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Category: nanotechnology – Page 288

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.

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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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Interesting read for those interested in inorganic protein (NP) states from a solid to a liquid as the research proves inorganic NPs are in a ‘glassy’ state while transitioning from a solid to a liquid form.

Molecular dynamics simulations of ubiquitin in water/glycerol solutions are used to test the suggestion by Karplus and coworkers that proteins in their biologically active state should exhibit a dynamics similar to ‘surface-melted’ inorganic nanoparticles (NPs). Motivated by recent studies indicating that surface-melted inorganic NPs are in a ‘glassy’ state that is an intermediate dynamical state between a solid and liquid, we probe the validity and significance of this proposed analogy. In particular, atomistic simulations of ubiquitin in solution based on CHARMM36 force field and pre-melted Ni NPs (Voter-Chen Embedded Atom Method potential) indicate a common dynamic heterogeneity, along with other features of glass-forming (GF) liquids such as collective atomic motion in the form of string -like atomic displacements, potential energy fluctuations and particle displacements with long range correlations (‘colored’ or ‘pink’ noise), and particle displacement events having a power law scaling in magnitude, as found in earthquakes. On the other hand, we find the dynamics of ubiquitin to be even more like a polycrystalline material in which the α-helix and β-sheet regions of the protein are similar to crystal grains so that the string -like collective atomic motion is concentrated in regions between the α-helix and β-sheet domains.

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Nice.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in the US are combining nanoscience with the principle of Faraday rotation, a magnetic phenomenon discovered in 1845, in a new method for speedy medical tests.

The team applied the magneto-optical technique, called frequency-domain Faraday rotation spectroscopy—or fd-FRS, to characterize proteins, using antibody-functionalized magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs).

“Fd-FRS is a new way of looking at the interaction between light and magnetized material,” says Shawn Putnam, assistant professor UFC’s College of Engineering & Computer Science. “We covered the surfaces of magnetic nanoparticles with a layer of biological sensors and measured their movement after exposure to their corresponding biological targets for detection.”

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IBM researchers have established experimental proof of a previously difficult-to-prove law of physics, and in so doing may have pointed to a way to overcome many of the heat management issues faced in today’s electronics. Researchers at IBM Zurich have been able to take measurements of the thermal conductance of metallic quantum point contacts made of gold. No big deal, you say? They conducted measurements at the single-atom level, at room temperature—the first time that’s ever been done.

These measurements confirm the Wiedemann–Franz law, which predicts that the smallest amount of heat that can be carried across a metallic junction — a single quantum of heat — is directly proportional to the quantum of electrical conductance through the same junction. By experimentally confirming this law, it can now be used with confidence to predict and to explore nanoscale thermal and electrical phenomena affecting materials down to the size of few atoms or a single molecule.

“Although the Wiedemann–Franz law is predicted, and should be valid for certain metals, it has turned out to be difficult to prove it when you go to the nanoscale,” explained Bernd Gotsmann, an IBM scientist and one of the lead researchers on this work, in an e-mail interview with IEEE Spectrum. “We think the difficulty is mainly a sign of the challenges related to the measurement of thermal transport on small scales.”

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Published today, using a technique which looks like trampoline, IBM scientists have measured the thermal conductance of metallic quantum point contacts made of gold down to the single-atom level at room temperature for the first time.

As everything scales to the nanoscale, heat – more precisely, the loss of it – becomes an issue in device reliability. To address this, last year, IBM scientists in Zurich and students from ETH Zurich published and patented a technique to measure the temperature of these nano-sized objects at and below 10 nanometer – a remarkable achievement. They called the novel technique scanning probe thermometry (video) and it provided engineers, for the first time, with the ability to map heat loss across a chip, and, more importantly, map heat loss down to the single device level and to map temperature distributions.

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I do hope people realize things like nanoparticles/ quantum bio revolutionizing everything in medicine beyond AI. Anyone, not considering in biotech and medical space in general will look dated as improved and advance options are presented that works in conjunction with our systems v. trying kill things or negatively altered our systems like chemo, radioactive treatments, and other drugs do today.

Moderna Therapeutics hopes to turn RNA into a new kind of drug. Can it live up to the hype?

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We all love graphene — the one-atom-thick sheets of carbon aren’t just super flexible, harder than diamond, and stronger than steel, they’ve also recently become superconductors in their own right.

But it’s not the only over-achieving nanomaterial out there. Researchers have just simulated a stretched out, one-dimensional (1D) chain of boron, predicting that the material could have even weirder properties than graphene.

To be clear, 1D boron chains haven’t been created as yet — so far, this research is purely based on detailed computer simulations of the new material.

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Graphene cooking oil?

In Brief

  • Researchers have discovered a way to make soybean oil into the super-strong material graphene. The material has a wide variety of potential uses and can revolutionize electronics.
  • The material could be used to make cell phone batteries last 25 percent longer, make more effective solar cells, and even filter fuel out of air.

Researchers have found a way to turn cheap, everyday cooking oil into the wonder material graphene – a technique that could greatly reduce the cost of making the much-touted nanomaterial.

Graphene is a single sheet of carbon atoms with incredible properties – it’s 200 times stronger than steel, harder than diamond, and incredibly flexible. Under certain conditions, it can even be turned into a superconductor that carries electricity with zero resistance.

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