While electrons ordinarily flow freely through the nanotubes, any ethylene molecules present in the vicinity will bond with the copper atoms,
which absorb ethylene and concentrate it near the nanotubes. By measuring how much the electron flow has been slowed,
It's these approximately 100-nanometers-wide slits that allow the device to differentiate between colors with plasmons waves of electrons that flow across metal surfaces) excited by light of a specific wavelength.
#Scientists find that exposure to nanoparticles could impact cardiovascular health Due to its huge potential in applications ranging from cheaper vaccinations to energy-storing car panels there's plenty of excitement surrounding the emergence of nanotechnology.
But a team of scientists are urging caution with a study conducted at the Technion-Israel Institute of technology suggesting that exposure to silicon-based nanoparticles may play a role in the development of cardiovascular disease.
exposing them to nanoparticles made from silicon dioxide. The team was seeking to explore the effects that the nanoparticles have on the development of atherosclerosis a condition that leads to the hardening of the arteries and cardiovascular events such as heart attack and stroke.
What the researchers found was a negative relationship between the silicon-based nanoparticles and macrophages a type of white blood cell that destroys damaged or dead cells.
The toxicity of the nanoparticles causes the macrophages to transform into foam cells or lipids leading to the development of lesions and hastening the onset of atherosclerosis.
This exposure may be especially chronic for those employed in research laboratories and in high tech industry where workers handle manufacture use
and dispose of nanoparticles says the study's lead author Professor Michael Aviram. Products that use silica-based nanoparticles for biomedical uses such as various chips drug or gene delivery and tracking imaging ultrasound therapy and diagnostics may also pose an increased cardiovascular
risk for consumers as well. This study isn't the first time concerns have been raised about the dangers of nanotechnology.
Operating at a scale of 1-100 nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter) the chemical reactions
when dealing with nanotechnology can be somewhat unpredictable. Previous research has turned up some unsettling results including that silver nanoparticles can materially alter a person's immunity and that titanium dioxide nanoparticles cause systemic genetic damage in mice.
The researchers warn that adopting a cautious approach is critical in the near-term with nanotechnology-based consumer products on the rise a world market they estimate will hit US$3 trillion by 2020.
This reality leads to increased human exposure and interaction of silica-based nanoparticles with biological systems write the researchers.
Because our research demonstrates a clear cardiovascular health risk associated with this trend steps need to be taken to help ensure that potential health
and environmental hazards are being addressed at the same time as the nanotechnology is being developed. The research was published in the journal Environmental Toxicology y
#Spinal implant could one day let paralyzed people walk again Three years ago scientists at The swiss Federal Institute of technology (EPFL) reported success in getting rats with severed spinal cords
such as"ninja polymers"and artificial nanoparticles made of lipids. But this latest breakthrough by researchers from Novobiotic in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Northeastern University in Boston, the University of Bonn in Germany,
these nanoscale motors twist the polymer chains in the gel, which as a result contracts by several centimeters.
Individually, these motors only operate overdistances in the region of a nanometer. However, when millions of them join up they can work in a completely coordinated way,
#Gelatin Nanoparticles could Deliver Drugs to your Brain Stroke victims could have more time to seek treatment that could reduce harmful effects on the brain thanks to tiny blobs of gelatin that could deliver the medication to the brain non-invasively.
nanoparticles in the journal Drug Delivery and Translational Research. The researchers found that gelatin nanoparticles could be laced with medications for delivery to the brain
and that they could extend the treatment window for when a drug could be effective.
Once administered the gelatin nanoparticles target damaged brain tissue thanks to an abundance of gelatin-munching enzymes produced in injured regions.
Illinois professor Kyekyoon#Kevin#Kim graduate student Elizabeth Joachim and researchscientist Hyungsoo Choi developed tiny gelatin nanoparticles that can carry medicationto the brain which could lead to longer
#To test gelatin nanoparticles as a drug-delivery system the researchers used the drug osteopontin (OPN)
By lacing gelatin nanoparticles with OPN the researchers found that they could extend the treatment window in rats so much
so that treating a rat with nanoparticles six hours after a stroke showed the same efficacy rate as giving them OPN alone after one hour#70 percent recovery of dead volume in the brain.
The researchers hope the gelatin nanoparticles administered through the nasal cavity can help deliver other drugs to more effectively treat a variety of brain injuries and neurological diseases.#
#Gelatin nanoparticles are a delivery vehicle that could be used to deliver many therapeutics to the brain#Choi said.#
But the sensors aren just useful for explosives the researchers found that the coated nanotubes can also detect two pesticides that contain nitro-aromatic compounds.
IBM recently made a#breakthrough with a nanomedicine#that it can engineer to latch on to fungal cells in the body
but within 40 years neurons made from nanomaterials could enable humans to survive even the most horrendous accident,
Of course, duplicating synapse firings in nanotube circuits does not mean that scientists are ready to replace the human brain,
Nano engineer John Burch, commenting on this molecular nanotechnology#video, predicts in his#blogthat expected advances in molecular nanotechnology will one day enable us to replace brain cells with damage-resistant nanomaterials that process thoughts faster than today s biological brains.##
##The new brain would include an exact copy of the structure and personality that existed before the conversion,
A daily pill would supply nanomaterials and instructions for nanobots to form new neurons and position them next to existing brain cells to be replaced.
These changes would be unnoticeable to us, but in six months, we would sport the new brain.
nanobots would quickly repair our brain, if damaged. Information is transmitted then to a processing center where a new body is cloned,
using carbon dioxide and carbon nanofibers.####The first step in the process of creating synthetic gas requires the conversion of carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide.
Researchers replaced the silver with carbon nanofibers, and paired those with nitrogen to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide.
substituting a super capacitor made from advanced carbon fiber-based nanomaterials that can be integrated into the body panels of the vehicle.
and roof panels are made of nanomaterial (see image below) that replaces the electric batteries used by conventional EVS.
and superhydrophobic (water hating) surfaces, on the nanoscale. Together these surfaces dramatically increased the efficiency of moisture condensation and
and the blockbuster chemotherapy drugs that gave you all those nasty side effects will be a thing of the past
#Commercial nanotube transistors could be ready by 2020 Each chip on this wafer has 10,000 nanotube transistors on it.
Intel s latest chips have transistors with features as small as 14 nanometers, but it is unclear how the industry can keep scaling down silicon transistors much further or
transistors at that point must have features as small as five nanometers to keep up with the continuous miniaturization of computer chips.
who leads the company s nanotube project at the company s T. J. Watson research center in Yorktown Heights,
New york. Nanotubes are the only technology that looks capable of keeping the advance of computer power from slowing down,
In 1998, researchers at IBM made one of the first working carbon nanotube transistors. And now after more than a decade of research, IBM is the first major company to commit to getting the technology ready for commercialization.
Hannon led IBM s nanotube work before Haensch, who took over in 2011 after a career working on manufacturing conventional chips.
The current best is 14 nanometers, and by 2020, in order to keep up with Moore s Law,
the industry will need to be down to five nanometers. This is the point IBM hopes nanotubes can step in.
The most recent report from the microchip industry group the ITRS says the so-called five-nanometernode is due in 2019.
000 nanotube transistors. Now it is working on a transistor design that could be built on the silicon wafers used in the industry today with minimal changes to existing design and manufacturing methods.
IBM s chosen design uses six nanotubes lined up in parallel to make a single transistor.
Each nanotube is 1. 4 nanometers wide about 30 nanometers long, and spaced roughly eight nanometers apart from its neighbors.
Both ends of the six tubes are embedded into electrodes that supply current, leaving around 10 nanometers of their lengths exposed in the middle.
A third electrode runs perpendicularly underneath this portion of the tubes and switches the transistor on and off to represent digital 1s and 0s.
The IBM team has tested nanotube transistors with that design, but so far it hasn t found a way to position the nanotubes closely enough together,
because existing chip technology can t work at that scale. The favored solution is to chemically label the substrate
and nanotubes with compounds that would cause them to self-assemble into position. Those compounds could then be stripped away,
leaving the nanotubes arranged correctly and ready to have electrodes and other circuitry added to finish a chip.
Haensch s team buys nanotubes in bulk from industrial suppliers and filters out the tubes with the right properties for transistors using a modified version of a machine used to filter molecules such as proteins in the pharmaceutical industry.
It uses electric charge to separate semiconducting nanotubes useful for transistors from those that conduct electricity like metals
and can t be used for transistors. Last year researchers at Stanford created the first simple computer built using only nanotube transistors.
But those components were bulky and slow compared to silicon transistors says However, for now IBM s nanotube effort remains within its research labs, not its semiconductor business unit.
And the researchers are open about the fact that success is guaranteed not. In particular, if the nanotube transistors are not ready soon after 2020
when the industry needs them, the window of opportunity might be closed, says IBM s Hannon.
If nanotubes don t make it, there s little else that shows much potential to take over from silicon transistors in that time frame.
Although IBM hasn worked t out how to make nanotube transistors small enough for mass production, Mirta says it has made concrete steps,
A new nanomaterial recently invented does the seemingly impossible: It hides things from touch. Just a thin layer of this amazing polymer will hide anything under it from being perceived by your sense of touch.
though, could be the nanorobot, a tiny microscopic-size machine that can whiz through veins replacing aging and damaged cells with new youthful ones.
and goggles who handle fragile nanotechnology equipment at a high-tech semiconductor lab. The long effort has yielded the Ostendo Quantum Photonic Imager, an appropriately sci-fi-sounding name,
Around six or seven years ago, scientists at Kyushu University started working on nanotechnology and material breakthroughs in the laboratory of applied chemistry professor Tatsumi Ishihara that could raise the capacity (how much electric charge can be delivered at a certain voltage) of those early dual carbon batteries.
Before coming to Harvard from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign last year, Lewis had spent more than a decade developing 3-D printing techniques using ceramics, metal nanoparticles, polymers,
NA nanorobots could potentially carry out complex programs that could one day be used to diagnose or treat diseases with unprecedented sophistication,
Levner and his colleagues at Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, made the nanobots by exploiting the binding properties of DNA.
A bug life The team has injected now various kinds of nanobots into cockroaches. Because the nanobots are labelled with fluorescent markers
the researchers can follow them and analyse how different robot combinations affect where substances are delivered.
and control of the nanobots is equivalent to a computer system. his is the first time that biological therapy has been able to match how a computer processor works,
says co-author Ido Bachelet of the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar Ilan University. nlike electronic devices,
Commodore cockroach The number of nanobots in the study more than in previous experiments makes it particularly promising,
The best configuration, a honeycomb lattice with a 50 nanometer coat of alumina, is less dense than waterthat is,
#Scientists achieve quantum teleportation of data with 100 percent accuracy Dutch scientists working with the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at the Delft University of Technology have made a stunning breakthrough in quantum technology
In this case, the researchers chose peptides that could capture gold nanoparticles and quantum dots. Researchers then programmed the E coli cells to produce biofilms with the conducting properties of gold nanowires.
Other films were studded with quantum dots, or tiny crystals that exhibit quantum mechanical properties. The cells were further able to communicate with each other
This pattern is only 17 nanometers higher than the rest of the plate something that is very difficult to see with a standard optical microscope.
Baughman has made artificial muscles out of carbon nanotube yarns before but those are much more expensive and complicated to make.
Our electronic whiskers consist of high-aspect-ratio elastic fibers coated with conductive composite films of nanotubes and nanoparticles.
and silver nanoparticles that are patterned on high-aspect-ratio elastic fibers. The nanotubes provide both flexibility allowing the whiskers to bend
when they experience pressure and conductivity allowing them to transmit data on the environmental factors they experience.
and nanoparticles they're also printing with dough vegetables and even meats. Both engineers and gourmet chefs are experimenting with creating foods from 3-D printing.
To create the effect researchers used lasers to etch nanoscale structures into the metal surface that repel the water.
Also airplanes etched in these nanostructures could potentially avoid the dangers of water freezing on the wings.
When turned on, electrons flow single-file through each double quantum dot which causes them to emit photons in the microwave region of the spectrum.
"The double quantum dot allows them full control over the motion of even a single electron,
when researchers at IBM manipulated individual xenon atoms on a nickel plate to spell out the letters'IBM'across a space just a dozen nanometres wide2.
They showed they could read out an'S'for Stanford with features as small as 0. 3 nanometres.
But by using a layer of nickel less than 300 nanometres thick and by cooling the sample quickly after the reaction the researchers could produce up to ten single-atom layers of carbon in graphene's signature honeycomb pattern.
But this would need technological breakthroughs such as the ability to grow larger-scale uniform monolayer graphene films
and to modify the conductivity of graphene nanostructures. Such applications could be some time off, says Geim."
"Sniffle-omics All this havoc is caused by a tiny virus only about 30 nanometres in diameter, with a genome that is a mere 7,
#Tighter nanotech regulations touted: Nature News The Canadian government is about to introduce the first mandatory programme in the world for reporting the safety of manufactured nanomaterials.
The scheme will require companies to provide any details that they have about the physical,
chemical and toxicological properties of nanomaterials they make or import in quantities greater than one kilogram.
In 2007, the government asked the Council of Canadian Academies to assess the state of health and safety in nanotechnology.
reported in July 2008 that very little information existed about the risks associated with nanomaterials."
Voluntary data-reporting schemes have been trialled in other countries with limited success. The ongoing voluntary programme of the US Environmental protection agency (EPA) has received so far submissions from 29 companies on more than 120 nanoscale materials;
"says Colin Finan, from the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, based at the Woodrow wilson International Center for Scholars in WASHINGTON DC.
Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances) regulations are currently being reviewed to clarify how nanomaterials are dealt with.
or supply a nanomaterial. Finan expects the United states, and perhaps other countries, to follow Canada's lead."
"says Steve Morgan, nanotechnologies policy adviser at DEFRA.""We're all watching with interest
#Rising air pollution clouds climate debate: Nature News Air pollution that is harmful to human health has increased over all populated continents except Europe since 1973, according to an extensive survey.
#Diamond defects shrink MRI to the nanoscale Diamond-based quantum devices can now make nuclear magnetic resonance measurements on the molecular scale.
His team is one of two that have used NMR to detect hydrogen atoms in samples measuring just a few nanometres across1.
The second team2 was led by Daniel Rugar, manager of nanoscale studies at IBM s Almaden Research center in San jose, California.
Probing single molecules a few nanometres wide has been a major frustration in NMR. The detectors need to be a similar size to the sample
NMR and MRI measurements on the nanoscale have been done using powerful nanomagnets in a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy
Both teams made diamonds with defects in their crystal structure#a single nitrogen atom next to a missing carbon atom, a few nanometres below the surface.
The researchers worked out that most of the signal came from a volume just 5 nanometres across inside the sample.
Diamond nanocrystals immersed in a cell's cytoplasm could essentially produce real-time films of the activity of single molecules,
#Novel solar photovoltaic cells achieve record efficiency using nanoscale structures Here's how to make a powerful solar cell from indium and phosphorus:
and phosphorus. Keep the nanowires in line by etching them clean with hydrochloric acid and confining their diameter to 180 nanometers.
A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. Exposed to the sun, a solar cell employing such nanowires can turn nearly 14 percent of the incoming light into electricity#a new record that opens up more possibilities for cheap and effective solar power.
According to research published online in Science #and validated at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar energy systems#this novel nanowire configuration delivered nearly as much electricity as more traditional indium phosphide thin-film solar cells
even though the nanowires themselves covered only 12 percent of the device's surface. That suggests such nanowire solar cells could prove cheaper
#and more powerful#if the process could be industrialized, argues physicist Magnus Borgstr#m of Lund University in Sweden,
who led the effort. The promise starts with the novel semiconductor#a combination of indium
and phosphorus that absorbs much of the light from the sun (a property known as its band gap).
The key will be even finer control of the nanowires themselves as they grow as well as the chemical tweaking of the constituent compounds.
Borgstr#m, for one, suspects that nanowire solar cells will stand on their own once the production process can be simplified,
such as growing the nanowires by applying simple heat and evaporation techniques in future. He explains:
#Nanomaterial rivals hardness of diamond An article by Scientific American. It s only a matter of time before a movie villain pulling off the crime of the century needs a cutting tool that is harder than anything else On earth.
the nanotwin segments are just 3. 8 nanometers wide on average. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.
The researchers fabricated their samples from round nanoparticles of boron nitride in which the atoms of nitrogen and boron form an onionlike structure of nested layers.
Pressed into macroscopic pellets and subjected to intense pressure and heat, the nanoparticles coalesced into tiny grains comprising numerous twin domains.
The onionlike precursors, Tian explains, contain numerous defects where crystals can nucleate under high temperature and pressure but resist rapid crystal growth,
but less hard than polycrystalline diamonds made of nanoscale grains. But Natalia Dubrovinskaia, a crystallographer at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, notes that measuring the properties of superhard materials is problematic
it s the quantum dot TV! Researchers working with nanoscale fluorescent particles called quantum dots have predicted long groundbreaking achievements,
such as ultra-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDS) and solar cells, but the technology has found mainly niche applications.
Demand for quantum dot displays, say industry watchers, could benefit quantum dot companies, bring down the price of these nanomaterials
and boost other applications that have stalled.""Displays are a potential market that could help quantum dot companies find traction,
says Jonathan Melnick, an analyst at Lux Research in Boston, Massachusetts. Quantum dots are crystals about 10 nano#metres in diameter,
made from a semiconductor material, commonly cadmium selenide. They are so tiny that their shape
researchers can tune the precise colour a quantum dot will absorb and re-emit by tailoring its size.
That was when the Quantum dot Corporation of Hayward, California, began selling them to cell biologists, who prize them as fluorescent imaging labels for proteins and other biological molecules.
As recently as 2010, the biomedical sector was responsible for US$48#million of $67#million in total quantum dot revenues, according to BCC Research of Wellesley, Massachusetts.
with quantum dot coatings to convert the harsh glare of LEDS into a warmer glow, to make them more appealing as long-life, low energy light bulbs.
and technology for the light-bulb market evolved too fast for the quantum dot coatings to keep up."
His optimism will be tested this spring with the company s quantum dot debut in Sony LCD televisions,
Another quantum dot company, Nanosys of Palo alto, California, is providing 3m of St paul, Minnesota, with material for a similar product. 3m will make a polymer film seeded with quantum dots that does the same jobas QD Vision s glass tube.
will make up $310#million of a total $666 million in quantum dot revenues. Melnick says that these numbers might be overly optimistic,
Miriam Wilsonwith molecules for moving parts, this nanorobot links together amino acids (colored balls) by attaching them to a moving ring (blue.
In its present incarnation, the nanomachine requires the axle to be preloaded with amino acids in the correct sequence.
#Electron beams set nanostructures aglow Put a piece of quartz under an electron microscope and it will shine an icy blue.
turning the glow into a precise probe of a material s nanoscale structure. The researchers expect the technology to reach the market early this year,
giving materials scientists a new tool for investigating the behaviour of light in the interiors of the complex nanostructures used in lasers, light-based circuits and solar cells."
An electron beam can in principle achieve a resolution of less than one nanometre, compared with hundreds of nanometres for a beam of light.
But maps made by scattered or reflected electrons are not typically sensitive to the way light behaves in the sample.
it promises the same nanometre scale resolution that those systems can achieve.""This has opened the door to understanding how light couples to matter in a more fundamental way,
along with collaborators in the United states and Spain, has used the technique to tease out how certain nanostructures interact with light.
The team has mapped also the distribution of light in the silicon nanodiscs that are used as a coating on solar cells to improve efficiency,
#Stealth nanoparticles sneak past immune system s defences Small man-made peptides can help to sneak drug-bearing nanobeads past the ever-vigilant immune system,
Although scientists are developing nanoparticles that help to deliver drugs to the right place, all therapeutic molecules face a deadly foe#the immune system.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia have now found a way to stop macrophages from destroying drug-bearing nanoparticles.
They then stuck the peptide to commercially available polystyrene nanobeads. The beads also carried a dye
fluorescent nanobeads accumulated in the tumours. Nanoparticles tend to accumulate in tumours because of the tumour s haphazard structure and leaky blood vessels.
The nanoparticles spill through these blood vessels and get stuck in the tumour. Buoyed by the evidence that the peptide-carrying nanobeads were circulating in the blood
Discher and his team also tagged their nanobeads with the anticancer drug paclitaxel. They saw that their peptide-carrying system shrank tumours just as well as the standard paclitaxel carrier, Cremophor,
but without that carrier's toxic side effects. Neil Barclay of the University of Oxford, UK, was part of the team that worked out the CD47 structure that inspired Discher s work2."
"It s neat, he says of Discher s research.""It s a new way of trying to get the immune system to prevent phagocytosis of drugs or particles.
Discher hopes that the system can be improved with custom-made nanobeads, rather than being limited to the off-the-shelf ones he and his team used."
Although the difference was a mere 0. 3 nanometres, about the width of three helium atoms,
Another month in the hospital on intensive chemotherapy drugs did nothing to help. By the time the man started the trial,
If the semiconductor is small enough#a nanoparticle, for example#a single electron can switch the transistor on,
They strung together thousands of gold nanoparticles, each 10 nanometres across, into long necklaces. These can form a tangled network that connects two electrodes some 30 micrometres apart.
Roughly 5%of the gold nanoparticles have defects that prevent current from flowing from one electrode to the other.
But if an electron settles on a defective nanoparticle it makes it slightly easier for current to flow,
says Ulrich Simon, a nanoscience researcher at the RWTH Aachen University in Germany. Now, Saraf s team has shown that the nano-necklace device works in water
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