#Explosives and Pesticides Can Be detected by Using Bee venom Scientists from MIT have discovered that by coating carbon nanotubes in bee venom,
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.
##Researchers at#USC s Viterbi School of Engineeringhave created a#functioning synapse#using neurons made from carbon nanotubes.
Of course, duplicating synapse firings in nanotube circuits does not mean that scientists are ready to replace the human brain,
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.
#Commercial nanotube transistors could be ready by 2020 Each chip on this wafer has 10,000 nanotube transistors on it.
A project at IBM is now aiming to have built transistors using carbon nanotubes ready to take over from silicon transistors soon after 2020.
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.
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.
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
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.
In particular, if the nanotube transistors are not ready soon after 2020 when the industry needs them,
If nanotubes don t make it, there s little else that shows much potential to take over from silicon transistors in that time frame.
and unlike carbon nanotubes, they don t behave similarly to silicon transistors, says Hannon. Subhasish Mitra, a professor who worked on the project.
We now know that you can build something useful with carbon nanotubes, he says. The question is,
Although IBM hasn worked t out how to make nanotube transistors small enough for mass production, Mirta says it has made concrete steps,
when they reinforced the polymer with carbon nanotubes, it became 50 percent stronger. IBM Research's James Hedrick, who co-authored the new paper,
Researchers then programmed the E coli cells to produce biofilms with the conducting properties of gold nanowires.
Baughman has made artificial muscles out of carbon nanotube yarns before but those are much more expensive and complicated to make.
The new muscles contract to about 50 percent of their length compared with carbon nanotubes which contract to only about 10 percent their initial length he said.
Our electronic whiskers consist of high-aspect-ratio elastic fibers coated with conductive composite films of nanotubes and nanoparticles.
what the paper describes as highly tunable composite films of carbon nanotubes 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.
Also airplanes etched in these nanostructures could potentially avoid the dangers of water freezing on the wings.
and to modify the conductivity of graphene nanostructures. Such applications could be some time off, says Geim."
and phosphorus. Keep the nanowires in line by etching them clean with hydrochloric acid and confining their diameter to 180 nanometers.
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.
#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,
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:
#Electron beams set nanostructures aglow Put a piece of quartz under an electron microscope and it will shine an icy blue.
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."
along with collaborators in the United states and Spain, has used the technique to tease out how certain nanostructures interact with light.
A handful work at room temperature (by using carbon nanotubes to detect electrons for example2), but they cannot operate in water#a serious obstacle to using such devices in living organisms.
Bao via e-mail. am impressed that they were able to inject even the nanowire transistors with very high yield.""
Within each of the tiny particles is an elaborate nanopore structure think of it as a series of microscopic holes within a thin membrane,
Manufacturing these structures is part of an elaborate process that involves breaking down the nanopore structures into niform-sized particlesthat are fabricated ompletely
Mirin made a nanowire detector that operates at-270 C. This boosted the number of photons it received each second by two orders of magnitude compared with regular detectors.
spinning out nanofibers for use in water filters body armor and smart textiles; or propulsion systems for fist-sized nanosatellites.
But in the new work they instead used carbon nanotubes atom-thick sheets of carbon rolled into cylinders grown on the slopes of the emitters like trees on a mountainside.
and height of the nanotubes the researchers were able to achieve a fluid flow that enabled an operating ion current at very near the theoretical limit.
To control the nanotubes growth the researchers first cover the emitter array with an ultrathin catalyst film
The nanotubes grow up under the catalyst particles which sit atop them until the catalyst degrades.
Using their nanotube forest they re able to get the devices to operate in pure ion mode
Recently, scientists have explored ways to improve the efficiency of solar-thermal harvesting by developing new solar receivers and by working with nanofluids.
The membranes combine a very thin layer of nanopores with a thicker layer of micropores to limit the passage of unwanted material
That combination of order and disorder contributes to eumelanin broadband absorption, the team found. t a naturally existing nanocomposite,
hat has very critical macroscopic properties as a result of the nanostructure. While eumelanin molecules all share a basic chemistry,
Grossman team tried attaching the molecules to carbon nanotubes (CNTS), but t incredibly hard to get these molecules packed onto a CNT in that kind of close packing,
Kucharski says. But then they found a big surprise: Even though the best they could achieve was a packing density less than half of
called azobenzene, protrude from the sides of the CNTS like the teeth of a comb.
they were interleaved with azobenzene molecules attached to adjacent CNTS. The net result: The molecules were actually much closer to each other than expected.
The interactions between azobenzene molecules on neighboring CNTS make the material work, Kucharski says. While previous modeling showed that the packing of azobenzenes on the same CNT would provide only a 30 percent increase in energy storage,
the experiments observed a 200 percent increase. New simulations confirmed that the effects of the packing between neighboring CNTS,
as opposed to on a single CNT, explain the significantly larger enhancements. This realization, Grossman says,
opens up a wide range of possible materials for optimizing heat storage. Instead of searching for specific photoswitching molecules
The adoption of carbon nanotubes to increase materialsenergy storage density is lever, says Yosuke Kanai, an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of North carolina who was involved not in this work.
and create gold nanowires conducting biofilms and films studded with quantum dots or tiny crystals that exhibit quantum mechanical properties.
If gold nanoparticles are added to the environment the histidine tags will grab onto them creating rows of gold nanowires and a network that conducts electricity.
In a new Nature Materials paper, the researchers report boosting plantsability to capture light energy by 30 percent by embedding carbon nanotubes in the chloroplast,
Using another type of carbon nanotube, they also modified plants to detect the gas nitric oxide. Together
the researchers also embedded semiconducting carbon nanotubes, coated in negatively charged DNA, into the chloroplasts. Plants typically make use of only about 10 percent of the sunlight available to them,
but carbon nanotubes could act as artificial antennae that allow chloroplasts to capture wavelengths of light not in their normal range, such as ultraviolet, green,
With carbon nanotubes appearing to act as a rosthetic photoabsorber photosynthetic activity measured by the rate of electron flow through the thylakoid membranes was 49 percent greater than that in isolated chloroplasts without embedded nanotubes.
When nanoceria and carbon nanotubes were delivered together, the chloroplasts remained active for a few extra hours. The researchers then turned to living plants
and used a technique called vascular infusion to deliver nanoparticles into Arabidopsis thaliana, a small flowering plant.
the nanotubes moved into the chloroplast and boosted photosynthetic electron flow by about 30 percent.
Lean green machines The researchers also showed that they could turn Arabidopsis thaliana plants into chemical sensors by delivering carbon nanotubes that detect the gas nitric oxide,
Strano lab has developed previously carbon nanotube sensors for many different chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide, the explosive TNT, and the nerve gas sarin.
When the target molecule binds to a polymer wrapped around the nanotube, it alters the tube fluorescence. e could someday use these carbon nanotubes to make sensors that detect in real time, at the single-particle level,
free radicals or signaling molecules that are at very low-concentration and difficult to detect, Giraldo says. his is a marvelous demonstration of how nanotechnology can be coupled with synthetic biology to modify
To create these ynthetic antibodies, the researchers used carbon nanotubes hollow, nanometer-thick cylinders made of carbon that naturally fluoresce
In the past, researchers have exploited this phenomenon to create sensors by coating the nanotubes with molecules, such as natural antibodies, that bind to a particular target.
the carbon nanotube fluorescence brightens or dims. The MIT team found that they could create novel sensors by coating the nanotubes with specifically designed amphiphilic polymers polymers that are drawn to both oil and water, like soap.
This approach offers a huge array of recognition sites specific to different targets, and could be used to create sensors to monitor diseases such as cancer, inflammation,
or diabetes in living systems. his new technique gives us an unprecedented ability to recognize any target molecule by screening nanotube-polymer complexes to create synthetic analogs to antibody function,
Moreover, this approach can provide a more durable alternative to coating sensors such as carbon nanotubes with actual antibodies,
Their approach takes advantage of a phenomenon that occurs when certain types of polymers bind to a carbon nanotube.
when the polymers are exposed to carbon nanotubes, the hydrophobic regions latch onto the tubes like anchors
These loops form a new layer surrounding the nanotube, known as a corona. The MIT researchers found that the loops within the corona are arranged very precisely along the tube,
and alter the carbon nanotube fluorescence. Molecular interactions What is unique about this approach, the researchers say,
and the polymer before it attaches to the nanotube. he idea is that a chemist could not look at the polymer
It has to adsorb onto the nanotube and then, by having certain sections of the polymer exposed,
The researchers used an automated, robot-assisted trial and error procedure to test about 30 polymer-coated nanotubes against three dozen possible targets, yielding three hits.
They are now working on a way to predict such polymer-nanotube interactions based on the structure of the corona layers,
using data generated from a new type of microscope that Landry built to image the interactions between the carbon nanotube coronas
And the ground receiver is based on arrays of small inexpensive telescopes that are coupled fiber to highly efficient superconducting nanowires a photon counting technology that was brought to its high state of maturity by joint MIT and Lincoln Lab teams.
The new approach uses yarns, made from nanowires of the element niobium, as the electrodes in tiny supercapacitors (which are essentially pairs of electrically conducting fibers with an insulator between).
Among nanomaterials, carbon-based nanoparticles such as carbon nanotubes and graphene have shown promising results, but they suffer from relatively low electrical conductivity,
and that niobium nanowire yarn is a promising an alternative. magine youe got some kind of wearable health-monitoring system,
The new nanowire-based supercapacitor exceeds the performance of existing batteries, while occupying a very small volume. f youe got an Apple Watch and
Other groups have made similar supercapacitors using carbon nanotubes or other materials, but the niobium yarns are stronger and 100 times more conductive.
Overall, niobium-based supercapacitors can store up to five times as much power in a given volume as carbon nanotube versions.
500 degrees Celsius so devices made from these nanowires could potentially be suitable for use in high-temperature applications.
individual niobium nanowires are just 140 nanometers in diameter 140 billionths of a meter across,
which the nanoribbons are pulled apart. The way atoms line up along the edge of a ribbon of graphenehe atom-thick form of carbonontrols
the Rice team used sophisticated computer modeling to show it's possible to rip nanoribbons
The researchers created highly organized nanostructures within a portion of the active layer of an organic solar cell meaning that the molecules in that portion all ran the same way.
and it tells us that we don't need highly ordered nanostructures for efficient free electron generation.
and nanostructure features are needed to advance organic solar cell technology. Explore further: Hybrid materials could smash the solar efficiency ceiling More information:
A similar effect can be realized at a much smaller scale by using arrays of metallic nanostructures since light of certain wavelengths excites collective oscillations of free electrons known as plasmon resonances in such structures.
An advantage of using metal nanostructures rather than inks is that it is possible to enhance the resolution of color images by a hundred fold.
The plasmon resonance wavelength varies sensitively with the dimensions of the nanostructures. Consequently by varying the diameter of the four aluminum nanodisks in a pixel (all four nanodisks having the same diameter) the scientists were able to produce about 15 distinct colors#a good start
Researchers use aluminum nanostructures for photorealistic printing of plasmonic color palettes More information: Tan S. J. Zhang L. Zhu D. Goh X. M. Wang Y. M. et al.
Plasmonic color palettes for photorealistic printing with aluminum nanostructures. Nano Letters 14 4023#4029 (2014.
The study also investigates how the size of the nanopores changes the repulsive forces on bacteria."
"It's probably one of the lowest-cost possibilities to manufacture a nanostructure on a metallic surface,
#Carbon nanotube finding could lead to flexible electronics with longer battery life University of Wisconsin-Madison materials engineers have made a significant leap toward creating higher-performance electronics with improved battery lifend the ability
the team has reported the highest-performing carbon nanotube transistors ever demonstrated. In addition to paving the way for improved consumer electronics,
000 times better and a conductance that's 100 times better than previous state-of-the-art carbon nanotube transistors."
"Carbon nanotubes are very strong and very flexible, so they could also be used to make flexible displays
"Carbon nanotubes are single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up into a tube. As some of the best electrical conductors ever discovered, carbon nanotubes have long been recognized as a promising material for next-generation transistors,
which are semiconductor devices that can act like an on-off switch for current or amplify current. This forms the foundation of an electronic device.
However, researchers have struggled to isolate purely semiconducting carbon nanotubes, which are crucial, because metallic nanotube impurities act like copper wires and"short"the device.
Researchers have struggled also to control the placement and alignment of nanotubes. Until now these two challenges have limited the development of high-performance carbon nanotube transistors.
Building on more than two decades of carbon nanotube research in the field, the UW-Madison team drew on cutting-edge technologies that use polymers to selectively sort out the semiconducting nanotubes,
achieving a solution of ultra-high-purity semiconducting carbon nanotubes. Previous techniques to align the nanotubes resulted in less than-desirable packing density,
or how close the nanotubes are to one another when they are assembled in a film. However, the UW-Madison researchers pioneered a new technique,
called floating evaporative self-assembly, or FESA, which they described earlier in 2014 in the ACS journal Langmuir.
In that technique, researchers exploited a self-assembly phenomenon triggered by rapidly evaporating a carbon nanotube solution.
The team's most recent advance also brings the field closer to realizing carbon nanotube transistors as a feasible replacement for silicon transistors in computer chips and in high-frequency communication devices,
which are rapidly approaching their physical scaling and performance limits.""This is not an incremental improvement in performance,
"Arnold says.""With these results, we've really made a leap in carbon nanotube transistors. Our carbon nanotube transistors are an order of magnitude better in conductance than the best thin film transistor technologies currently being used commercially
while still switching on and off like a transistor is supposed to function.""The researchers have patented their technology through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation
and have begun working with companies to accelerate the technology transfer to industry t
#A new step towards using graphene in electronic applications A team of the University of Berkeley
and the Centre for Materials Physics (CSIC-UPV/EHU) has managed with atomic precision to create nanostructures combining graphene ribbons of varying widths.
The work is being published in the prestigious journal Nature Nanotechnology. Few materials have received as much attention from the scientific world
On the other hand due to the great variability of electronic properties upon minimal changes in the structure of these nanoribbons exact control on an atomic level is an indispensable requirement to make the most of all their potential.
In the year 2010 however a way was found to synthesise nanoribbons with atomic precision by means of the so-called molecular self-assembly.
Manipulating nanoribbons at the molecular level More information: Bandgap Engineering of Bottom-up Synthesized Graphene nanoribbons by Controlled Heterojunctions.
and Chemical Biology and Professor Walter Kolch in Systems Biology Ireland synthesised nanorods with a long iron segment coated with polyethylene glycol
The team believe that Fe-Au functionalised nanorods used in conjunction with these drugs could be useful in cancer treatment.
After characterising and tuning the interaction of the nanorods with the cells the research team assessed how the cells respond to mechanical stimulation.
and used a novel microfluidic chip to monitor the interaction of individual nanorods with two human breast cancer cell lines that express the Erbb family of receptors at different rates.
When the HRG-nanorods bind to cancer cells expressing Erbb they kick off a cascade of signalling events that lead to cell death.
Two studies Complement activation by carbon nanotubes and its influence on the phagocytosis and cytokine response by macrophages and Complement deposition on nanoparticles can modulate immune responses by macrophage B
and T cells found that carbon nanotubes (CNTS) triggered a chain reaction in the complement system which is part of the innate immune system
The interaction between CNTS and C1q (a starter-protein for complement) was anti-inflammatory. This suggests that either coating nanoparticles
if the binding between complement proteins and CNTS was direct or indirect. However changing the surfaces of CNTS affected how likely the complement system was to be activated and in what way.
Using the data from this study carbon nanoparticles coated with genetically-engineered proteins are being used to target glioblastoma the most aggressive form of brain tumour.
#Scalable growth of high quality bismuth nanowires Bismuth nanowires have intriguing electronic and energy harvesting application possibilities.
A group at the CFN Brookhaven National Laboratory has demonstrated a new technique to produce single-crystal nanowires atop arbitrary substrates including glass silicon
#The simplicity of the technique and the universality of the mechanism open a new avenue for the growth of nanowire arrays of a variety of materials.
This is the first report on the high yield(>70%)synthesis of single crystalline bismuth nanowires a material with potentially exploitable and intriguing thermoelectric properties.#
#This technique produces bismuth nanowires in quantities limited only by the size of the substrate on
#The dimensions of the bismuth nanowires can be tuned over a very wide range simply by varying the substrate's temperature.#
#Further in contrast with other fabrication methods with this new technique there is no need for a catalyst to activate the production of the nanowires
CFN's Materials Synthesis and Characterization Electron microscopy and Advanced UV and X-ray Probes Facilities were used for synthesis of nanowires and their structural characterization.
Uniform nanowire arrays for science and manufacturing More information: Surface energy induced formation of single crystalline bismuth nanowires over vanadium thin film at room temperature.
Nano Letters 14 5630#5635 (2014) DOI: 10.1021/nl502208 2
#New'electronic skin'for prosthetics robotics detects pressure from different directions Touch can be a subtle sense,
#New technique allows low-cost creation of 3-D nanostructures Researchers from North carolina State university have developed a new lithography technique that uses nanoscale spheres to create three-dimensional (3-D) structures
or multiple beams of light allowing them to create a wide variety of nanostructure designs.
which gives us the ability to shape the resulting nanostructure in three dimensions without using the expensive equipment required by conventional techniques Chang says.
which in turn can be used to create a uniform pattern of 3-D nanostructures. This could be used to create an array of nanoneedles for use in drug delivery
or other applications says Xu Zhang a Ph d. student in Chang's lab and lead author of the paper.
For this work we focused on creating nanostructures using photosensitive polymers which are used commonly in lithography Zhang says.
The paper Sculpting Asymmetric Hollow-Core Three-dimensional Nanostructures Using Colloidal Particles was published online Dec 8 in the journal Small l
An article based on the research Heterogeneous nucleation and shape transformation of multicomponent metallic nanostructures appeared in the Nov 2 online issue of Nature Materials s
#Scientists use'smallest possible diamonds'to form ultra-thin nanothreads For the first time scientists have discovered how to produce ultra-thin diamond nanothreads that promise extraordinary properties including strength and stiffness greater than that of today's strongest nanotubes
They describe their nanowire mesh design in the journal ACS Nano. Peidong Yang Bin Liu and colleagues note that harnessing sunlight to split water
The researchers took a page from the paper industry using one of its processes to make a flat mesh out of light-absorbing semiconductor nanowires that
Scientists create multifunctional nanotubes using nontoxic materials A doctoral student in materials science at Technische Universitat Darmstadt is making multifunctional nanotubes of goldith the help of Vitamin c and other harmless substances.
The doctoral student in the research group of Professor Wolfgang Ensinger in the Department of Material Analysis is working on making nanotubes of gold.
The metal on the walls of the channels adopts the shape of nanotubes; the film is dissolved then.
and simple basic chemicals can produce such precise nanostructures"says Münch.""Green meets Nano"is a motto of the researchers at the TU.
The gold nanotubes are thus several hundred times finer than a human hair. Their wall thickness depends both on the duration of precipitation and on the gold concentration of the original solution.
the result is-depending on the experimental conditions-a collection of individual nanotubes or an array of hundreds of thousands of interconnected tubes.
"With 1 gram of gold, we could make a nanotube for literally every person on earth."
Ensinger's team has tested already successfully one use of the gold nanotubes: they are suitable for building sensors to measure hydrogen peroxide.
The gold nanotubes conduct electricity especially well due to their one-dimensional structure. In addition, they are relatively long
For example, they are thinking about also using the nanotubes to measure blood sugar.""A subcutaneous sensor could save diabetes patients from having to constantly prick their fingers"thinks Ensinger.
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