Nice.
A Nanotech company came up with a way for fingerprints to stay invisible on glass and metal surfaces: Nanotechnology is taking us to new and unique places.
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Category: nanotechnology – Page 273
CRISPR/Cas9, a powerful gene editing technique that has already been used in a human, is thought by many as a “cut and paste” for DNA in living organisms. While in a sense that is what happens, delivering the ribonucleoprotein that does the genetic editing and the RNA that hones in on the target, into the cellular nucleus without being damaged is a challenge. That is why the efficiency of successful edits remains very low. Researchers at University of Massachusetts Amherst have now come up with nanoparticles that protect the protein and RNA as they’re brought to their work site.
The nanoparticles are engineered around their cargo and have shown a 90% success rate of getting the cargo into the nucleus, and a 30% editing efficiency, which is “remarkable” according to the researchers. So far the team has tested their technique on cultured cells, but they’re already working on trying the same in laboratory animals. As part of their research, they developed a novel way of tracking the Cas9 protein inside the cells, something that will certainly help other scientists in this area.
“By finely tuning the interactions between engineered Cas9En protein and nanoparticles, we were able to construct these delivery vectors. The vectors carrying the Cas9 protein and sgRNA come into contact with the cell membrane, fuse, and release the Cas9:sgRNA directly into the cell cytoplasm,” in a statement said Vincent Rotello, lead author of the study in ACS Nano. “Cas9 protein also has a nuclear guiding sequence that ushers the complex into the destination nucleus. The key is to tweak the Cas9 protein,” he adds. “We have delivered this Cas9 protein and sgRNA pair into the cell nucleus without getting it trapped on its way. We have watched the delivery process live in real time using sophisticated microscopy.”
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Quantum mechanics, the physics that governs nature at the atomic and subatomic scale, contains a host of new physical phenomena to explore quantum states at the nanoscale. Though tricky, there are ways to exploit these inherently fragile and sensitive systems for quantum sensing. One nascent technology in particular makes use of point defects, or single-atom misplacements, in nanoscale materials, such as diamond nanoparticles, to measure electromagnetic fields, temperature, pressure, frequency and other variables with unprecedented precision and accuracy.
Quantum sensing could revolutionize medical diagnostics, enable new drug development, improve the design of electronic devices and more.
For use in quantum sensing, the bulk nanodiamond crystal surrounding the point defect must be highly perfect. Any deviation from perfection, such as additional missing atoms, strain in the crystalline lattice of the diamond, or the presence of other impurities, will adversely affect the quantum behavior of the material. Highly perfect nanodiamonds are also quite expensive and difficult to make.
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Nice.
Nanorobots and other mini-vehicles might be able to perform important services in medicine one day for example, by conducting remotely-controlled operations or transporting pharmaceutical agents to a desired location in the body. However, to date it has been hard to steer such micro- and nanoswimmers accurately through biological fluids such as blood, synovial fluid or the inside of the eyeball.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart are now presenting two new approaches for constructing propulsion systems for tiny floating bodies. In the case of one motor, the propulsion is generated by bubbles which are caused to oscillate by ultrasound (Applied Physics Letters, “Wireless actuation with functional acoustic surfaces”). With the other, a current caused by the product of an enzymatic reaction propels a nanoswimmer (JACS, “Bubble-Free Propulsion of Ultrasmall Tubular Nanojets Biocatalytic Reactions”).
‘Caged’ non-fluorescent carbon dot enters the cancer cell, loses its caging and lights up. Credit: University of Illinois.
Tiny carbon dots have, for the first time, been applied to intracellular imaging and tracking of drug delivery involving various optical and vibrational spectroscopic-based techniques such as fluorescence, Raman, and hyperspectral imaging. Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated, for the first time, that photo luminescent carbon nanoparticles can exhibit reversible switching of their optical properties in cancer cells.
“One of the major advantages of these agents are their strong intrinsic optical sensitivity without the need for any additional dye/fluorophore and with no photo-bleaching issues associated with it,” explained Dipanjan Pan, an assistant professor of bioengineering and the leader of the study. “Using some elegant nanoscale surface chemistry, we created a molecular ‘masking’ pathway to turn off the fluorescence and then selectively remove the mask leading to regaining the brightness.
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In Brief:
Researchers found a new “supercomputer” using nanotechnology. These biocomputers can solve mathematical problems faster, and they are more energy efficient.
Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have created a biological computer using nanotechnology. This, in itself, is not so remarkable, but it can solve mathematical problems much faster than conventional computers. The team was also able to prove that biological computers using molecular motors are more energy efficient.
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Great read and highlights what I have been showing folks around the convergence that is occurring between technology and biology via Quantum. We’re achieving (in the Epoch chart on Singularity Evolution) Epoch 5 via Quantum Bio and our work we’re seeing from DARPA, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and others. Synbio has to mimic the properties we see with Quantum Biology/ Biosystems. And, things like DARPA’s own RadioBio will enable and expose many things on multiple fronts in Biosensors (including security), IoT, healthcare/ medical prevention management and treatments, AI, etc.
Singularity – the state of being singular; Oneness.
The biological system is a natural form of technology. A simple examination of the nanobiology of the macromolecular system of any cell will attest to this – enzymes and structural proteins are veritable nanomachines, linked to the information processing network of DNA and plasma membranes. Far from being a primordial or rudimentary organic technology – we are discovering more and more the level of complexity and paragon technological sophistication of living systems, which as is being discovered, even includes non-trivial quantum mechanical phenomena once thought to only be possible in the highly specialized and controlled environment of the laboratory.
Reciprocally, soon our technologies will become living systems – particularly through nanotechnology (which is being accomplished through reverse engineering and hybridization with biomolecules, particularly DNA) and general artificial intelligence – machine sentience. Following this parallelization of biology with technology, we can examine how humanity as a technological supraorganism is undergoing a period of punctuated speciation – an evolutionary transformation of both our inner and outer world.
I don’t know how to say this; however, Apple has already shared their own experiment Li-Fi over a year ago; now this from IEEE.
Now an advance by a team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in South Korea and Dow Chemical may turn the display market on its head by eliminating the need for backlights in LCD devices. They have produced a LED pixel out of nanorods capable of both emitting and detecting light.
In the video below, you can get a further description of how the nanorods manage to both detect and emit light as well as some pretty attractive future applications, like mobile phones that can “see” without the need of a camera lens or communicate with each other using Light Fidelity (Li-Fi) technology.
Nice write up on magnetic Nano diamonds (NDs)
Here we present a simple physical method to prepare magnetic nanodiamonds (NDs) using high dose Fe ion-implantation. The Fe atoms are embedded into NDs through Fe ion-implantation and the crystal structure of NDs are recovered by thermal annealing.
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A biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics for disease intersections of arthritis, hypertension, and cancer, today announced that they have entered into a license agreement regarding the Company’s SMARTICLES platform for the delivery of nanoparticles including small molecules, peptides, proteins and biologics…
Marina Biotech, Inc. a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and commercialization of innovative therapeutics for disease intersections of arthritis, hypertension, and cancer, today announced that they have entered into a license agreement regarding the Company’s SMARTICLES platform for the delivery of nanoparticles including small molecules, peptides, proteins and biologics. This represents the first time that the Company’s SMARTICLES technologies have been licensed in connection with nanoparticles delivering small molecules, peptides, proteins and biologics. Under terms of the agreement, Marina could receive up to $90MM in success based milestones. Further details of the agreement were not disclosed.
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