you can use plasmons to build sensors which are so sensitive that they can detect much lower concentrations of toxins or signalling substances than is possible today. This may involve the detection of single molecules in a sample, for example, to diagnose diseases at an early stage, which facilitates quick initiation of treatment.”

Researchers from Northwestern University have developed a carbon-based material that could revolutionize the way solar power is harvested. The new solar cell material — a transparent conductor made of carbon nanotubes — provides an alternative to current technology, which is mechanically brittle and reliant on a relatively rare mineral.

Due to Earth’s abundance of carbon, carbon nanotubes have the potential to boost the long-term viability of solar power by providing a cost-efficient option as demand for the technology increases. In addition, the material’s mechanical flexibility could allow solar cells to be integrated into fabrics and clothing, enabling portable energy supplies that could impact everything from personal electronics to military operations. Source: Advanced Energy Materials

Graphene and its compounds are increasingly used to make transistors that show extremely good performance – a progress that comes with new cheaper production processes for the raw material. The former candidate for producing transistors, the Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), have not yet met commercial expectations from a decade ago. Graphene  is  the remarkable form of carbon that’s only one atom thick. According to IDTechEx, the biggest opportunity for both materials is in printed and potentially printed electronics.Flexible, see-through displays may be the one application that finally puts graphene into the commercial spotlight.

Combined with other flexible, transparent electronic components being developed at Rice University and elsewhere, the breakthrough could lead to computers and solar cells that wrap around just about anything. IDTechEx predicts a market volume of over $25 billion in 2021 for OLED displays and PV alone, some of which will use graphene.

Fast or accurate? Those are typically your choices for flu diagnosis. But a new biophotonics approach offers both speed and accuracy, and low cost as well—all things that are supremely helpful during outbreaks, especially because antiviral drugs are most effective in the early stages of disease. Gold nanoparticles—coated with antibodies that bind to specific strains of flu virus—form the foundation of the approach.

By measuring how the particles scatter laser light, University of Georgia researchers have been able to detect influenza in minutes at less than a penny per exam. “We’ve known for a long time that you can use antibodies to capture viruses and that nanoparticles have different traits based on their size,” said Ralph Tripp, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Vaccine Development in the UGA College of Veterinary Medicine. “What we’ve done is combine the two.”