#Coupled Microcantilevers Can Measure Nanogram-Scale Mass Working with a device that slightly resembles a microscopically tiny tuning fork,
researchers at the University of Tsukuba in Japan have developed recently coupled microcantilevers that can make mass measurements on the order of nanograms with only a 1 percent margin of error--potentially enabling the weighing of individual molecules in liquid
environments. The findings are published this week in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing. The group's coupled microcantilevers measure mass on the cellular
it doesn't require a special measurement environment, such as an ultrahigh vacuum,"said Hiroshi Yabuno, a professor at the University of Tsukaba in Japan.
Yabuno's graduate students Daichi Endo and Keiichi Higashino performed the measurements, and Yasuyuki Yamamoto and Sohei Matsumoto, collaborators at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, constructed the coupled microcantilevers using MEMS device manufacturing methods.
As all biological processes must take place in a liquid environment this makes the group's cantilevers ideal for processes such as detecting DNA hybridization
and characterizing, at the single cell level, whole proteomes--data that shows globally within such a cell
which proteins are expressed where and when as a result of instructions contained in an organism's DNA genome."
"From the features of the proposed method, it's easy to expect that we can obtain the same accuracy in a liquid environment,
"Yabuno said. The coupled cantilever, constructed from an etched silicon-insulator-silicon wafer, resembles a tiny tuning fork
The researchers tested their cantilever's capacities by measuring the mass of polystyrene microspheres, which have a mean diameter of 15.0 micrometers--the same order of magnitude as a liver cell.
In their setup, a sphere was placed on one of the prongs--in a biological system
"The method can be applied to more downsized, nanoscale, coupled cantilevers, "Yabuno said.""It can be expected to realize the measurement of infinitesimal mass,
which is impossible in existing methods, even in any measurement environments.""Future work for Yabuno and his colleagues involves using the cantilevers to obtain high-accuracy quantitative measurements of biological samples such as human cells and DNA in liquid media d
#Canatu Announces Design Win for Carbon nanobud Material-Based Flexible Touch Films Canatu, a manufacturer of next-generation transparent conductive films and touch sensors, has announced today a design win for a first-to-market fully flexible product.
The announcement coincides with the Display Week 2015 exhibition, organized by Society of Information Display,
where Canatu is exhibiting at booth#447. Canatu unique CNB#Flex Film has been utilized to create a complete One-Plastic-Solution,
OPS, incorporating display window, touch sensor and decoration, all in an ultra-thin, robust and durable package,
capable of withstanding the rigors of the demanding wearable market. Canatu will disclose further information about the product after its launch later this year.
The One-Plastic Solution is designed for products demanding extreme thinness as the overall thickness combining both the window
and the sensor can be as thin as 40 um, making it the world thinnest windows-integrated touch solution.
Unlike ITO and other metallic based sensor technologies the One-Plastic Solution provides for extreme bending
and folding, making it particularly well-suited for wearable, foldable and rollable devices. Flexible displays are now becoming more available
and will soon proliferate the market. Canatu is in prime position with its truly flexible CNB#Flex Film and the One-Plastic-Solution touch.
Both these products incorporate its proprietary flexible Carbon nanobud material. Earlier this year Canatu launched its super-thin 23 um CNB#Flex Film
which is optimized for wearable, flexible and foldable touch-enabled electronics devices. At 23 um, the super-thin CNB#Flex Film is the thinnest transparent conductive film on the market.
Outperforming all competitors with a bending radius down to 1mm, Canatu CNB#Films unleash an unprecedented design freedom for manufacturers to create new and novel wearable, foldable or rollable devices.
The zero haze, zero reflectance properties of Canatu Carbon nanobud material also provide for unparalleled outdoor readability,
which has been overlooked often in the first wave of wearable devices. ur message is our films are the best transparent, flexible, conductive films on the market,
superior to any other. Now we see the first of this exciting new genre of products coming to market
Canatu CNB#Films have 97%optical transmittance at a sheet resistivity of 150 ohms/square and 95%at 100 ohms/square.
#Inexpensive 3d Polypyrrole Aerogel-Based Alternative Material for Costly Graphene aerogels But now, materials such as graphene aerogels are gaining traction as more desirable alternatives
Theye widely expected to improve energy storage, sensors, nanoelectronics, catalysis and separations, but graphene aerogels are prohibitively expensive and difficult to produce for large-scale applications because of the complicated purification
and functionalization steps involved in their fabrication. So a team of researchers in China set out to design a cheaper material with properties similar to a graphene aerogeln terms of its conductivity, as well as a lightweight
Aming Xie, an expert in organic chemistry, and Fan Wu, both affiliated with PLA University of Science and Technology, worked with colleagues at Nanjing University of Science
and Technology to tap into organic chemistry and conducting polymers to fabricate a three-dimensional (3-D) polypyrrole (PPY) aerogel-based electromagnetic absorber.
They chose to concentrate on this method because it enables them to egulate the density and dielectric property of conducting polymers through the formation of pores during the oxidation polymerization of the pyrrole monomer,
explained Wu. And the fabrication process is a simple one. t requires only four common chemical reagents:
Wu said. ee also able to pour the Fecl3 solution directly into the pyrrole solution--not drop by drop--to force the pyrrole to polymerize into a 3-D aerogel rather than PPY particles. n short,
the team 3-D PPY aerogel is designed to exhibit esirable properties such as a porous structure and low density, Wu noted.
Compared with previous works, the team new aerogel has the lowest adjunction and widest effective bandwidth--with a reflection loss below-10 decibels.
In terms of applications, based on the combination of low adjunction and a ideeffective bandwidth, the researchers expect to see their 3-D PPY aerogel used in surface coatings for aircraft.
Another potential application is as coatings within the realm of corrosion prevention and control. ommon anticorrosion coatings contain a large amount of zinc (70 to 80 percent by weight),
and these particles not only serve as a cathode by corroding to protect the iron structure
but also to maintain a suitable conductivity for the electrochemistry process, Wu pointed out. f our 3-D PPY aerogel could build a conductivity network in this type of coating,
the loss of zinc particles could be reduced rapidly. he team is now taking their work a step further by pursuing a 3-D PPY/PEDOT-based (poly (3,
4-ethylenedioxythiophene) electromagnetic absorber. ur goal is to grow solid-state polymerized PEDOT particles in the holes of the 3-D PPY aerogel formed by PPY chains, Wu added.
Source: http://www. aip. org P
#Unique Gold Nano Spirals Could Help Prevent Identity Theft By Will Soutterthe spirals react in a unique way to polarized infrared light,
which makes them very hard to counterfeit-this property could be used to prevent counterfeiting of currency, credit cards,
Other researchers have created nanoscale spirals in the past, but this has usually been achieved by arranging nanoparticles in a spiral pattern.
In this new research, published in the Journal of Nanophotonics on May 21st, the nanospirals the smallest ever reported,
and are made also of continuous material rather than an array of nanoparticles. A square of the Vanderbilt spirals with 100 on each side would be less than 1/100th of a millimetre wide.
In fact, several crystals are known to produce this effect, which is known as harmonic generation or frequency doubling.
The synthetic crystal beta barium borate was previously the strongest frequency doubler known; however, the new nano-spirals are capable of emitting even higher intensity blue light.
The tiny amount of metal used in the spirals means they are not expensive to make-however,
significant investment in the advanced lithography equipment is required. Because of the strong frequency doubling response to circularly polarized light,
but easy to detect-makes the nano-spirals an ideal way of securing credit cards, currency, ID cards,
#MIT Physicists Simulate Friction at the Nanoscale MIT physicists have devised an experimental method to simulate friction at the nanoscale.
the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT, states that tuning friction could help in creating nanomachines such as tiny robots,
He adds that friction may be higher at the nanoscale, or in other words, could create wear and tear on nanomotors at a faster rate than at larger scales. here a big effort to understand friction and control it,
because it one of the limiting factors for nanomachines, but there has been relatively little progress in actually controlling friction at any scale,
Vuletic says. hat is new in our system is, for the first time on the atomic scale, we can see this transition from friction to superlubricity.
Vuletic, along with graduate students Alexei Bylinskii and Dorian Gangloff, publish their results in the journal Science.
Friction was created at the nanoscale by designing two surfaces, an optical lattice and an ion crystal,
when they pass such an electric field. The ion crystal is charged a atomic grid created by Vuletic to analyze the effects of friction, atom by atom.
The researchers applied light to either ionize or charge neutral ytterbium atoms rising from a tiny heated oven.
such that they form lattice-or crystal-like surfaces. The MIT physicists applied the same forces used for trapping the atoms to pull
and push the ion crystal over the lattice, and to squeeze and stretch the ion crystal, in a motion similar to an accordion,
to modify the atomic spacing. They observed that the two surfaces underwent maximum friction, similar to two complementary Lego bricks,
when atoms in the ion crystal were spaced normally at intervals equaling the optical lattice spacing.
It was found that when the atomic spacing is such that each atom occupies a trough in the optical lattice,
if complete ion crystal is shifted across the optical lattice, initially the atoms tend to adhere to the troughs of the lattice.
However, when a certain level of force is used, the ion crystal abruptly slips, as the atoms jointly move to the next trough. t like an earthquake,
Vuletic says. here force building up, and then there suddenly a catastrophic release of energy.
The team continued stretching and squeezing the ion crystal in order to influence the arrangement of atoms.
They found that if the atom spacing did not match that of the optical lattice,
friction between the two surfaces disappeared. In this situation, the crystal is inclined not to stick, and abruptly slips,
and continues to move smoothly across the optical lattice, similar to a caterpillar movement across a surface.
when the ion crystal is transferred across the optical lattice, one atom may move down a peak providing a little stress for another atom to move up a trough,
which may help pull another atom and so on. hat we can do is adjust at will the distance between the atoms to either be matched to the optical lattice for maximum friction,
and other biological parts. n the biological domain, there are various molecules and atoms in contact with one another, sliding along like biomolecular motors,
as a result of friction or lack of friction, Gangloff says. o this intuition for how to arrange atoms so as to minimize
Tobias Schaetz, a professor of physics at the University of Freiburg in Germany, sees the results as a lear breakthroughin gaining insight into therwise inaccessible fundamental physics.
from the nanoscale to the macroscale, he added. he applications and related impact of their novel method propels a huge variety of research fields investigating effects relevant from raft tectonics down to biological systems
and motor proteins, says Schaetz, who was involved not in the research. ust imagine a nanomachine where we could control friction to enhance contact for traction,
or mitigate drag on demand. This research endeavor was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada c
may change the way doctors approach treatment for patients who develop potentially deadly infections and may also help the food industry screen against contamination with harmful pathogens, according to researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South korea.
Described this week in The Optical Society (OSA) journal, Optics Express, the new approach involves bouncing laser light off individual bacteria under the microscope,
and computer software to analyze the images and identify them by comparing them to other, known bacteria.
The software uses a machine-learning algorithm the sort computers connected to security cameras might use for automated facial recognition.
which is still the gold standard in the health care industry for making a definitive diagnosis. Also routinely used today is a newer method for rapidly identifying bacteria based on a DNA-analysis technique called quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qpcr),
The challenge of meeting clinical needs in the developing world was one of the motivations behind the work, according to the KAIST team.
"This means the present method can be utilized as a prescreening test for point-of-care bacterial diagnosis for various applications including medicine and food hygiene.""
"Why Speed Matters in Infection Control In hospitals and clinics worldwide, bacterial infections are a major source of illness,
In the most severe cases, bacterial poisoning causes severe disease and syndromes like sepsis, meningitis, pneumonia,
and gastroenteritis all of which can be deadly unless the patient is given immediate and appropriate treatment.
The true challenge of fighting those infections is time. In order to best treat their patients, doctors would like to know exactly which bacteria they are infected with,
but the lost hours or days spent identifying the exact pathogen can make the road to recovery that much steeper.
Sepsis, for instance, can develop so rapidly that mortality has been seen to increase by 9 percent per hour until treatment is given.
Waiting two days may kill the patient, Park added. For that reason, many hospital-acquired infections are treated presumptively,
before they are identified definitively, using broad-spectrum antibiotics. These powerful combinations of potent drugs are often effective,
allowing doctors to prescribe the best drugs available to treat an infection and improving outcomes for people with hospital-acquired infections though the effectiveness of the approach remains to be proven in future clinical trials.
In their initial experiments, Park and his colleagues showed as a proof of principle that they could identify bacteria with high accuracy.
The first three are known all pathogens to infect humans through the food chain or via hospital-acquired infections.
which is the base for Anthrax. Under a microscope, all four of these rodlike bacteria look nearly identical.
They then applied software they designed to the analysis, which used a conventional approach to statistical classification known as machine learning a sorting strategy based on pattern similarities that has been used extensively in applications like facial recognition software.
This was the first time anyone had applied machine learning to Fourier Transform light scattering data, Park said. They are now looking to extend their initial work to see
if they can distinguish between several types of bacterial subgroups to identify the most drug resistant or virulent strains from the innocuous ones.
In addition to helping in the clinic the new method may be useful in the food industry or for homeland security applications.
In principle, the approach could be scaled up to screen for contaminated food or suspicious packages i
#Injectable Nanoscale Electronic Scaffolds to Monitor Neural activity It sounds unlikely, until you visit Charles Lieber's lab. A team of international researchers, led by Lieber, the Mark Hyman, Jr.
Professor of Chemistry, an international team of researchers developed a method for fabricating nanoscale electronic scaffolds that can be injected via syringe.
Once connected to electronic devices, the scaffolds can be used to monitor neural activity, stimulate tissues and even promote regenerations of neurons.
The study is described in a June 8 paper in Nature Nanotechnology. Contributing to the work were Jia Liu, Tian-Ming Fu
Zengguang Cheng, Guosong Hong, Tao Zhou, Lihua Jin, Madhavi Duvvuri, Zhe Jiang, Peter Kruskal, Chong Xie, Zhigang Suo, Ying Fang
"I do feel that this has the potential to be said revolutionary, "Lieber.""This opens up a completely new frontier where we can explore the interface between electronic structures and biology.
For the past thirty years, people have made incremental improvements in micro-fabrication techniques that have allowed us to make rigid probes smaller and smaller,
but no one has addressed this issue-the electronics/cellular interface-at the level at which biology works."
"The idea of merging the biological with the electronic is not a new one for Lieber.
In an earlier study, scientists in Lieber's lab demonstrated that the scaffolds could be used to create"cyborg"tissue
When releasing the electronics scaffold completely from the fabrication substrate, we noticed that it was almost invisible and very flexible like a polymer
and could literally be sucked into a glass needle or pipette. From there, we simply asked, would it be possible to deliver the mesh electronics by syringe needle injection,
a process common to delivery of many species in biology and medicine-you could go to the doctor
and you inject this and you're wired up.'"'"Though not the first attempts at implanting electronics into the brain-deep brain stimulation has been used to treat a variety of disorders for decades-the nano-fabricated scaffolds operate on a completely different scale."
"Existing techniques are crude relative to the way the brain is wired, "Lieber explained.""Whether it's a silicon probe or flexible polymers...
they cause inflammation in the tissue that requires periodically changing the position or the stimulation.
But with our injectable electronics, it's as if it's not there at all. They are one million times more flexible than any state-of-the-art flexible electronics
and have subcellular feature sizes. They're what I call"neuro-philic"-they actually like to interact with neurons.."
The process is used similar to that to etch microchips, and begins with a dissolvable layer deposited on a substrate.
researchers lay out a mesh of nanowires sandwiched in layers of organic polymer. The first layer is dissolved then, leaving the flexible mesh,
which can be drawn into a syringe needle and administered like any other injection. After injection, the input/output of the mesh can be connected to standard measurement electronics
so that the integrated devices can be addressed and used to stimulate or record neural activity.""These type of things have never been done before, from both a fundamental neuroscience and medical perspective,
"Lieber said.""It's really exciting-there are a lot of potential applications.""Going forward, Lieber said, researchers hope to better understand how the brain
and other tissues react to the injectable electronics over longer periods. Harvard's Office of Technology Development has filed for a provisional patent on the technology
and is actively seeking commercialization opportunities.""Having those results can prove that this is really a viable technology,
"Lieber said.""The idea of being able to precisely position and record from very specific areas,
#Carbon nanotube-Based Water Desalination and Purification Technology Awarded Patent Mitra's new carbon nanotube immobilized membrane (CNIM) is an energy-efficient device designed to filter higher concentrations of salt than is currently feasible through reverse osmosis, one of the standard
It is used also to remove pollutants such as volatile organic compounds (VOCS)- chemicals routinely used in solvents-from water."
At the same time, droughts caused by climate change are reducing supply in many regions of the world, including parts of the U s,
"Mitra's distillation process runs on energy-efficient fuels such as waste heat, an industrial by-product, and solar energy.
Membrane distillation is a water desalination process in which heated salt water passes through a tubelike membrane,
called a hollow fiber, which allows only pure water vapor to permeate its walls. Potable water emerges from the net flux of water vapor
which moves from the warm to the cool side of the membrane where it condenses. Certain industries such as semiconductor manufacturing and pharmaceutical processing also require ultra-pure water for their operations.
Mitra, who has conducted research on carbon nanotubes for the past 15 years created a novel architecture for the membrane distillation process by immobilizing carbon nanotubes,
which are an atom thick and about 10,000 times smaller than a human hair in diameter, in the membrane pores.
Ken Gethard, a former doctoral student who helped him develop it, is the co-inventor on the patent."
"One of the key characteristics of carbon nanotubes is their capacity to both rapidly absorb water vapor as well as industrial contaminants,
including volatile organic compounds (VOCS), and then easily release them, "he notes. In the case of fracking, the fresh water and chemicals that are pumped into the ground to release natural gas trapped beneath rocks absorb high concentrations of salt from the soil they pass through before returning as polluted water in need of treatment.
The electric power industry, which uses a vast amount of water to cool its generators, is also eager to come up with more efficient processes to treat its wastewater,
"Our hope is to dramatically improve overall water and energy utilization, "Mitra said. Source: http://www. njit. ed d
#Novel Method to Accurately Print High-resolution Images on Nanoscale Materials In this case, the print features are very fine visible only with the aid of a high-powered electron microscope.
and illustrate their technique by reproducing the Missouri S&t athletic logo on a nanometer scale surface.
A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, and some nanomaterials are only a few atoms in size.
The method described in the Scientific Reports article tructural color printing based on plasmonic metasurfaces of perfect light absorptioninvolves the use of thin sandwiches of nanometer scale metal-dielectric materials known as metamaterials that interact with light
in ways not seen in nature. Experimenting with the interplay of white light on sandwich-like structures,
what they call simple but efficient structural color printing platformat the nanometer scale level. They believe the process holds promise for future applications,
including nanoscale visual arts, security marking and information storage. The researchersprinting surface consists of a sandwich-like structure made up of two thin films of silver separated by a pacerfilm of silica.
The top layer of silver film is 25 nanometers thick and is punctured with tiny holes created by a microfabrication process known as focused ion beam milling.
The bottom layer of silver is four times thicker than the top layer but still minuscule at 100 nanometers.
Between the top and bottom films lies a 45-nanometer silica dielectric spacer. The researchers created a scaled-down template of the athletic logo and drilled out tiny perforations on the top layer of the metamaterial structure.
Under a scanning electron microscope, the template looks like a needlepoint pattern of the logo. The researchers then beamed light through the holes to create the logo using no ink only the interaction of the materials and light.
By adjusting the hole size of the top layer, light at the desired frequency was beamed into the material with a perfect absorption.
This allowed researchers to create different colors in the reflected light and thereby accurately reproduce the S&t athletic logo with nanoscale color palettes.
The researchers further adjusted the holes to alter the logo official green and gold color scheme to introduce four new colors (an orange ampersand, magenta and,
cyan pickaxe symbol and navy blue issouri. o reproduce a colorful artwork with our nanoscale color palettes,
we replaced different areas in the original image with different nanostructures with specified hole sizes to represent various visible colors,
says Dr. Xiaodong Yang, an assistant professor at Missouri S&t, who leads the Nanoscale Optics Laboratory in the university mechanical
and aerospace engineering department. e chose the athletic logo to fill that need.?Unlike the printing process of an inkjet or laserjet printer, where mixed color pigments are used,
there is no color ink used in our structural printing process only different hole sizes on a thin metallic layer,
says Dr. Jie Gao, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Missouri S&t and a co-author of the paper.
In their paper, the authors note that the process resulted in ure colors with high brightnesswith little need for protective coatings.
pigment-free color printing and relevant applications such as security marking and information storage. ther co-authors of the Scientific Reports paper are Dr. Fei Cheng,
a researcher at Missouri S&t Nanoscale Optics Laboratory, and Dr. Ting S. Luk of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New mexico.
Source: http://www. mst. edu
#Innovative Hand-held Tool and App to Monitor for Signs of Skin cancer Unveiled at World Dermatology Conference Sadeghi,
who laid the groundwork for the device during her Phd thesis research, has spent three years transitioning from academic research to her start-up venture,
I imagined doing as a student and now my vision is being realized through the launch of Molescope#,
#and my company, Metaoptima Technology. olescope#comprises a mini-microscope that attaches to a smartphone, an app (ios, Android,
or web compatible) and a cloud-based analytical platform called Dermengine#.#Once people take high-quality, high-resolution images of suspicious moles or skin abnormalities,
they can archive images and communicate concerns with others. Molescope#is expected to provide healthcare benefits in communities without access to medical specialists and in those with long waitlists,
as people can self-monitor their moles and track changes over time. Visual changes in skin often signal the possibility of skin cancer.
It estimated that 70 per cent of skin cancer is caught by individuals and family members. The company has developed two versions of the product:
and a more expensive professional version to be presented at the World Congress of Dermatology meeting.
and is registered FDA as a Class 1 medical device in the U s a CE mark in the EU
The company is initiating an early adopter program with qualified dermatologists and receiving strong interest from potential distributors and channel partners throughout the world.
and the company has grown to nine full-time employees. Metaoptima grew out of the SFU Innovation Office Venture Connection program and Sadeghi former mentor in the program
Hugh Macnaught, is now chair of the company board of directors. t was obvious from the outset that Maryam had identified an unmet medical need
and to work tirelessly to make it a reality. adeghi won recognition during the research and development phase of Molescope#,winning Wavefront Wireless Prize package ($40, 000) in the BCIC-New Ventures Competition in 2013, plus
While a graduate student at SFU (she earned a Phd in computing science in 2012 under supervisor
and professor emeritus Stella Atkins) Sadeghi and her team also developed the UV Canada app for skin cancer awareness and prevention.
It was released in June 2011 and donated to the BC Cancer Agency at Vancouver General Hospital.
Sadeghi Phd research on skin cancer prevention and analyzing dermoscopic images for early skin cancer diagnosis using intelligent computer technologies was recognized with a 2012 Innovation Challenge Award from the Natural sciences and Engineering Research Council
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