#Development of Single-Molecule Diode Revolutionizes Nanotechnology A paper published on May 25 in Nature Nanotechnology titled ingle-Molecule Diodes with High On-Off Ratios through Environmental Controlreports the first ever attempt for the development of single
-molecule diode that perform 50 times better than all the previous designs. A team of Columbia Engineering researchers under the guidance of an Indian-American associate professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering, Latha Venkataraman have designed this single-molecule electronic device
which would revolutionize nanoscale devices. Venkataraman proudly stated that the new device represents the ultimate in functional miniaturisation that can be achieved for an electronic device.
He added that constructing a device where the active elements are only a single molecule has long been a tantalizing dream in nanoscience.
Further, Venkataraman explained enthusiastically, t amazing to be able to design a molecular circuit, using concepts from chemistry and physics,
and have it do something functional. It is truly a triumph to be able to create something that you will never be able to physically see
in order to develop a single-molecule diode. Brian Capozzi, Phd student working with Venkataraman and lead author of the paper stated that
while such asymmetric molecules do indeed display some diode-like properties, they are not effective as they typically suffered from very low current flow in both nand ffdirections
and even the ratio of current flow is very low. In order to overcome the issues, Venkataraman and her colleague rather created an environmental asymmetry through a simple method of surrounding the active molecule with an ionic solution
and used gold metal electrodes of different sizes to contact the molecule. This simple new technique can be applied easily to all nanoscale devices of all types,
including those that are made with graphene electrodes a
#Nivolumab helps fight Cancerous Lung Tumors A trial has suggested that a therapy for lung cancer has the ability to double the life expectancy in patients.
Nivolumab is able to stop cancerous cells hiding from body's defenses. The trial showed results from more than 550 patients
which were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Lung cancer, which is also known as carcinoma of the lung,
is the deadliest form of cancer that kills about 1. 6 million people every year. It is difficult to treat the cancer as it is usually diagnosed late.
In addition a number of patients are found unsuitable for surgery due to their smoking-related diseases.
Nivolumab is among the set of drugs known as heckpoint inhibitorsthat are developed by a number of pharmaceutical companies.
Those drugs stop cancers by turning off the immune system of human so that it could keep on attacking the harmful tumor.
The new trial was conducted in the United states and Europe on people with advanced lung cancer. Those people had tried already other treatments,
but didn receive satisfactory results. As per the trial results, patients on standard therapy lived for about 9. 4 months
but the patient who took Nivolumab lived for more than one year on average. However, some patients did spectacularly well.
Those whose tumors were producing high levels of PD-L1 lived for more than one and half year.
The data about Nivolumab was presented by the pharmaceutical company Bristol-myers squibb. Luis Paz-Ares, doctor at the Hospital Universitario Doce de Octubre in Madrid
and lead researcher of the trial, said, he results mark a milestone in the development of new treatment options for lung cancer.
Nivolumab is the first PD-1 inhibitor to show a significant improvement in overall survival in a phase III trial in non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer n
#Kazakhstan Rare Saiga Antelopes die of Unknown Disease Killings of tens of thousands of endangered antelopes in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan have happened over the past two weeks.
an event that has been called"catastrophic"by the United nations environment programme. According to experts at the United nations, the mass killings of the rare antelopes are attributable to a combination of environmental and biological factors.
However, researchers have so far not been able to pin the exact cause behind the disease outbreak.
Mothers and calves account for the majority of victims. Scientists said in a report Thursday by the United nations environment programme (UNEP that not even a single animal managed to survive after getting affected by the disease. nseasonal wetness may have been lowered something that their immunity to infection
but until we do more analysis we will not know anything for sure Steffen Zuther of the Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative told AFP.
Richard Kock, a professor at the Royal Veterinary College in London who recently returned from Kazakhstan,
Kock from the Royal Veterinary College in London said that the government has showed commitment to help resolve the issue.
#Oil and gas companies target coal industry as climate deal comes closer As the global climate deal draws closer,
oil and gas companies are claiming that coal is the major factor that is posing a threat to climate.
They mentioned that they are ready to play their part and work together with renewable energy sources like wind and solar power.
they are considering gulp coal's market share in power generation. According to them, natural gas and oil are so much part of the problem.
However, gas produced by many oil companies release about half the CO2 EMISSIONS of coal fired plants and lower levels of air pollution.
In an energy conference in Paris on Tuesday, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden said that a coal-togas switch ensures a sustainable energy system tomorrow.
Counterstrikes against fellow fossil fuels industries have been resisted by the coal industry. It has opted instead to draw attention to new technologies that improve the efficiency of coal fired power plants or capture their CO2 EMISSIONS.
Many environmental advocacy groups are skeptic behind the attacks of oil-and-gas industry's on coal.
They don want fossil fuel industries to influence the climate policy i
#A blood test can detect every virus that ever infected you A test has been developed to detect every known human virus using just a single drop of blood.
and has been developed by Howard hughes medical institute (HHMI) researchers. The test is for detecting current and previous infections with any known human virus,
together with HIV and hepatitis C. The method is an efficient substitute to diagnostics available at present.
The method tests for particular viruses individually. Scientists can conduct a single test using Virscan
Stephen Elledge, an HHMI investigator at Brigham and Women's hospital and his colleagues made use of Virscan in order to screen the blood of 569 people in the US, Thailand, South africa and Peru.
Virscan screens the blood for antibodies against any of the 206 species of viruses that are known to attack humans.
According to Ian Lipkin, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University
The artificial limb is fitted with sensors which enable transmission of feelings to the brain. This prosthetic limb, invented by Professor Hubert Egger from the University of Linz in Austria is fitted with six sensors
which stimulate the nerve endings in a patient's stump which are attached further to healthy tissue in the patient's thigh.
Egger explained that these sensors tell the brain that there is a foot and the wearer has the impression that it rolls off the ground when he walks.
Professor Egger who is credited also with the development of a mind-controlled prosthetic arm in 2010,
claimed that it was the first time that a leg amputee had been fitted with a sensory-enhanced prosthesis.
The lucky recipient, Wolfang Rangger is a former teacher who lost his right leg in 2007 after a cerebral stroke.
"Additionally, the new prosthesis has imparted not only mobility to Rangger but it has relieved also him from the excruciating phantom pain
However, priced between 10,000 and 30,000 Euros, Egger's invention for now would not be affordable for all l
#Stanford university Engineers create World First water-Operated Computer World's first water-operated computer has been developed. Researchers from Stanford university created this wonder by using magnetized particles flowing through a network of channels.
The computer working involves using droplets of water soaked with magnetic nanoparticles, the computer then uses electromagnetic field to pump the droplets around gates to perform logical operations.
The researchers said the droplets in the system can be used to complete any process that a normal electronic computer can.
Stanford assistant professor Manu Prakash was working on an interesting project and he developed the computer which could run with water.
After carrying out a lot of research, Prakash has built a rotating magnetic field to coordinate with the flow of droplets in a timely manner and acts as a clock."
"The reason computers work so precisely is that every operation happens synchronously; it's what made digital logic so powerful in the first place,
"affirmed Prakash. The new computer provides a way to develop new high-speed, complex, electronic computers. This way, there are chances that the fluidic computer may find its uses in areas like biology, chemistry,
and other physical sciences. Prakash made it clear that their aim is not to compete with the electronic computers.
They aim to build a new class of computers having ability to control and manipulate physical matter r
#Pope Francis to take on Global warming in upcoming Encyclical On Thursday, Pope Francis will deliver a papal encyclical on ethical issues and environment.
The official guide states that humanity is'slapping nature in the face'.'The Pope is expecting the paper to have a great impact on UN conference to be held in Paris in December.
The nations can pledge to cut emissions. It is said the encyclical is the highest level of document that the pope can issue.
the Pope has announced that pollution is not good for earth and is a sin. There are many who are not linking the interference of the Pope into politics
which it challenged the Pope's views on climate change.""We believe Pope Francis is making a mistake
Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, MD, PHD, co-director of the Center for Neuroengineering at the Duke university School of medicine and principal investigator for the study,
but also were also able to divide the work into individual sections based on the abilities of each animal.
thus facilitating the development of organic computers created by the interfacing of multiple animal brains with computers c
#Multilayer QD Solar cells Promising for Natcore RED BANK, N. J.,Feb 23, 2015 A new breed of quantum dots (QDS) could enable multilayer solar cells that capture more of the sun energy.
Natcore Technology Inc. said scientists in the laboratories of cofounder Dr. Andrew Barron, who is also a professor at Rice university,
have formed successfully a heterojunction solar cell using germanium QDS on an ordinary n-type silicon wafer. Individual germanium quantum dots were coated with silicon dioxide (silica),
doped to make them p-type, and then deposited, using Natcore's liquid phase deposition (LPD) process,
on a commercial-grade silicon wafer. The LPD process was developed at Rice and is licensed to Natcore.
QD solar cells have the potential to capture solar energy more efficiently than other cells available commercially today.
the careful control of their size to absorb energy from a specific spectrum of light.
or germanium quantum dots into layers using a process such as Natcore, which appears to be ideal for mass production,
Tandem solar cells are used in space applications. The major issue preventing their broad use in terrestrial applications has been need the to use exotic semiconducting materials for the upper layers, according to Natcore.
which quantum dots are used to form both the p-type and n-type materials. Once this next step is achieved
it will open the door to potential ultra-high-efficiency, multijunction solar cells, the company said.
Developed by Columbia University professor Dr. Elizabeth Hillman and graduate student Matthew Bouchard, swept confocally aligned planar excitation (SCAPE) microscopy involves simplified equipment
3-D imaging at cellular resolution in behaving organisms is a new frontier for biomedical and neuroscience research,
SCAPE yields data equivalent to conventional light-sheet microscopy, but using a single, stationary objective lens;
This unique configuration permitted volumetric imaging of cortical dendrites in the awake, behaving mouse brain.
but cannot generate 3-D images quickly enough to capture events like neurons firing. SCAPE does have one drawback:
The new technique could be combined with optogenetics and other tissue manipulations, the researchers said. It could also be used for imaging cellular replication,
#System Combines Optical Microscopy, MRI Combining optical and MRI techniques, a new imaging system aims to uncover the complexities of tumors to help better tailor cancer treatment.
The preclinical and intravital molecular imaging system houses a window for tissue observation in addition to a larger imaging chamber.
Together they are being used to peer into the microenvironment of tumors and other tissues while learning about the coregistration of multiple lines of imaging data."
versus images of a live subject,"said Zhen Liu, a doctoral candidate from the department of nuclear medicine at the Technical University of Munich."
"In a study, a tumor cell line was transplanted into a rat and imaged with each of the following:
conventional MRI, the radiotracer carbon-13 (C-13) pyruvate and hyperpolarized MRI at a resolution of 2. 5 mm, Medipix positron detector, luminescence sensor,
Direct positron imaging is a nuclear medicine technique that allows researchers to gain physiological information from radiolabeled imaging agents that bind to targets in the body.
which is used to track minute biochemistry in the body, such as the transition of the naturally occurring chemical pyruvate to lactate.
has been found to be an excellent biomarker for disease. Finally, luminescence, fluorescence and optical imaging are all state-of-the-art imaging techniques that can be used to paint targets as small as a strand of DNA with glowing substances to make them stand out
Results of the study showed that increased lactate production was detected by hyperpolarized MRI in areas of hypoxia
while other parts of a tumor could be rapidly growing or becoming more aggressive. These details tell researchers about the heterogeneity of tumors,
which is essential for developing appropriate research and drug protocols that can navigate all the inherent complexity of not just the anatomy
and how to leverage data with statistical analysis while advancing new radiotracers and contrast agents for the imaging and treatment of a range of diseases,
The research was to be presented during the annual meeting of the Society of Nuclear medicine and Molecular Imaging in Baltimore e
#Ultrafast Lasers Create 3-D Crystal Waveguides in Glass Ultrafast Lasers Create 3-D Crystal Waveguides in Glassbethlehem, Pa.
June 9, 2015 Femtosecond laser pulses can create complex single-crystal waveguides inside glass a discovery that could enable photonic integrated circuits (PICS) that are smaller, cheaper, more energy-efficient and more reliable than current networks that use
discrete optoelectronic components. Using lanthanum borogermanate (Labgeo5), researchers at Lehigh University have reported creating waveguides with a loss of 2. 64 db/cm at 1530 nm."
"Other groups have made crystal in glass but were not able to demonstrate quality, "said professor Himanshu Jain."
"With the quality of our crystal, we have crossed the threshold for the idea to be useful.
As a result, we are now exploring the development of novel devices for optical communication in collaboration with a major company."
"A polarized light field microscope image shows crystal junctions written inside glass with a femtosecond laser.
The color wheel indicates the angle of the fast or slow axis of birefringence. Courtesy of Lehigh University.
The fabrication technique involves focusing femtosecond pulses inside a glass substrate to selectively melt regions and turn them into crystal.
Dynamic phase modulation allows growth of symmetric crystal junctions with single-pass writing, the researchers said."
"said professor Volkmar Dierolf.""With our crystal, it is possible to do this in 3-D
so that the wire the light can curve and bend as it is transmitted. This gives us the potential of putting different components on different layers of glass."
to prevent light from scattering as it is being transmitted and, second, to transmit and manipulate light signals fast enough to handle increasingly large quantities of data.
Glass, an amorphous material with an inherently disordered atomic structure, cannot meet these challenges, but crystals, with their highly ordered lattice structure, have the requisite optical qualities.
Scientists have been attempting for years to make crystals in glass in order to prevent light signals from being scattered
Jain said. The task is complicated by the"mutually exclusive"nature of the properties of crystal and glass.
Glass turns to crystal when it is heated, he said, but it is critical to control the transition."
"The question is, how long will this process take and will we get one crystal or many,
"Jain said.""We want a single crystal; light cannot travel through multiple crystals. And we need the crystal to be in the right shape and form."
"The fact that the demonstration was achieved using Labgeo5, a ferroelectric material, creates additional possibilities, Dierolf said."
"Ferroelectric crystals have demonstrated an electrical-optical effect that can be exploited for switching and for steering light from one place to another as a supermarket scanner does said,
"he.""Ferroelectric crystals can also transform light from one frequency to another. This makes it possible to send light through different channels."
"The research was published in Scientific Reports (doi: 10.1038/srep10391. For more information, visit www1. lehigh. edu. Harsh Environments No Match for New Fiber Sensor Nanofiber Fabrication Boosts Quantum computing Sulfur Copolymers Boost IR Optics
Bandwidth Demands Drive Fiber optics Advance s
#Graphene Filaments Provide Tunable On-Chip Light source Graphene Filaments Provide Tunable On-Chip Light Sourcenew YORK, June 15,
2015 Incandescent bulbs may be a thing of the past, but the principle of light-emitting filaments may have a new use in displays and optical communications.
Researchers from the U s. and South korea collaborated to develop an on-chip visible light source using filaments made of graphene.
They attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above a silicon substrate,
and passed a current through the filaments to cause them to heat up and emit light.""We've created
what is essentially the world's thinnest light bulb, "said Columbia University engineering professor James Hone."
"This new type of broadband light emitter can be integrated into chips and will pave the way towards the realization of atomically thin, flexible and transparent displays,
and graphene-based on-chip optical communications.""Schematic illustration of electrically biased suspended graphene and light emission from the center of the suspended graphene.
Images courtesy of Young Duck Kim/Columbia Engineering. The ability to create light in small structures on the surface of a microchip is a crucial step towards the development of fully integrated photonic circuits.
Researchers have developed many approaches to do so, but have not yet been able to put the oldest, simplest artificial light source the incandescent light bulb onto a chip.
This is primarily because light bulb filaments must be extremely hot thousands of degrees Celsius in order to glow in the visible range,
and microscale metal wires cannot withstand such temperatures. In addition, heat transfer from the hot filament to its surroundings is extremely efficient at the microscale,
making such structures impractical and leading to damage of the surrounding chip. The ability of graphene to achieve such high temperatures without melting the substrate
or the metal electrodes is due to another interesting property: as it heats up, graphene becomes a much poorer conductor of heat.
High temperatures are confined to a small ot spotin the center.""At the highest temperatures, the electron temperature is much higher than that of acoustic vibrational modes of the graphene lattice,
so that less energy is needed to attain temperatures needed for visible light emission, "said Myung-Ho Bae, a senior researcher at the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS)."
"These unique thermal properties allow us to heat the suspended graphene to up to half of the temperature of the sun
and improve efficiency 1000 times, as compared to graphene on a solid substrate.""By measuring the spectrum of the light emitted from the graphene,
the team was able to show that graphene was reaching temperatures of above 2500°Celsius,
"Edison originally used carbon as a filament for his light bulb, and here we are going back to the same element
"said Yun Daniel Park, professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Seoul National University. The group is now working to further characterize the performance of these devices for example,
U s. funding came from the National Science Foundation, Air force Office of Scientific research, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office and Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship.
Korean funding came from the National Research Foundation, Center for Advanced Soft Electronics through the Global Frontier Research Program, Priority Research center Program, Center for Topological Matters at the Pohang
University of Science and Technology (POSTECH. The research was published in Nature Nanotechnology (doi: 10.1038/nnano. 2015.118.
For more information, visit engineering. columbia. edu. Corning to Acquire Fiber optics Business from Samsung Camera Powered by the Light It Captures Microscope Takes 3-D Images From Inside Moving Subjects Technique
Could Simplify Photonic crystal Formatio i
#Study: OCT Could Aid Brain tumor Removal Study: OCT Could Aid Brain tumor Removalbaltimore, June 19, 2015 Optical coherence tomography (OCT) holds promise for guiding surgeons as they operate on brain tumors
and help them avoid removing healthy tissue. After identifying brain cancer's OCT signature, researchers at Johns hopkins university have developed a computer algorithm that rapidly generates a color-coded map that shows cancer in red and healthy tissue in green."
"We envision that the OCT would be aimed at the area being operated on, and the surgeon could look at a screen to get a continuously updated picture of where the cancer is
and isn't,"said professor Xingdi Li. So far the system has been tested on fresh human brain tissue removed during surgeries
and in surgeries to remove brain tumors from mice. The researchers hope to begin clinical trials in patients this summer.
Neurosurgeons walk a tightrope as they try to take out as much of the cancer as possible
while keeping crucial brain tissue intact. Visually distinguishing the two is often impossible.""As a neurosurgeon,
I'm in agony when I'm taking out a tumor, "said Dr. Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa, a professor of neurosurgery, neuroscience and oncology at the Johns hopkins university School of medicine and the clinical leader of the research team."
"If I take out too little, the cancer could come back; too much, and the patient can be disabled permanently.
We think optical coherence tomography has strong potential for helping surgeons know exactly where to cut."
"Optical coherence tomography that could help surgeons differentiate a human brain tumor, red, from surrounding noncancerous tissue, green.
Courtesy of Kut et al.//Johns Hopkins Medicine. First developed in the early 1990s for imaging the retina,
OCT operates on the same echolocation principle used by bats and ultrasound scanners, but it uses light rather than sound waves,
yielding a higher-resolution image than does ultrasound. And unlike x-rays and CT or PET scans, OCT uses nonionizing radiation to produce images.
Cancers tend to be relatively dense, which affects how they scatter and reflect light. Brain cancer cells also lack the myelin sheaths that coat healthy brain cells,
a factor that has even greater effect on OCT readings than cell density, the researchers said.
If clinical trials are successful and the system goes to market, it will be a big step up from imaging technologies now available during surgeries,
Quinones-Hinojosa said.""Ultrasound has a much lower resolution than OCT, and MRI SCANNERS designed to be wheeled over a patient on the operating table cost several millions of dollars each
and require an extra hour of operating room time to obtain a single image, "he said.
By comparison, the team anticipates that an OCT-based system would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The system could be adapted to detect cancers in other parts of the body, said doctoral student Carmen Kut.
She is working on combining OCT with a different imaging technique that would detect blood vessels to help surgeons avoid cutting them.
The research was published in Science Translational Medicine (doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed. 3010611. For more information, visit www. hopkinsmedicine. org.
Doppler OCT Measures Cocaine Impact on Brain Drugs Enhance SPECT Imaging of Metastatic Cancer Compact Imaging,
IPIC to Commercialize OCT Biosensor Raman Imager Speeds Cancer Detectio e
#Continuously Disinfecting Light Fixtures Commercialized Designed to continuously disinfect the air and surfaces in hospitals,
a new line of light fixtures is about to hit the U s. market. Developed at the University of Strathclyde in the U k. and licensed to Kenall Manufacturing Co. Inc,
. the Indigo-Clean fixtures emit high-intensity narrow-spectrum (HINS) visible light at 405 nm, which produces a chemical reaction that kills bacteria from the inside,
as if common household bleach had been released within the bacterial cells. A microbial contamination on a contact agar plate with a 405-nm light source in the background.
Courtesy of the University of Strathclyde. The lights can be used to inactivate a range of microorganisms that are known causes of hospital-acquired infections,
including MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), C. difficile and VRE (vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus).""Breaking the chain of infection, from an infected patient, to the environment,
to new patient, is vitally important, and the ability of this technology to be in use and effective at all times will make a huge difference,
"said Cliff Yahnke, Kenall's director of clinical affairs. While other methods of disinfecting health care environments are effective,
they are episodic and results are short-lived because bacteria immediately repopulate the space, Yahnke said.
Continuous indigo light, on the other hand, is lethal to pathogens but safe for use in the presence of patients and staff.
And unlike other light-based disinfection systems it does not require a technician to operate.
The technology has been in use since 2008 at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, a teaching hospital operated by the National Health service.
The technology and its effectiveness have been the subject of more than 20 peer-reviewed academic publications and 30 conference presentations since 2008.
and recently granted Kenall licensing rights for the North american health care market. Kenall plans to start commercial production of the technology immediately.
The company provides a clinical partners program to assist hospitals in evaluating the performance and cost-savings potential of the technology.
visit www. indigo-clean. com and www. strath. ac. uk. Biophotonics Market Poised for Growth Top Biophotonics Stories of 2014 Ophthalmology Devices Market Set to
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011