Imagine the marriage of hard metals or semiconductors to soft organic or biological products. Picture the strange, wonderful offspring –– hybrid materials never conceived by Mother Nature.
Looking to push the boundaries of nanoscience, the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science is no longer a think tank for new ideas, but a proving ground to aggressively push the limits of nanotechnology. And to that end, Cornell has named Paul McEuen, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics, as the director. David A. Muller, associate professor of applied and engineering physics, will serve as co-director.
A new finding reported in Nature Nanotechnology suggests that anti-cancer chemotherapies using nanoparticles to deliver drugs deep inside tumor tissue will be more effective if the particles are positively electrically charged, because they are taken up to a greater extent by proliferating cells.
To make large sheets of carbon available for light collection, Indiana University Bloomington chemists have devised an unusual solution -- attach what amounts to a 3-D bramble patch to each side of the carbon sheet. Using that method, the scientists say they were able to dissolve sheets containing as many as 168 carbon atoms, a first.
Leading international experts on the global regulation of nanotechnologies, including scientists, lawyers, ethicists and officials from governments, industry stakeholders, and NGOs will join in a two-day conference May 7-8, 2010 at Northeastern University’s School of Law.
Georgia Tech researchers are using gold nanoparticles to locate & kill cancer cells; creating software to ID cancer biomarkers; collecting & characterizing tumor cells from blood; detecting breast cancer with breath and ovarian cancer from blood; & visualizing the prostate during robotic biopsies.
A NIST team has built an ultra-stable instrument for tugging on chains of atoms, an instrument that can maneuver and hold the position of an atomic probe to within 5 picometers.
A closer look at a promising nanotube coating that might one day improve solar cells has turned up a few unexpected wrinkles, according to new research at NIST and North Dakota State University.
Directors of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science discuss their new “high-risk, high-payoff” mission to push the technology of observation, measurement and control to ever-smaller dimensions.
Researchers at the University of Arkansas and their colleagues have discovered a new phase in ferroelectric nanowires that could be controlled to optimize important properties for future electronic devices.
The University of Illinois at Chicago will become the world's first university to own and operate a scanning transmission electron microscope with aberration correction, allowing atom-level imaging up to three times sharper than with today's conventional electron microscopes. The device will be used for academic and industrial research, as well as for teaching.
By combining a new generation of piezoelectric nanogenerators with two types of nanowire sensors, researchers have created what are believed to be the first self-powered nanometer-scale sensing devices that draw power from the conversion of mechanical energy.
Promising research on superconducting materials, near infra-red spectroscopy, and nanotechnology has earned three faculty at Tufts University's School of Engineering prestigious early career awards from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy.
Interest in ‘green’ innovation means not just thinking big but also very, very, very small. At least that’s the way Omowunmi Sadik, director of Binghamton University’s Center for Advanced Sensors and Environmental Systems, sees it. She’s working to develop sensors that would detect and identify engineered nanoparticles. Her research will advance our understanding of the risks associated with the environmental release and transformation of these particles.
In findings that took the experimenters three years to believe, University of Michigan engineers and their collaborators have demonstrated that light itself can twist ribbons of nanoparticles.
A new high-performance anode structure based on silicon-carbon nanocomposite materials could significantly improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries used in a wide range of applications from hybrid vehicles to portable electronics.
North Dakota State University, Fargo, has been awarded a grant of $351,764 from the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation Program, funded under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009. The grant will provide highly-specialized equipment for faculty, graduate and undergraduate research in biomaterials.
The rapidly growing field of nanotechnology and its future use in cosmetic products holds both enormous potential and potential concern for consumers. Currently, major cosmetic manufacturers have imposed a voluntary ban on the use of nanoparticles in products while they await a ruling from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the safety of this technology. However, these manufacturers know that when ingredients in products such as sunscreens and anti-aging products are converted into nano-sized particles, the end product displays unique properties that can benefit the skin in ways that otherwise could not be achieved using larger-sized particles.
In a far-reaching dialogue, three pioneering researchers -- Nicholas Spitzer, Kwabena Boahen and Hongkun Park -- discuss the synergy between nanoscience and neuroscience, what it means for the future, and how it is driving current research.
Researchers have discovered that, under the right conditions, newly developed nanocrystalline materials exhibit surprising activity in the tiny spaces between the geometric clusters of atoms called nanocrystals from which they are made.
Nobel Laureate Professor Sir Harold “Harry” Kroto will discuss how ingenious strategies for the creation of molecules with exactly specified structures and functions are being developed; in essence, molecules that “do things” are now being made.
A new nanotech catalyst developed by McGill University Chemists Chao-Jun Li, Audrey Moores and their colleagues offers industry an opportunity to reduce the use of expensive and toxic heavy metals.
Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown that by directing gold nanoparticles into the nuclei of cancer cells, they can not only prevent them from multiplying, but can kill them where they lurk.
Researchers in Chicago and London have developed a method for controlling the properties of magnets that could be used to improve the storage capacity of next-generation computer hard drives.
Scientists at Georgia Tech and the Ovarian Cancer Institute have further developed a potential new treatment against cancer that uses magnetic nanoparticles to attach to cancer cells, removing them from the body. The treatment, tested in mice in 2008, has now been tested using samples from human cancer patients.
History has shown that previous industrial revolutions, such as those involving asbestos and chloroflurocarbons, have had some serious environmental impacts. Might nanotechnology also pose a risk?
Scientists have devised a way to explore how phase transitions -- changes of matter from one state to another without altering chemical makeup -- function in less than three dimensions and at the level of just a few atoms.
Studying pollen tubes, plant physiologist Peter Hepler has captured some of the fastest growing tissues known, on camera for the first time, advancing understanding of fertilization that’s critical to development of all fruits, nuts, grains, rice, corn, wheat and other crops we depend on for food.
To make thin films for semiconductors in electronic devices, layers of atoms must be grown in neat, crystalline sheets. But while some materials grow smooth crystals, others tend to develop bumps and defects – a serious problem for thin-film manufacturing. Cornell researchers shed new light on how atoms arrange themselves into thin films. (Science, Jan. 22, 2010).
Boron nitride nanotubes have alluring properties but are notoriously difficult to grow. Now a Michigan Tech researcher has created virtual carpets of them using simple substrates.
Building microscopic materials known as superlattices on the surface of gold may lead to a treasure for researchers interested in faster, smaller, and more energy efficient computing devices, say researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T).
A research team at NIST has quantified the interaction of gold nanoparticles with important proteins found in human blood, an approach that should be useful in the development of nanoparticle-based medical therapies and for better understanding the physical origin of the toxicity of certain nanoparticles.
A team of researchers in California and Massachusetts has developed a “cocktail” of different nanometer-sized particles that work in concert within the bloodstream to locate, adhere to and kill cancerous tumors.
Researchers have created biodegradable nanosized particles that can easily slip through the body’s sticky and viscous mucus secretions to deliver a sustained-release medication cargo.
Researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have developed a new approach for treating and healing skin abscesses caused by bacteria resistant to most antibiotics. The study appears in the journal PLoS One.
The Institute of Food Technologists released three review articles in the Journal of Food Science that were presented at the IFT Annual Meeting in 2009. The articles provide greater detail on nanotechnology science and its application to food.
A team of University of Illinois at Chicago chemists, lead by assistant professor Petr Král report the ability to bend and reshape graphene, opening up the possibility of forming new and novel devices in the nanoscale. They use an everyday household ingredient to perform the work -- a droplet of water.
NIST today announced funding for 20 new research projects under its Technology Innovation Program, including projects ranging from unmanned, hovering aircraft for inspecting bridges to a high-speed sorting system for recycling aerospace metals to nanomaterials for advanced batteries.
Biomedical engineers have produced a laboratory chip with nanoscopic grooves and ridges capable of growing cardiac tissue that closely resembles natural heart muscle.
Scientists at Georgia Tech have developed a nanolithographic technique that can produce high-resolution patterns of at least three different chemicals on a single chip at writing speeds of up to one millimeter per second. The nanopatterns can be designed with any shape and are stable enough to be stored for weeks and used elsewhere.
Researchers from NIST and the Naval Research Laboratory have developed a new way to introduce magnetic impurities in a semiconductor crystal, a technique that will enable researchers to selectively implant atoms in a crystal one at a time to learn about its electrical and magnetic properties on the atomic scale.
A group including researchers from NIST have demonstrated how single-walled nanotubes can be used to detect and destroy an aggressive form of breast cancer.
The Georgia Institute of Technology has been awarded a $10.5 million U.S. Air Force Center of Excellence to design nanostructures for energy harvesting and adaptive materials, and to develop tools to optimize critical cognitive processes of the modern warfighter.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health, is increasing its investment in understanding the potential health, safety and environmental issues related to tiny particles that are used in many everyday products such as sunscreens, cosmetics and electronics. The NIEHS will award about $13 million over a two-year period, through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to bolster the NIEHS’s ongoing research portfolio in the area of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs).