NanoComputer

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

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/

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/

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/

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/

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

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/

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 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/

Researchers at Rice University are designing transparent, two-terminal, three-dimensional computer memories on flexible sheets that show promise for electronics and sophisticated heads-up displays or quant glass.The technique based on the switching properties of silicon oxide, a breakthrough discovery by Rice in 2008, was reported today in the online journal Nature Communications.The Rice team led by chemist James Tour and physicist Douglas Natelson is making highly transparent, nonvolatile resistive memory devices based on the revelation that silicon oxide itself can be a switch At 5 namometer, it shows promise to extend Moore’s Law, which predicted computer circuitry will double in power every two years. Current state-of-the-art electronics are made with 22 nm circuits.

The research by Tour, Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science; lead author Jun Yao, a former graduate student at Rice and now a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard; Jian Lin, a Rice postdoctoral researcher, and their colleagues details memories that are 95 percent transparent, made of silicon oxide and crossbar graphene terminals on flexible plastic.The Rice lab is making its devices with a working yield of about 80 percent, “which is pretty good for a non-industrial lab,” Tour said. “When you get these ideas into industries’ hands, they really sharpen it up from there.”
Source: http://news.rice.edu/2012/10/02/visionary-transparent-memory-a-step-closer-to-reality/

A nanoparticle developed at Rice University and tested in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) may bring great benefits to the emergency treatment of brain-injury victims, even those with mild injuries.
Combined polyethylene glycol-hydrophilic carbon clusters (PEG-HCC), already being tested to enhance cancer treatment, are also adept antioxidants. In animal studies, injections of PEG-HCC during initial treatment after an injury helped restore balance to the brain’s vascular system. A PEG-HCC infusion that quickly stabilizes blood flow in the brain would be a significant advance for emergency care workers and battlefield medics, said Rice chemist and co-author James Tour.

“This might be a first line of defense against reactive oxygen species (ROS) that are always overstimulated during a medical trauma, whether that be to an accident victim or an injured soldier,” said Tour, Rice’s T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science. “They’re certainly exacerbated when there’s trauma with massive blood loss.”
Source: http://news.rice.edu/2012/08/23/nanoparticles-reboot-blood-flow-in-brain/

University of Texas  at Arlington (UT Arlington) professor Cheng Luo can envision the day that a flexible cell phone could be folded and placed in a pocket like a billfold or that a laptop computer could be rolled up and stored. Through an active $300,000 National Science Foundation grant, the mechanical and aerospace engineering professor is developing a process called “micropunching lithography.” The process is used to create lightweight, low-cost and more flexible polymer-based devices that have the potential to replace silicon-based materials commonly used in computers and other electronic devices. Luo’s work was recently published in the June 2012 North America edition of International Innovation. 

“Practical applications for these microstructures could be in everything from glucose monitoring and delivery of chemicals in treating water pipes,” Luo said. 

You can rfollow  a  similar research at the Rice University . read the Nanocomputer.com article. http://www.nanocomputer.com/?p=2259

Source. http://www.cisionwire.com/university-of-texas-at-arlington/r/ut-arlington-micropunching-lithography-project-could-yield-pliable-cell-phone–laptops,c9287057

Researchers from Rice University have developed paintable lithium-ion battery. Any surface can be painted with the new product,  and the batteries were easily charged with a small solar cell. Scientists foresee the possibility of integrating paintable batteries with recently reported paintable solar cells to create an energy-harvesting combination that would be hard to beat. 

"This means traditional packaging for batteries has given way to a much more flexible approach that allows all kinds of new design and integration possibilities for storage devices," said Ajayan, Rice's Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. "There has been lot of interest in recent times in creating power sources with an improved form factor, and this is a big step forward in that direction."This rechargeable battery created in the lab of Rice consists of spray-painted layers, each representing the components in a traditional battery. 

Source: http://news.rice.edu/2012/06/28/rice-researchers-develop-paintable-battery-2/

At the right temperature, with the right catalyst, there's no reason a perfect single-walled carbon nanotube 50,000 times thinner than a human hair can't be grown a meter long.

Defects in nanotubes heal very quickly in a very small zone at or near the iron catalyst before they ever get into the tube wall, according to calculations by theoretical physicists at Rice University, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Tsinghua University. Courtesy of Feng Ding/Rice/Hong Kong Polytechnic.

The  study of  the self-healing mechanism that could make such extraordinary growth possible, is important to scientists who see high-quality carbon nanotubes as critical to advanced materials and, if they can be woven into long cables, power distribution over the grid of the future.

Source: http://news.rice.edu/2012/06/15/nanotubes-seek-perfection-from-the-start/