NanoTechnology

Scientists at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT have developed nanometer-sized “nanoworms” that can cruise through the bloodstream without significant interference from the body’s immune defense system and—like tiny anti-cancer missiles—home in on tumors.

Their discovery, detailed in this week’s issue of the journal Advanced Materials, is reminiscent of the 1966 science fiction movie, the Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine is shrunken to microscopic dimensions, then injected into the bloodstream to remove a blood clot from a diplomat’s brain.

Since scientists first learned to make nanowires, the nano-sized wires just a few millionths of a centimeter thick have taken many forms, including nanobelts, nanocoils and nanoflowers.

But when University of Wisconsin-Madison chemistry professor Song Jin and graduate student Matthew Bierman accidentally made some pine tree shapes one day — complete with tall trunks and branches that tapered in length as they spiraled upward — they knew they’d stumbled upon something peculiar.

Researchers at The University of Manchester have produced tiny liquid crystal devices with electrodes made from graphene – an exciting development that could lead to computer and TV displays based on this technology.

Writing in the American Chemical Society’s journal Nano Letters, Dr Kostya Novoselov and colleagues from The School of Physics and Astronomy and The School of Computer Science, report on the use of graphene as a transparent conductive coating for electro-optical devices – and show that its high transparency and low resistivity make it ideal for electrodes in liquid crystal devices.

A new low-temperature, catalyst-free technique for growing copper nanowires has been developed by researchers at the University of Illinois. The copper nanowires could serve as interconnects in electronic device fabrication and as electron emitters in a television-like, very thin flat-panel display known as a field-emission display.

“We can grow forests of freestanding copper nanowires of controlled diameter and length, suitable for integration into electronic devices,” said Kyekyoon (Kevin) Kim, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Researchers at Purdue University are the first to precisely measure the forces required to peel tiny nanotubes off of other materials, opening up the possibility of creating standards for nano-manufacturing and harnessing a gecko's ability to walk up walls.

So-called "peel tests" are used extensively in manufacturing. Knowing how much force is needed to pull a material off of another material is essential for manufacturing, but no tests exist for nanoscale structures, said Arvind Raman, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue.

Lockheed Martin and Rice University announced the creation of an innovative, strategic partnership to develop new technologies for a broad range of applications in electronics, energy and security.

The Lockheed Martin Advanced Nanotechnology Center of Excellence at Rice University, or LANCER, will pair researchers from Lockheed Martin with Rice experts in carbon nanotechnology, photonics, plasmonics and more. LANCER will be based at Rice's Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

New analysis by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) indicates that European nations are investing nearly twice as much as the U.S. in research primarily aimed at addressing the potential risks of nanotechnology. The analysis also highlights a substantial over-inflation of the federal government's nanotechnology risk-research investment figures for the U.S.

The new PEN assessment of nanotechnology risk-relevant projects identified by the federal government's National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) for fiscal year 2006 found that only $13 million was invested in projects highly relevant to addressing possible risks.

Researchers have used the world's thinnest material to create the world's smallest transistor, one atom thick and ten atoms wide.

Reporting their peer-reviewed findings in the latest issue of the journal Science, Dr Kostya Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim from The School of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Manchester show that graphene can be carved into tiny electronic circuits with individual transistors having a size not much larger than that of a molecule.

Researchers from the UAB Research Park have created the first nanomotor that is propelled by changes in temperature. A carbon nanotube is capable of transporting cargo and rotating like a conventional motor, but is a million times smaller than the head of a needle. This research opens the door to the creation of new nanometric devices designed to carry out mechanical tasks and which could be applied to the fields of biomedicine or new materials.

One of the key engineering challenges to building a clean, efficient, hydrogen-powered car is how to design the fuel tank. Storing enough raw hydrogen for a reasonable driving range would require either impractically high pressures for gaseous hydrogen or extremely low temperatures for liquid hydrogen. In a new paper* researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) have demonstrated that a novel class of materials could enable a practical hydrogen fuel tank.