MIT researchers, led by Professor Sidney Yip, have proposed a new theory that might eliminate one obstacle to more capable robots – the limited speed and control of the “artificial muscles” that perform such tasks. Currently, robotic muscles move 100 times slower than ours. But engineers using the Yip lab’s new theory could boost those …
A online Wired magazine article discussing the use of nanoparticles and nanoscale sensors for detecting and treating cancer The National Cancer Institute, which recently announced two waves of funding for nanotech training and research, sees nanotechnology as vital to its stated goal of “eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015.” Nanotech gives us the …
A new HIV test the size of a credit card promises to diagnose the disease in minutes rather than weeks, and could be deployed in sub-Saharan Africa as early as next year. In tests, it has detected the amount of CD4 cells in the blood in as little as 10 minutes. The CD4 count indicates …
Recent advances in nanotech devices, point to new ways for developing inexpensive and effective cancer-screening devices. One of the most promising of these new detectors is being built by Charles Lieber, a chemist at Harvard University. In an article this month in Nature Biotechnology, he announced a highly-sensitive detector that can simultaneously find multiple cancer …
Membranes composed of manmade carbon nanotubes permit a fluid flow nearly 10,000 to 100,000 times faster than conventional fluid flow theory would predict because of the nanotubes’ nearly friction-free surface, researchers at the University of Kentucky report in the Nov. 3 issue of Nature. In their study, Mainak Majumder, Nitin Chopra and Bruce J. Hinds …
What are called nanosaws, nanocombs and nanowires can be grown (self-assembled) from cadmium selenium. A study of the temperature and pressure conditions were systematically varied and the impact on the growth was determined. The nanosaws and combs seem to be 2 microns wide. I think the nanowires are a few nanometers thick. While this is …
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have potentially opened up a new avenue toward room temperature quantum information processing. By demonstrating the ability to image and control single isolated electron spins in diamond, they unexpectedly discovered a new channel for transferring information to other surrounding spins — an initial step towards spin-based information processing. A team …
Richard Smalley, a Rice University professor who discovered fullerenes, died Friday after a long bout with cancer
Quantum dots that produce white light could be the light bulb’s successor But chemists at Vanderbilt University discovered a way to make quantum dots spontaneously produce broad-spectrum white light. The report of their discovery, which happened by accident, appears in the communication “White-light Emission from Magic-Sized Cadmium Selenide Nanocrystals” published online October 18 by the …
This will help put us on the path to computational cell biology as an extension of computational chemistry. Computational chemistry is important to the development of molecular manufacturing. Yale researchers have reported a method to count the absolute number of individual protein molecules inside a living cell, and to measure accurately where they are located, …