Technut News

They might not look like your Ford F-150 or Toyota Camry, but a new generation of nanocars and nanotrucks (along with nanotrains and even nanobackhoes) could eventually build anything from computer memory chips to entire buildings, atom by atom.

Now they don’t even have to be built; some nanomachines can build themselves, according to an upcoming study.

“Most things that people build are top-down. You cut down a tree to build a table,” said James Tour, a scientist at Rice University and co-author on the upcoming study, which will appear in the upcoming issue of the new journal Tetrahedron.

“But what if you could make the table from assembling molecules together from the bottom up?” said Tour.

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Scientists at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT have developed nanometer-sized “nanoworms” that can travel through the bloodstream and — like tiny anti-cancer missiles — zero in on tumors. These can circulate in the body for hours since they do not trigger the immune system.

These nanoworms, composed of magnetic iron oxide and coated with a polymer, are able to find and attach to tumors. The nanoworms are superparamagnetic and show up very well on MRIs.

Using these nanoworms, doctors could eventually be able to target and reveal the location of developing tumors that are too small to detect by conventional methods.

With the use of this nanoworms concept, researchers are developing chemical attachments that will help to reach specific targets in the body, and are adding drugs that would be released when these targets are reached.

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IM Flash Technologies LLC, a joint venture between Intel and Micron has made world’s first sub-40nm Nand memory device.This 34nm 32Gb multi-level chip which is due this year is the smallest Nand process geometry on the market.

NAND Flash architecture is one of two flash technologies (the other being NOR) used in memory cards such as the CompactFlash cards. It is also used in USB Flash drives, MP3 players, and provides the image storage for digital cameras.

According to the statement released by Intel and Micron the chip is the only monolithic device at this density that fits into a standard 48-lead thin small-outline package, providing a cost-effective path to higher densities in existing applications.

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Open source 3D printer copies itself

Based in the Waitakeres, in West Auckland, software developer and artist Vik Olliver is part of a team developing an open-source, self-copying 3D printer. The RepRap (Replicating Rapid-prototyper) printer can replicate and update itself. It can print its own parts, including updates, says Olliver, who is one of the core members of the RepRap team. The 3D printer works by building components up in layers of plastic, mainly polylactic acid (PLA), which is a bio-degradable polymer made from lactic acid. The technology already exists, but commercial machines are very expensive. They also can’t copy themselves, and they can’t be manipulated by users, says Olliver.

RepRap has a different idea. The team, which is spread over New Zealand, the UK and the US, develops and gives away the designs for its much cheaper machine, which also has self-copying capabilities. It wants to make the machine available to anybody — including small communities in the developing world, as well as people in the developed world, says Olliver.

Accordingly, the RepRap machine is distributed, at no cost, under the GNU (General Public Licence).

World’s smallest transistor is the size of a molecule

Scientists have created the world’s smallest transistor, one little bigger than a single molecule.

A team in Manchester last year announced that it had created transistors that measured 50 atoms across. Now they have slashed the size of the transistors to just 10 atoms, marking the first true electronic nanocomponent, where a nanometre is one billionth of a metre, and a single human hair is 100,000 nanometres across.

The University of Manchester team led by Prof Andre Geim has been fashioning the transistors from the world’s thinnest material, called graphene, consisting of carbon atoms a single layer thick, arranged in a hexagonal pattern like that seen in chicken wire.

Working with Dr Kostya Novoselov, he believes that the world’s smallest transistor, described in the journal Science, could spark the development of super-fast computer chips.

Are nanobots on their way?

US researchers have built a proto-prototype nano assembler

The first real steps towards building a microscopic device that can construct nano machines have been taken by US researchers. Writing in the peer-reviewed publication, International Journal of Nanomanufacturing from Inderscience Publishers, researchers describe an early prototype for a nanoassembler.

In his 1986 book, The Engines of Creation, K Eric Drexler set down the long-term aim of nanotechnology - to create an assembler, a microscopic device, a robot, that could construct yet smaller devices from individual atoms and molecules.

For the last two decades, those researchers who recognized the potential have taken diminutive steps towards such a nanoassembler. Those taking the top-down approach have seen the manipulative power of the atomic force microscope (AFM), a machine that can observe and handle single atoms, as one solution. Those taking the bottom-up approach are using chemistry to build molecular machinery.

However, neither the top-down nor the bottom-up approach is yet to fulfill Drexler’s prophecy of functional nanobots that can construct other machines on a scale of just a few billionths of a meter.

Nanomaterial turns radiation directly into electricity

Materials that directly convert radiation into electricity could produce a new era of spacecraft and even Earth-based vehicles powered by high-powered nuclear batteries, say US researchers.

Electricity is usually made using nuclear power by heating steam to rotate turbines that generate electricity.

But beginning in the 1960s, the US and Soviet Union used thermoelectric materials that convert heat into electricity to power spacecraft using nuclear fission or decaying radioactive material. The Pioneer missions were among those using the latter, “nuclear battery” approach.

Dispensing with the steam and turbines makes those systems smaller and less complicated. But thermoelectric materials have very low efficiency. Now US researchers say they have developed highly efficient materials that can convert the radiation, not heat, from nuclear materials and reactions into electricity.

Artificial Muscle Heals Itself, Charges IPod

Researchers in California have created an artificial muscle that heals itself and generates electricity.

The research, parts of which are already being used in Japan to generate electricity from ocean waves, could be used to make walking robots, develop better prosthetics, or even charge your iPod.

“We’ve made an artificial muscle that, when you apply electricity to it, it expands” more than 200 percent, said Qibing Pei, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and study author. “The motion and energy is a lot like human muscles.”

Artificial muscles have been around for years but have essentially hamstrung themselves. Some artificial muscles get so big they tear, developing uneven film thickness and random particles that cause muscle failure.

The researchers used flexible, ever-more ubiquitous carbon nanotubes as electrodes instead of other films, often metal-based, that fail after repeated use.

Chemical brain controls nanobots

A tiny chemical “brain” which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented.

The molecular device - just two billionths of a metre across - was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously in a test.

Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists say it could also be used to boost the processing power of future computers.

Many experts have high hopes for nano-machines in treating disease.

“If [in the future] you want to remotely operate on a tumour you might want to send some molecular machines there,” explained Dr Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, Tsukuba, Japan.

“But you cannot just put them into the blood and [expect them] to go to the right place.”

Wiperless windshield created, powered by nanotech

Italian car designer Leonardo Fioravanti (of Pininfarina fame) has developed a prototype car with a windshield that doesn’t need wipers. It can brush away water and dirt all by itself.

The car, dubbed Hidra, uses a special aerodynamic design along with four sophisticated surface treatments to the windshield to keep the driver’s view clear. The first treatment filters the sun and repels water. The second is made of nano-dust which is able to push dirt to the edges of the glass. This dust is activated by the third layer, which senses dirt and activates the second layer as necessary. Finally, it’s all topped off by the fourth layer which is a conductor of electricity to power the whole mechanism.

Fioravanti claims that this technology could go into mass production within 5 years, but it already works and has been installed on the Hidra concept car.

Scientists Scan Striking Nanoscale Images

For the first time, late last year, a team of British scientists filmed the nanoscale interaction of an attacking virus with an enzyme and a DNA strand in real time.

This was the latest breakthrough in the advancement of scanning probe microscopes — the family of nonoptical microscopes researchers use to create striking images through raster scans of individual atoms.

The granddaddy of them all is the scanning tunneling microscope, a 1986 invention that won its creators the Nobel Prize. STMs pass an electrical probe over a substance, allowing scientists to visualize regions of high electron density and infer the position of individual atoms and molecules.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the development of STMs, an international contest — SPMage07 — showcasing the best STM images was founded.

Nanowires Could Turn Your T-Shirts Into Nano-Power Stations

A nanotech invention by a US research team offers an intriguing glimpse of the future: slip on some nanowire-embedded clothes, plug your MP3 player or cellphone into them, and as you dance or walk around, your outfit generates enough power to run the gadget. More details on how the fabric works, and some nano-imagery after the jump.

Professor Zhong Lin Wang and team of the Georgia Institute of Technology coated kevlar strands with zinc oxide nanowires, protecting the bushy wires with a polymer and adding gold to other fibers to act as a conductor. The piezoelectric power-generating action comes when the nanowires bend as two fibers rub together, translating bending of the material into electricity which flows along the gold fibers.

Professor Wang says that across several square feet of fabric the nanowire fibers can generate power adding up to tens of milliwatts, which is not a huge amount, but is certainly enough for a dribble top-up charge for your portable devices.

‘Holy Grail’ Of Nanoscience: DNA Technique Yields 3-D Crystalline Organization Of Nanoparticles

In an achievement some see as the “holy grail” of nanoscience, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have for the first time used DNA to guide the creation of three-dimensional, ordered, crystalline structures of nanoparticles (particles with dimensions measured in billionths of a meter). The ability to engineer such 3-D structures is essential to producing functional materials that take advantage of the unique properties that may exist at the nanoscale - for example, enhanced magnetism, improved catalytic activity, or new optical properties.

“From previous research, we know that highly selective DNA binding can be used to program nanoparticle interactions,” said Oleg Gang, a scientist at Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), who led the interdisciplinary research team, which includes Dmytro Nykypanchuk and Mathew Maye of the CFN, and Daniel van der Lelie of the Biology Department. “But while theory has intriguingly predicted that DNA can guide nanoparticles to form ordered, 3-D phases, no one has accomplished this experimentally, until now.”

As with the group’s previous work, the new assembly method relies on the attractive forces between complementary strands of DNA - the molecule made of pairing bases known by the letters A, T, G, and C that carries the genetic code of living things. First, the scientists attach to nanoparticles hair-like extensions of DNA with specific “recognition sequences” of complementary bases. Then they mix the DNA-covered particles in solution. When the recognition sequences find one another in solution, they bind together to link the nanoparticles.

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“This work is the first step to demonstrate that it is possible to obtain ordered structures. But it opens so many avenues for researchers, and this is why it is so exciting,” Gang says.