Lighter than air! Stronger than steel! More flexible than rubber! No, it’s not an upcoming superhero flick: It’s the latest marvelous formulation of carbon nanotubes–at least as reported by the creators of the new super-material. Researchers working on artificial muscles say they’ve created nanotech ribbons that make our human muscles look puny by comparison. The ribbons, which are made of long, entangled 11-nanometer-thick nanotubes, can stretch to more than three times their normal width but are stiffer and stronger than steel…. They can expand and contract thousands of times and withstand temperatures ranging from -190 to over 1,600 °C. What’s more, they are almost as light as air, and are transparent, conductive, and flexible [Technology Review].
The material is made from bundles of vertically aligned nanotubes that respond directly to electricity. Lengthwise, the muscle can expand and contract with tremendous speed; from side-to-side, it’s super-stiff. Its possibilities may only be limited by the imaginations of engineers. [The material's composition] “is akin to having diamond-like behavior in one direction, and rubber-like behavior in the others” [Wired], says material scientist John Madden, who wasn’t involved in the research.
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Sapphire crystals may be the next material to transform the electronics industry, thanks to nanotechnology researchers who have announced a new way of storing data that would fit the contents of 250 DVDs on a coin-sized surface. The study, published in Science, illustrates how nanoscale elements can organize themselves over a large sheet of semiconductor film. The researchers expect that when applied to electronic media, their discovery will improve the efficiency of data storage, savings which can then be transferred to improve other pieces of electronics besides just storage, like high-definition screens and solar cells.
Similar attempts have previously been made to improve data storage on semiconductor films, but have consistently failed because the polymers—which are known to link together, on their own, in precise patterns—lose their organized structure when the film being used increases in area, rendering them useless for storing memory. Lead researchers Ting Xu from the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Russell from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst overcame this by layering the film of block copolymers onto the surface of a commercially available sapphire crystal. When the crystal is cut at an angle—a common procedure known as a miscut—and heated to 1,300 to 1,500 degrees Centigrade (2,372 to 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit) for 24 hours, its surface reorganizes into a highly ordered pattern of sawtooth ridges that can then be used to guide the self-assembly of the block polymers [Science Daily].
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The joke about hydrogen-powered cars is that they’re about 10 years away–and always will be. The technology has been held up largely by the high cost of hydrogen fuel cells, but now researchers say they’ve found a way to bring down the cost dramatically by making a key component out of carbon nanotubes instead of platinum. More than half the cost of fuel-cell stacks comes from platinum, according to the Department of Energy. “Fuel cells haven’t been commercialized for larger-scale applications because platinum is too expensive,” says Liming Dai [Technology Review], the lead author of the new study.
Researcher found that tightly packed, vertically aligned carbon nanotubes doped with nitrogen were more effective as catalysts than platinum, which is usually used to help oxygen react within the fuel cell. That is a vital stage of the fuel cell cycle. Rather than burning fuel to create heat to power a turbine, fuel cells turn chemical energy directly into a flow of electricity. Hydrogen gas, for example, is pumped past one electrode (the anode), where it is split into its constituent electrons and protons. The electrons then flow out of the anode, providing electrical power, while the protons diffuse through the cell. Electrons and protons both end up at a second electrode (the cathode), where they combine with oxygen to form water [New Scientist].
That second reaction is very slow, so engineers have developed cathodes made out of materials that act as chemical catalysts and speed up the reaction. Until now, platinum was considered the best catalyst, but now carbon nanotubes with a trace of nitrogen (the critical ingredient) have left the precious metal in the dust.
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The future, according to author and technological soothsayer Ray Kurzweil, is going to be awesome. In his books, he maps out a future for humanity in which we live forever, supported by a fleet of cleverer-than-human artificial intelligences who solve such trivial problems as hunger and disease, while simultaneously creating ever more intelligent computer minds, racing technological progress forward according to his Law of Accelerated Returns [Telegraph]. Now, Kurzweil is opening a new school, Singularity University, that will gather smart people together and encourage them to bring that future to pass.
Kurzweil dreamed up the school with Peter Diamandis, CEO of the X Prize Foundation, and got backing from Google and NASA; it will be housed on the NASA Ames base in California. The university takes its name from Kurzweil’s recent book, The Singularity Is Near, in which he argues that exponential advances in technology will shortly transform human life beyond all recognition…. This is Kurzweil’s own take on the widespread science-fiction use of the term “singularity” to refer to the day when artificial “intelligence” and/or processing power surpasses that of the human race’s collective brains. Sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge probably did most to hijack the word “singularity” from its use in physics to describe the breakdown of normal principles near a black hole [The Register].
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Researchers who created the first so-called invisibility cloak in 2006, have made significant advances that could lead to an invisibility cloak for visible light in as little as six months. “A large number of folks are looking at it, and I think it’s a matter of coupling the right material to the right device,” [Discovery News] said researcher David Smith. His team has developed an algorithm that speeds up the design of materials that can bend light around an object. Using the new algorithm, they were able to create an invisibility cloak that can bend much wider spectrum of microwaves than previous versions.
Invisibility cloaks rely on metamaterials, ones with unique properties that derive from [their] physical structure, not [their] chemical make up [Discovery News]. Smith compares the effect of metamaterials on light to mirages that appear over a road on sweltering days. “You see what looks like water hovering over the road, but it is in reality a reflection from the sky,” Smith said. “In that example, the mirage you see is cloaking the road below. In effect, we are creating an engineered mirage with this latest cloak design” [AFP].
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Thin, translucent sheets of graphene may one day allow electronic displays that can be folded and rolled up like a newspaper. Previously, the only way to make graphene—thin layers of carbon atoms that can conduct electricity at stunning speeds—was to use sticky tape to pull off thin films of graphite. Now researchers are developing a technique that can create flexible sheets of graphene on a commercially useful scale. “Until now, everyone has been using our so-called ‘pencil technique’ (the sticky-tape method) but the disadvantage is that the graphite crystals are quite small—it’s really painstaking research,” [BBC News] said Andre Geim, who was the first to create graphene in 2004.
It was Geim who first proposed that graphene could be made more efficiently using a method called chemical vapor deposition. On that advice, South Korean researchers found a way to deposit graphene using CVD, which involves evaporating a mixture of large carbon-containing molecules and firing it over a heated metal surface. The molecules break down, releasing carbon that re-organises on the surface in neat graphene sheets. The precise conditions of the experiment determine how many sheets are produced [BBC News]. The researchers used extremely thin pieces of nickel as the metal surface on which to grow the graphene, the molecules of which forms a regular hexagonal pattern similar to chicken wire. Afterward, the nickel can be chemically dissolved away, leaving behind pure graphene.
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Never before has the nano-scale world of viruses and proteins been so visible. A team led by scientists at IBM Research has developed a new imaging technique based on the same principles used in magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, which is routinely used in hospitals. But the new process has 100 million times better resolution than a conventional MRI, allowing researchers to construct 3-D images of individual tobacco mosaic viruses, which are only 18 nanometers in diameter. “This technology stands to revolutionize the way we look at viruses, bacteria, proteins, and other biological elements,” said IBM [researcher] Mark Dean…. This advancement was enabled by a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM), which relies on detecting ultrasmall magnetic forces [CNN].
The MRFM process hasn’t captured images of the smallest objects ever: Techniques like atomic force and scanning tunneling microscopes have provided images of individual atoms. (An atom is about one-tenth of a nanometer in diameter). But these techniques are more destructive of biological samples because they send a stream of electrons at the target in order to get an image. And these microscopes cannot peer beneath the surface of the Lilliputian structures [The New York Times]. Researchers say the new 3-D technique will be enormously valuable for the study of protein structures.
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By harnessing a quantum mechanic force of repulsion researchers have caused nanoparticles to repel each other, and in their next experiment they plan to levitate a tiny gold nanosphere. The quantum force is part of the Casimir effect, first predicted in 1948 by the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, which describes both the attraction and repulsion that occur between two tiny objects held close together in a vacuum. While the attractive force has previously been demonstrated, the new experiment marks the first time the repulsive force has been seen in a lab.
But the experiment wasn’t just a neat physics trick; the researchers say the repulsive force may one day be used in nanoscale devices. Lead author Jeremy Munday says the research may lend itself to producing ultrasensitive detectors and almost friction-free devices by separating their components via Casimir repulsion. “Where you would normally have friction,” he says, “you can start to greatly reduce that by having a repulsive interaction that doesn’t let the surfaces come into contact” [Scientific American].
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Federal research on the emerging field of nanotechnology has failed to adequately address health, safety, and environmental concerns, according to a critical new report from the National Research Council. With more than 600 products that use nanotech materials already on the market, the lag in research creates a risk to consumers, and could also fuel a “nanophobia” in which people assume that every product that uses the new technology is harmful. David Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies … said the report echoed calls by industry and congressional leaders for a revamped research plan for nanotechnology. “The administration’s delay has hurt investor and consumer confidence,” Rejeski said in a statement. “It has gambled with public health and safety” [Reuters].
Nanomaterials are engineered on the scale of a billionth of a meter, perhaps 1/10,000 the width of a human hair. They are turning up in a range of items including consumer products like toothpaste and tennis rackets and industrial products like degreasers or adhesives [The New York Times]. Engineered nanoparticles can also be found in sunscreens, cosmetics, and the fabric used in “nano-pants” that resist stains.
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IBM has won a $4.9 million government grant from DARPA to begin the first phase of research on “cognitive computing”– essentially building computers that work like living brains. The new brain-like computers will aim to process vast amounts of data to solve problems without relying on specific programmed algorithms. Mark Dean, Vice President of IBM said, “The challenge is that computers today are very good at computing, but what we really need is a more efficient way of sifting through information” [International Herald Tribune].
The inside of computers already have the look of neural networks, a static road map of electronic circuits. But the brain actually works by constantly creating, breaking, and tweaking the synaptic connections between neurons. Although today’s computers may excel at complex challenges with clear rules, like chess, they fail at simple tasks that require strategy, sensation, perception, and learning, like finding misplaced keys. IBM will partner with five universities to develop new nano-scale circuitry that has the ability to shift depending on the signals that pass through them. Free from the constraints of explicitly programmed function, computers could gather together disparate information, weigh it based on experience, form memory independently and arguably begin to solve problems in a way that has so far been the preserve of what we call “thinking” [BBC].
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Next-generation loudspeakers could be as thin as paper, as clear as glass, and as stretchable as rubber. Chinese researchers have discovered that sheets of carbon nanotubes can amplify sound as loud as conventional speakers can. These nanotube speakers could eventually be used to add audio capabilities to windows, video screens, and clothing. “It is so wonderfully simple, that it brings up a strong wave of ‘Duh, why didn’t I think of that!’,” says physical chemist Howard Schmidt at Rice University [Nature News].
The researchers made the speaker by aligning carbon nanotubes, each about 10 nanometers in diameters, into thin flexible sheets. When they applied an electric current with an audio frequency to the sheets, the sheets broadcast the sounds loud and clear. The researcher describe their device in Nano Letters. The physics behind the nanotube speakers is different from that of conventional speakers. Unlike standard loudspeakers that generate sound by vibrations in the surrounding air molecules, the nanotube speaker doesn’t emit vibrations. The team used a laser vibrometer to detect vibrations in the sheet, but found nothing [Physorg.com].
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A thin nanotech paper that’s being developed in a Florida lab could revolutionize everything from aviation to laptop computers, researchers say. The super-strong “buckypaper” could be layered like papier-mâché to build lighter airplanes and cars, or it could be exposed to an electric charge and used to illuminate computer and television screens–and those are just the most obvious applications, researchers say.
Buckypaper is 10 times lighter but potentially 500 times stronger than steel when sheets of it are stacked and pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity like copper or silicon and disperses heat like steel or brass. “All those things are what a lot of people in nanotechnology have been working toward as sort of Holy Grails,” said [nanotech expert] Wade Adams [AP].
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Researchers have invented a new tool in the fight against antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” that are becoming a growing health threat worldwide: a nanoscale device that shows instantly whether new drugs can kill the bacteria. The device uses tiny springboards coated in bacteria proteins, which are then exposed to an antibiotic; if the drug effectively binds to the proteins, the springboard bends.
[D]rug resistant superbugs are becoming more common and increasingly causing problems outside of hospitals. So [lead researcher Rachel] McKendry and colleagues want to find speedier ways to screen new potential antibiotics. They say their new nanoscale device can help, revealing in minutes whether an antibiotic is potent enough to kill bacteria [New Scientist]. Typically, researchers test new antibiotics by growing a bacterial culture and then applying the antibiotics, but it can take days for the cultures to grow.
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Would-be superheros have a cause for celebration, as the ability to walk up walls just got a little closer. Researchers have developed a nanotech superglue modeled on the minute structures on gecko feet that allow the lizards to scamper up sheer surfaces. They say the new glue is three times stronger than previous gecko-inspired glues, and ten times stickier than the lizards themselves.
The gecko owes its gravity-defying capacity to tiny structures that make use of the atomic-scale attractive van der Waals force. Look close enough at a gecko foot and you will see an ordered, forest-like structure — roughly half a million fine hairs that each sprout into hundreds of even thinner, spatula-shaped tips. When these tips come into close contact with a surface they induce strong van der Waals forces that keep the foot anchored — that is, until the gecko decides to peel it off [Physics World].
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Researchers have used nets of carbon nanotubes to print electronic circuits on to thin, flexible sheets of plastic, in yet another example of nanotechnology’s expanding possibilities. The work is a major step towards the development of ‘plastic electronics’, where circuits on light, flexible surfaces could provide a range of products from paper-thin displays to intelligent food packaging and smart clothing [Chemistry World].
Everyone from entrepreneurs to the military is dreaming up applications for flexible electronics: They could be used to make a single-page electronic newspaper, for example, or could be formed into an electronic “skin” that covers an entire airplane, and checks the plane’s surface for cracks. Since the typical silicon-based circuits are too rigid to use in such devices, researchers have been trying out new materials. The other major contender is semiconductors that use organic molecules, but those have been shown to have poor performance and reliability.
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