NanoComputer

High-temperature superconductivity doesn't happen all it once. It starts in isolated nanoscale patches that gradually expand until they take over. That discovery, from atomic-level observations at Cornell and the University of Tokyo, offers a new insight into the puzzling "pseudogap" state observed in high-temperature superconductors; it may be another step toward creating new materials that superconduct at temperatures high enough to revolutionize electrical engineering.

Scanning tunneling microscope image of a partially doped cuprate superconductor shows regions with an electronic "pseudogap" (rounded rectangle) others with no progress from the original insulator (dashed circles). As doping increases, pseudogap regions spread and connect, making the whole sample a superconductor. 

Superconductivity, in which an electric current flows with zero resistance, was first discovered in metals cooled very close to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius). New materials called cuprates — copper oxides "doped" with other atoms — superconduct as "high" as -123 Celsius.

Source: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May12/CuprateEvolution.html

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

Click on the image to see lab's videos

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

Think the future of communication is 4G? Think again. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are working on communication solutions for networks at the nanoscale. Over the next four years, the team will study how bacteria communicate with each other on a molecular level to see if the same principles can be applied to how nanodevices will one day communicate to form nanoscale networks. If the team is successful, the applications for intelligent, communicative nanonetworks could be wide ranging and potentially life changing.

“The nanoscale machines could potentially be injected into the blood, circulating in the body to detect viruses, bacteria and tumors,” said Akyildiz, principal investigator of the study. “All these illnesses—cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, asthma, whatever you can think of—they will be history over the years. And that’s just one application.”said Akyildiz, computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and principal investigator of the study. “All these illnesses—cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, asthma, whatever you can think of—they will be history over the years. And that’s just one application.”
Source: PhysOrg.com