Tag Archives: nanoscale

Flawed Diamonds Promise Sensory Perfection

Berkeley Lab researchers and their colleagues extend electron spin in diamond for incredibly tiny magnetic detectors

From brain to heart to stomach, the bodies of humans and animals generate weak magnetic fields that a supersensitive detector could use to pinpoint illnesses, trace drugs – and maybe even read minds. Sensors no bigger than a thumbnail could map gas deposits underground, analyze chemicals, and pinpoint explosives that hide from other probes.

Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley, working with colleagues from Harvard University, have improved the performance of one of the most potent possible sensors of magnetic fields on the nanoscale – a diamond defect no bigger than a pair of atoms, called a nitrogen vacancy (NV) center. (more…)

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IBM Research Makes World’s Smallest Movie Using Atoms

Future storage systems based on atomic-scale memory would be capable of storing massive amounts of Big Data
GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS® certifies movie as World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film

SAN JOSE, Calif. – 01 May 2013: Scientists from IBM today unveiled the world’s smallest movie, made with one of the tiniest elements in the universe: atoms. Named “A Boy and His Atom,” the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS -verified movie used thousands of precisely placed atoms to create nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action. (more…)

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Researchers ‘Nanoweld’ by Applying Light to Aligned Nanorods in Solid Materials

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a way to melt or “weld” specific portions of polymers by embedding aligned nanoparticles within the materials. Their technique, which melts fibers along a chosen direction within a material, may lead to stronger, more resilient nanofibers and materials.

Physicists Jason Bochinski and Laura Clarke, with materials scientist Joe Tracy, placed specifically aligned gold nanorods within a solid material. Gold nanorods absorb light at different wavelengths, depending upon the size and orientation of the nanorod, and then they convert that absorbed light directly into heat. In this case, the nanorods were designed to respond to light wavelengths of 520 nanometers (nm) in a horizontal alignment and 800 nm when vertically aligned. Human beings can see light at 520 nm (it looks green), while 808 nm is in the near infrared spectrum, invisible to our eyes. (more…)

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Bio-inspired Fibres Change Colour When Stretched

A team of materials scientists at Harvard University and the University of Exeter has invented a new fibre which changes colour when stretched. Inspired by nature, the researchers identified and replicated the unique structural elements, which create the bright iridescent blue colour of a tropical plant’s fruit.

The multilayered fibre, described in the journal Advanced Materials, could lend itself to the creation of smart fabrics that visibly react to heat or pressure.

“Our new fibre is based on a structure we found in nature, and through clever engineering we’ve taken its capabilities a step further,” says lead author Dr Mathias Kolle, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “The plant, of course, cannot change colour. By combining its structure with an elastic material, however, we’ve created an artificial version that passes through a full rainbow of colours as it’s stretched.” (more…)

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Researchers Create Flexible, Nanoscale ‘Bed of Nails’ for Possible Drug Delivery

Researchers at North Carolina State University have come up with a technique to embed needle-like carbon nanofibers in an elastic membrane, creating a flexible “bed of nails” on the nanoscale that opens the door to development of new drug-delivery systems.

The research community is interested in finding new ways to deliver precise doses of drugs to specific targets, such as regions of the brain. One idea is to create balloons embedded with nanoscale spikes that are coated with the relevant drug. Theoretically, the deflated balloon could be inserted into the target area and then inflated, allowing the spikes on the balloon’s surface to pierce the surrounding cell walls and deliver the drug. The balloon could then be deflated and withdrawn. (more…)

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UCLA Engineers Develop New Energy-Efficient Computer Memory Using Magnetic Materials

MeRAM is up to 1,000 times more energy-efficient than current technologies

By using electric voltage instead of a flowing electric current, researchers from UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have made major improvements to an ultra-fast, high-capacity class of computer memory known as magnetoresistive random access memory, or MRAM.

The UCLA team’s improved memory, which they call MeRAM for magnetoelectric random access memory, has great potential to be used in future memory chips for almost all electronic applications, including smart-phones, tablets, computers and microprocessors, as well as for data storage, like the solid-state disks used in computers and large data centers. (more…)

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Capturing Circulating Cancer Cells Could Provide Insights into How Disease Spreads

ANN ARBOR — A glass plate with a nanoscale roughness could be a simple way for scientists to capture and study the circulating tumor cells that carry cancer around the body through the bloodstream.

Engineering and medical researchers at the University of Michigan have devised such a set-up, which they say takes advantage of cancer cells’ stronger drive to settle and bind compared with normal blood cells. (more…)

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Seeing in Color at the Nanoscale

Berkeley Lab scientists develop a new nanotech tool to probe solar-energy conversion

If nanoscience were television, we’d be in the 1950s. Although scientists can make and manipulate nanoscale objects with increasingly awesome control, they are limited to black-and-white imagery for examining those objects. Information about nanoscale chemistry and interactions with light—the atomic-microscopy equivalent to color—is tantalizingly out of reach to all but the most persistent researchers.

But that may all change with the introduction of a new microscopy tool from researchers at the Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) that delivers exquisite chemical details with a resolution once thought impossible. The team developed their tool to investigate solar-to-electric energy conversion at its most fundamental level, but their invention promises to reveal new worlds of data to researchers in all walks of nanoscience. (more…)

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