You'll Need an Electron Microscope to Read the World's Smallest Book
Image: Robert Chaplin
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.
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Eye Augmentation in the Future
Image: Raygun Studio
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
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Scientists Design Self-Assembling Nanogears
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.
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Recent Advances in Nanotechnology May Lead to a Massive Increase in Memory Capacity
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.
The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate. Multiple data patterns can be written and read within the same area in the material without interfering with each other. Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers have written six different patterns within the same area. They've further increased the storage density to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of as many as 10 nanorod layers. In a paper published online today in the journal Nature, Gu's group reports recording speeds of about a gigabit per second.
The picture to the right shows 6 patterns written in the same area of the nanorods using three different color and two different polarization of lasers: Link (Photo credit: Nature Publishing Group)
(Image: Zettl Research Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
University of California at Berkeley)
- Berkeley (yay! My alma mater) researcher Alex Zettl and colleagues
created a physical memory cell composed of an iron nanoparticle that
can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. The position of the iron
particle represents the state of the bit, which leads to very dense
and highly stabile memory arrays, resulting in very long lifetime: Link
How stable is stable? Here's a chart that shows typical storage lifetimes vs bit density for a variety of storage media. As you can see, his stuff beats rock!
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Nanotechnology Explained with Puppetry
[YouTube - Link]
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
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Diabetes-monitoring Nanoparticle Tattoos
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.
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