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A quantum metasurface that can simultaneously control multiple properties of light

:oooo.


Metasurfaces are artificial materials designed at the nanoscale, which can control the scattering of light with exceptionally high precision. Over the past decade or so, these materials have been used to create a variety of technological tools ranging from sensors to lenses and imaging techniques.

A research team led by Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University has recently proposed a new type of metasurface that can control both the spatiotemporal and of transmitted and reflected . In a paper published in Nature Physics, the team showed that realizing a quantum metasurface is possible and could be achieved by entangling the macroscopic response of thin atom arrays to light.

“Quantum metasurfaces are an entirely new type of materials designed atom by atom, which enable applications such as quantum computation with photons,” Rivka Bekenstein, the lead author of the recent paper, told Phys.org. “We combined a state-of-the-art technique for manipulating the state of many by (i.e., Rydberg interactions) with a recent discovery of how a single sheet of atoms can reflect light. We identified an architecture that can be realized in the laboratory, in which a single layer of atoms can act as a switchable quantum mirror.”

Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures Funds Microchip Implant Vaccine Technology

You really can not make this up The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated more than $21 million towards developing a vaccine technology that uses a tattoo-like mechanism which injects invisible nanoparticles under the skin that is now being tested in a vaccine against the virus that causes COVID-19.


Another study funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published in December, 2019 by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the Global Good, Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, WA, describes how “near-infrared quantum dots” can be implanted under the skin along with a vaccine to encode information for “decentralized data storage and bio-sensing.”

“To maximize the utility of this technology for vaccination campaigns, we aimed to create a platform compatible with microneedle-delivered vaccines that could reliably encode data on an individual for at least five years after administration,” said the MIT paper, titled Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches record vaccination. “In addition, this system also needed to be highly biocompatible, deliver a sufficient amount of dye after an application time of 2 min or less, and be detectable using a minimally adapted smartphone.”

Fridrik Laurusson, an author of the microchip study, is from The Global Good, Intellectual Ventures Labarotory . Its website features Microsoft founder Bill Gates on its front page and describes itself as a “collaboration between Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures” a company founded by Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung of Microsoft. Wikipedia describes Intellectual Ventures in Gates’ home state as a private American company that “centers on the development and licensing of intellectual property” and “one of the top-five owners of U.S. patents, as of 2011.

NanoViricides, Inc. Progress on COVID-19 Drug Encouraging

The company’s update on its development of COVID-19 drug candidate is promising.

Vancouver, British Columbia—(Newsfile Corp. — March 31, 2020) — NanoViricides, Inc. (NYSE American: NNVC) (the “Company”) is a nano-biopharmaceutical Company at the development stage, with proprietary and patented drug development work focused on viral diseases. The Company’s research involves the use of a unique nanomedicine technology called nanoviricides — agents designed to “fool” a virus into attaching to an antiviral nanomachine, in the same way that the virus normally attaches to the receptors on a cell surface, but for the purpose of its neutralization and destruction. NanoViricides was highlighted by SmallCapsDaily for providing an update on its progress to develop a drug that can treat COVID-19, the coronaviral pneumonia disease which is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, aka, 2019-nCoV, also known as the Wuhan coronavirus.

In Good News, Scientists Built a Device That Generates Electricity ‘Out of Thin Air’

They found it buried in the muddy shores of the Potomac River more than three decades ago: a strange “sediment organism” that could do things nobody had ever seen before in bacteria.

This unusual microbe, belonging to the Geobacter genus, was first noted for its ability to produce magnetite in the absence of oxygen, but with time scientists found it could make other things too, like bacterial nanowires that conduct electricity.

For years, researchers have been trying to figure out ways to usefully exploit that natural gift, and this year they might have hit pay-dirt with a device they’re calling the Air-gen. According to the team, their device can create electricity out of… well, almost nothing.

Team designs carbon nanostructure stronger than diamonds

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions have architecturally designed plate-nanolattices—nanometer-sized carbon structures—that are stronger than diamonds as a ratio of strength to density.

In a recent study in Nature Communications, the scientists report success in conceptualizing and fabricating the material, which consists of closely connected, closed-cell plates instead of the cylindrical trusses common in such structures over the past few decades.

“Previous beam-based designs, while of great interest, had not been so efficient in terms of mechanical properties,” said corresponding author Jens Bauer, a UCI researcher in mechanical & aerospace engineering. “This new class of plate-nanolattices that we’ve created is dramatically stronger and stiffer than the best beam-nanolattices.”

Closing in on ‘holy grail’ of room temperature quantum computing chips

To process information, photons must interact. However, these tiny packets of light want nothing to do with each other, each passing by without altering the other. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have coaxed photons into interacting with one another with unprecedented efficiency — a key advance toward realizing long-awaited quantum optics technologies for computing, communication and remote sensing.

The team, led by Yuping Huang, an associate professor of physics and director of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, brings us closer to that goal with a nano-scale chip that facilitates photon interactions with much higher efficiency than any previous system. The new method, reported as a memorandum in the Sept. 18 issue of Optica, works at very low energy levels, suggesting that it could be optimized to work at the level of individual photons — the holy grail for room-temperature quantum computing and secure quantum communication.

“We’re pushing the boundaries of physics and optical engineering in order to bring quantum and all-optical signal processing closer to reality,” said Huang.

Coating That Could Destroy COVID-19 Virus, for Use in Hospital Masks, in Development

Researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) are working to create a protective coating that would include a new nanomaterial to catch #COVID19 and kill it within seconds.


ORLANDO, Fla., April 10, 2020 — The masks that health care workers wear to protect them from the virus that causes COVID-19 block the virus before it reaches their faces, but do not destroy it. To further protect doctors, nurses, and others on the front lines of the pandemic, researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) are working to create a protective coating that would include a new nanomaterial to catch the virus and kill it within seconds.

Scientists capture 3D images of nanoparticles, atom

O,.,o.


Since their invention in the 1930s, electron microscopes have helped scientists peer into the atomic structure of ordinary materials like steel, and even exotic graphene. But despite these advances, such imaging techniques cannot precisely map out the 3D atomic structure of materials in a liquid solution, such as a catalyst in a hydrogen fuel cell, or the electrolytes in your car’s battery.

Now, researchers at Berkeley Lab, in collaboration with the Institute for Basic Science in South Korea, Monash University in Australia, and UC Berkeley, have developed a technique that produces atomic-scale 3D images of nanoparticles tumbling in liquid between sheets of graphene, the thinnest material possible.

3D images of platinum particles between 2-3 nm in diameter shown rotating in liquid under an electron microscope

3D images of platinum particles between 2–3 nm in diameter shown rotating in liquid under an electron microscope. Each nanoparticle has approximately 600 atoms. White spheres indicate the position of each atom in a nanoparticle. (Image: IBS)

The future is nano, and it will revolutionise medical science Essays

If you’ve been interested in nanotech, but have been too afraid to ask, here is an introductory and interesting article that I’d like to recommend.

My interest in nanotech is based on my hope that nanotech can lead to methods of constructing substrates that are suitable for mind uploading. It may lead to a technique to create duplicate minds.

“These ‘biological engineering’ technologies have made real one of the dreams of the nanotechnology pioneers: the deployment of molecular assemblers able to construct any shape with atomic precision, following a rational design.”

“…hybrid bioinorganic devices that mimic biological processes will soon be used in new computers and electronic devices.”


In the mid-1980s, evidence started to emerge from labs across the world confirming that scientists were finally able to reach the nano level in experimental conditions and not just with their theories. Working at scales defined in millionths of a millimetre, Richard Smalley, Robert Curl and Harold Kroto reported the discovery of ‘buckminsterfullerene’ – a nanosized polyhedron, with 32 faces fused into a cage-like, soccer-ball structure, and with carbon atoms sitting in each of its 60 vertices.

These miniature ‘Bucky’ balls (named for their similarity to the geodesic dome structures made by the architect R Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s), are found in tiny quantities in soot, in interstellar space and in the atmospheres of carbon-rich red giant stars, but Kroto was able to recreate them in chemical reactions in the lab while visiting Rice University in Texas. Then, in 1991, Nadrian Seeman’s lab at New York University used 10 artificial strands of DNA to create the first human-made nanostructure, connecting up the DNA strands to resemble the edges of a cube, so marking the beginning of the field now known as ‘DNA nanotechnology’. Clever scientists with broad visions started to realise that a new kind of technology, prophesied by Richard Feynman in the 1950s, was finally materialising, as researchers achieved the capacity to visualise, fabricate and manipulate matter at the nanometre scale.