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"Smaller
is better" is a hot automotive trend these days, but if you think
your Mini is small, take a look at these one-molecule "nano-cars"
than run on electron fuel:
The whole thing is a single molecule. Its core is formed by two hubs that have a five-ringed structure at their core. The hubs are connected by a rigid rod formed from carbon atoms, held together by triple bonds. Each hub is flanked by two “wheels,” each consisting of a three-ringed structure. The bulk of the molecule is a carbon backbone, with a small number of nitrogen and sulfur molecules thrown in.
The key to the system is the bond between the wheel and its hub, which is a double bond formed between two carbon atoms. Electrons can cause this double bond to rotate, which places part of the wheel in close proximity to a bulky side-molecule attached to the hub. This bulky piece acts a bit like a ratchet; the wheel requires some vibrational energy to get past it. Once it does, it’s positioned so that another dose of electrons can cause it to rotate again.
By repeating this cycle, the wheel will turn indefinitely in a single direction relative to the rest of the molecule.
Link (Image: Randy Wind and Martin Roelfs)
It's
not quite as fantastic as shrinking people in a submarine into someone's
bloodstream like in Fantastic Voyage, but it's very neat nonetheless.
Penn State University scientists have created self-propelling micromachines using spheres less than a micrometer wide:
Ayusman Sen of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and his colleagues have created the self-propelling microspiders using spheres less than a micrometre wide. Each sphere is made up of two halves – one hemisphere is gold, the other silica – and looks like a gold-and-silver Christmas bauble.
To turn the spheres into motors, the group attached a Grubbs catalyst – a molecule that builds long chains of smaller molecules – to the silica side. When Sen drops his spheres into a solvent containing the chemical norbornene, the catalyst spins a polymer from molecules of the chemical. Eventually there are far more unpolymerised single molecules of norbornene around the gold side of the sphere than the silica side , creating an osmotic gradient, as fluids will always move from a region with lots of particles to a region with fewer particles. The solvent rushes toward the gold side of the sphere, causing the whole sphere to move.
Sen's group were able to control the direction of the spheres' movement by placing lumps of gel soaked in norbornene at one corner of the tank of solvent. The thread-spinning spheres followed the trail of leached norbornene towards the gels.
Link - via Popular Science
If the development on this nanotechnology battery pans out soon you may never have to charge your laptop computer again or fish around in the junk draw for batteries. Researchers hope that they will be able to create a battery that will allow electronic devices to power themselves.
Lead co-author Dr Madhu Bhaskaran said the research combined the potential of piezoelectrics – materials capable of converting pressure into electrical energy – and the cornerstone of microchip manufacturing, thin film technology. “The power of piezoelectrics could be integrated into running shoes to charge mobile phones, enable laptops to be powered through typing or even used to convert blood pressure into a power source for pacemakers – essentially creating an everlasting battery,” she said.
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The governments of Singapore and the European Union are trying to develop a computer chip the size of a single molecule. From Singapore’s press release on the subject:
A*STAR’s IMRE and 10 EU research organisations are working together to build what is essentially a single molecule processor chip. As a comparison, a thousand of such molecular chips could fit into one of today’s microchips, the core device that determines computational speed. The ambitious project, termed Atomic Scale and Single Molecule Logic Gate Technologies (ATMOL), will establish a new process for making a complete molecular chip. This means that computing power can be increased significantly but take up only a small fraction of the space that is required by today’s standards.
The fabrication process involves the use of three unique ultra high vacuum (UHV) atomic scale interconnection machines which build the chip atom-by-atom. These machines physically move atoms into place one at a time at cryogenic temperatures. One of these machines is located in A*STAR’s IMRE.
Link via Glenn Reynolds | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Fabrizio Sclami used under Creative Commons license
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Scientists in Taiwan discovered that placing gold nanoparticles in plants made them glow, which could turn them into an effective form of nighttime illumination:
By implanting the gold nanoparticles into the leaves of the Bacopa caroliniana plants, the scientists were able to induce the chlorophyll in the leaves to produce a red emission. Under a high wavelength of ultraviolet light, the gold nanoparticles were able to produce a blue-violet fluorescence to trigger a red emission in the surrounding chlorophyll.[...]
“In the future, bio-LED could be used to make roadside trees luminescent at night. This will save energy and absorb CO2 as the bio-LED luminescence will cause the chloroplast to conduct photosynthesis,” Dr. Yen-Hsun Su said in an interview with Chemistry World.
Link via Popular Science | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user Irargerich used under Creative Commons license
DARPA-funded research is developing batteries to power nano-scale machinery. The largest of these batteries will be the size of a grain of sand. UCLA researcher Jane Chang explained:
“We’re trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller,” says Chang.
To reach this goal, Chang is thinking in three dimensions in collaboration with Bruce Dunn other researchers at UCLA. She’s coating well-ordered micro-pillars or nano-wires — fabricated to maximize the surface-to-volume ratio, and thus the potential energy density — with electrolyte, the conductive material that allows current to flow in a battery.
Using atomic layer deposition — a slow but precise process that allows layers of material only an atom thick to be sprayed on a surface — she has successfully applied the solid electrolyte lithium aluminosilicate to these nanomaterials.
Link via GearFuse | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Anton Fomkin used under Creative Commons license
A Möbius strip is a ribbon of material that has only one side. A group of nanotechnology researchers experimenting with manipulating tiny objects was able to reshape a DNA strand into a Möbius strip.
The ability to create complex structures on the tiniest of scales is one of the great challenges of nanotechnology. In particular, chemists are looking for particular topological structures, or structures that keep their basic properties no matter how much you stretch or twist them. A Möbius strip is a good example of such a structure, because no matter what you do it (short of tearing it, of course), it will always have only one side.
Link | Journal Article (Subscription required) | Image: Han et al.
Researchers at the École Polytechnique de Montréal used bacteria that follow magnetic pull to build a tiny pyramid:
By using a computer-controlled magnetic field, the researchers turned the bacteria into fully-compliant biological nanorobots.
The trick was using a type of microbe known as magnetotactic bacteria. These critters have little internal compasses, and will follow the pull of a magnetic field. By manipulating a magnetic field, the researchers tricked the bacteria into forming a giant, computer-controlled swarm. In one experiment, the researchers had the bacterial swarm assemble a small pyramid.
The researchers hope to use this development to perform microscopic tasks normally thought to be the future of nanotechnology, such as organ repair.
via Popular Science
The Photonics Research Group of Ghent University in Belgium created a 1 trillionth scale map that measures only 40 micrometers across. That’s about half the width of a human hair. It serves a purely decorative purpose on a new type of microchip that the team is developing:
The silicon photonics technology that is being developed with these chips integrates optical circuits onto a small chip: Light can be manipulated on submicrometer scale in tiny strips of silicon called waveguides or photonic wires. Using the unique properties of silicon, combined with state-of-the-art manufacturing technology, these silicon photonic circuits can pack a million times more components on the same footprint as today’s commercial glass-based photonics.
Teeny Ted from Turnip Town by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s smallest book. Each page measures about 11 by 15 microns:
The Robert Chaplin/SFU Nanobook project was produced using a focused-gallium-ion beam with the assistance of Dr. Li Yang, and Dr. Karen L. Kavanagh of Simon Fraser University, located at the summit of Burnaby Mountain, Burnaby, BC. The gallium beam has a minimum diameter of 7 nanometers, and was programmed to carve the space surrounding each letter of a book. The book was typeset in block letters with a resolution of 40 nanometers, and is made up of 30 microtablets, each carved on a polished piece of single crystalline silicon. The entire collection of microtablets is contained within an area of 69 x 97 microns square with an average size of tablet being 11 x 15 microns square.
Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnologist at the University of Washington, writes that in the future, biotech innovations could lead to display screens inside contact lenses:
These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle [see sidebar, "A Twinkle in the Eye"]. These lenses don’t give us the vision of an eagle or the benefit of running subtitles on our surroundings yet. But we have built a lens with one LED, which we’ve powered wirelessly with RF. What we’ve done so far barely hints at what will soon be possible with this technology.
Conventional contact lenses are polymers formed in specific shapes to correct faulty vision. To turn such a lens into a functional system, we integrate control circuits, communication circuits, and miniature antennas into the lens using custom-built optoelectronic components. Those components will eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs. Much of the hardware is semitransparent so that wearers can navigate their surroundings without crashing into them or becoming disoriented. In all likelihood, a separate, portable device will relay displayable information to the lens’s control circuit, which will operate the optoelectronics in the lens.
Link via CrunchGear
Creating nanomachines can be unprofitable because of the time necessary to create and then assemble the components. But researchers at Columbia University have found a way to make machines assemble themselves:
To make the gears, a thin copper sheet is laid over a heat-expanded polymer. When the polymer cools, it shrinks faster than the metal, which causes the metal to bend. When the metal bends, it creates regularly spaced teeth in the polymer, effectively making a microscopic gear. Stiffer metal that’s harder to bend creates a gear with fewer, larger teeth, while a more supple metal creates gears with smaller, more numerous teeth.
The team has already made a number of different types of gears, all at the six-to-25 millimeter range, and are now ready to shrink the process down further, to create gears smaller than a micrometer.
There are two very exciting recent advances in nanotechnology may soon result in a massive increase in memory capacities of your DVDs and iPods:
Researchers
at the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology
in Victoria, Australia, created a new material that could lead to new
discs that can store 10,000 times more data than your average DVDs.
(Image: Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
University of California at Berkeley)
Graduate students Patrick Bennett and Ryan Miyakawa at UC Berkeley made an entry for the "What is Nano" video competition, where people submit their explanations of what exactly nanotechnology means.
However, instead of a boring lecture with slides, they made an amazing Sesame Street-style musical, complete with homemade puppets! (The singer is Glory Liu)
Link to competition.
– via physorg
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by easf.
Diabetics monitoring their glucose levels may soon put the days of painful finger-sticks behind them. Instead, they can go through the one-time ordeal of getting inked with a nanoparticle tattoo. Heather Clark, a scientist at Draper Laboratories, has developed a nano ink particle that constantly samples glucose levels in the skin. Injected subcutaneously, the ink changes color in response to glucose content.
The nano ink particles are tiny, squishy spheres about 120 nanometers across. Inside the sphere are three parts: the glucose detecting molecule, a color-changing dye, and another molecule that mimics glucose.
…
If the molecules mostly latch onto glucose, the ink appears yellow. If glucose levels are low, the molecule latches onto the glucose mimic, turning the ink purple. A healthy level of glucose has a “funny orangey,” color, according to Clark. The sampling process repeats itself every few milliseconds.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by tempeh.
