Nanotechnology: Advanced science in ancient art

In the hip science of ultrasmall nanotechnology, fantastical future possibilities like rampaging nanorobots capture the most attention, but the first fruits of the field have been more mundane: tiny bits of mostly ordinary stuff that just sit there. Yet these bits—nanoparticles—gain wondrous new capabilities simply because they are so small.

Nano-Armor: Protecting the Soldiers of Tomorrow

An Israeli company has recently tested one of the most shock-resistant materials known to man. Five times stronger than steel and at least twice as strong as any impact-resistant material currently in use as protective gear, the new nano-based material is on its way to becoming the armor of the future.

Read rest of the story here: Physorg

Nanotech Advances May Lead to New Devices

Advances in nanotechnology such as tiny porphyrin tubes to make a broad range of nanodevices, and tiny bioelectronic circuits to make nanotech machines or sensors, could lead to new devices.

Nanotechnology combined with superconductivity could pave the way for ’spintronics’

As the ever-increasing power of computer chips brings us closer and closer to the limits of silicon technology, many researchers are betting that the future will belong to “spintronics”: a nanoscale technology in which information is carried not by the electron’s charge, as it is in conventional microchips, but by the electron’s intrinsic spin.

If a reliable way can be found to control and manipulate the spins, these researchers argue, spintronic devices could offer higher data processing speeds, lower electric consumption, and many other advantages over conventional chips–including, perhaps, the ability to carry out radically new quantum computations.

Now, University of Notre Dame physicist Boldizsar Janko and his colleagues believe they have found such a control technique. Their work, funded by the National Science Foundation through a Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team grant, was published in the March 5, 2005, edition of the journal Nature.

Nanotech advance makes carbon nanotubes

Researchers have made carbon nanotubes bent in sharp predetermined angles, a technical advance that could lead to use of the long, thin cylinders of carbon as tiny springs, tips for atomic force microscopes, smaller electrical connectors in integrated circuits, and in many other nanotechnology applications.

In a paper published in the April 7, 2005, issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry B, Sungho Jin, a professor of materials science at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, reported a technique to create bent nanotubes by manipulating the electric field during their growth and adjusting other conditions.

Nanodevice For Weighing Individual Molecules

Physicists have created the first nanodevices capable of weighing individual biological molecules. This technology may lead to new forms of molecular identification that are cheaper and faster than existing methods, as well as revolutionary new instruments for proteomics.

According to Michael Roukes, professor of physics, applied physics, and bioengineering at Caltech and the founding director of Caltech’s Kavli Nanoscience Institute, the technology his group has announced this week shows the immense potential of nanotechnology for creating transformational new instrumentation for the medical and life sciences. The new devices are at the nanoscale, he explains, since their principal component is significantly less than a millionth of a meter in width.

Tiny Porphyrin Tubes May Lead to New Nanodevices

Sunlight splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen using devices too small to be seen in a standard microscope. That’s a goal of a research team from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sandia National Laboratories.

Sunlight splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen using devices too small to be seen in a standard microscope. That’s a goal of a research team from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Sandia National Laboratories. The research has captured the interest of chemists around the world pursuing methods of producing hydrogen from water.

Data Storage May Enter New Nanotech Phase

Toroid moment storage in nano-particles would be a true quantum leap in the area of data storage, say researchers. A new phase of matter exhibited in nanorods and nanodisks may enable a thousand-fold increase in memory and data storage. Itsy bitsy rods and disks may be able to store vast numbers of data bits.

A new phase of matter exhibited in nanorods and nanodisks may enable a thousand-fold increase in memory and data storage Latest News about Data Storage, say University of Arkansas physicists Ivan Naumov, Laurent Bellaiche and Huaxiang Fu.

Scientists Make Magnetic Silicon, Advancing Spin Based Computing

CNSE spintronics lab research shows silicon can maintain a permanent magnetic field above room temperature, which could help to develop more effective magnetic semiconductors and future spintronic devices

Scientists at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University at Albany announced research that could lay the foundation for using silicon to develop chips with magnetic properties, potentially impacting the development of electron-spin-based or “spintronic” devices.mage: Ferromagnetic hysteresis loops taken at three temperatures measured from the Mn implated Si.
mage: Ferromagnetic hysteresis loops taken at three temperatures measured from the Mn implated Si.

Self-assembled Nano-sized Probes Allow To See Tumors Through Flesh And Skin

Nano-sized particles embedded with bright, light-emitting molecules have enabled researchers to visualize a tumor more than one centimeter below the skin surface using only infrared light.

A team of chemists, bioengineers and medical researchers based at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota has lodged fluorescent materials called porphyrins within the surface of a polymersome, a cell-like vesicle, to image a tumor within a living rodent. Their findings, which represent a proof of principle for the use of emissive polymersomes to target and visualize tumors, appear in the Feb. 7 online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Scientists Unlock Secrets Behind Nanotube Formation

Nanotubes are ubiquitous in the world of science. Although several methods for making them exist, little is known about how these techniques physically produce the hollow fibers of carbon molecules known as nanotubes, that is until now. A multinational team of scientists has discovered that multi-walled carbon nanotubes made by the pure carbon arc method are, in fact, carbon crystals that form inside drops of glass-coated liquid carbon.

Small science to be big in 2005

According to this BBC News article (Jan 20, 2005) Nanotechnology” will be a much more familiar word to everyone in 2005, not just scientists, say analysts

Nanotechnologies involve the manipulation of structures at the molecular scale and can change the behaviour of materials. It has been slowly moving into sun creams, drug delivery and computer disk drives to improve storage. But it will soon be the cornerstone of every manufacturing industry says a Deloitte research trends report.

Read rest of the article at : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4187813.stm

Some uses for Nanotech:
SOME POTENTIAL USES OF NANOTECHNOLOG
1 - Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) for displays
2 - Photovoltaic film that converts light into electricity
3 - Scratch-proof coated windows that clean themselves with UV
4 - Fabrics coated to resist stains and control temperature
5 - Intelligent clothing measures pulse and respiration
6 - Bucky-tubeframe is light but very strong
7 - Hip-joint made from biocompatible materials
8 - Nano-particle paint to prevent corrosion
9 - Thermo-chromic glass to regulate light
10 - Magnetic layers for compact data memory
11 - Carbon nanotube fuel cells to power electronics and vehicles
12 - Nano-engineered cochlear implant

Nanotech device touted to replace transistors in computers

U.S. scientists have developed a layer of molecules just three-billionths of a meter thick that can help store data during a computing operation without using traditional semiconductors and some day could replace the transistor as the building block of all computers.

The technology could produce computers that are thousands of times more powerful than those produced today, Hewlett Packard researchers say in a paper published Tuesday in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Nanotech: Big things in small packages

Forty-five years ago, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman proposed a future world in which computers might be reduced radically from the giant room-sized machines of that era and in which atoms could be rearranged and ordered one by one according to our wishes. This future anticipated by Feynman in 1959 is now upon us.

Today’s laptop computers provide far more computational power, storage capacity and speed than was ever achieved by the enormous contraptions of yesteryear. And advances in nanotechnology are taking us to the brink of a world in which systems can be designed and developed at the molecular level.