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Category: nanotechnology – Page 295

A New Bionic Eye Could Give Robots and the Blind 20/20 Vision

Good news.

In a paper published last week in Nature, though, researchers from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology devised a way to build photosensors directly into a hemispherical artificial retina. This enabled them to create a device that can mimic the wide field of view, responsiveness, and resolution of the human eye.

“The structural mimicry of Gu and colleagues’ artificial eye is certainly impressive, but what makes it truly stand out from previously reported devices is that many of its sensory capabilities compare favorably with those of its natural counterpart,” writes Hongrui Jiang, an engineer at the University of Wisconsin Madison, in a perspective in Nature.

Key to the breakthrough was an ingenious way of implanting photosensors into a dome-shaped artificial retina. The team created a hemisphere of aluminum oxide peppered with densely-packed nanoscale pores. They then used vapor deposition to grow nanowires inside these pores made from perovskite, a type of photosensitive compound used in solar cells.

Membrane nanopore transport gets picky

Trying to determine how negatively charged ions squeeze through a carbon nanotube 20,000 times smaller than a human hair is no easy feat.

Not only did Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists do that but they found that those ions are unexpectedly picky depending on the (a negatively charged ion). The research appears in ACS Nano.

Inner pores of carbon nanotubes combine extremely fast water transport and ion selectivity that could potentially be useful for high-performance water desalination and separation applications. Determining which anions are permeable to the nanotube pore can be critical to many separation processes, including desalination, which turns seawater into fresh water by removing the salt ions.

Scientists Disguise Cancer-Hunting Nanorobots as Blood Cells

In order to find and treat cancerous tumors, a team of scientists is working on an aggressive new approach that involves a swarm of tiny, cancer-killing robots.

The idea is to inject the nanobots, which are engineered to look and travel like white blood cells, into a patient’s veins and move them around inside the body with powerful magnets.

“Our vision was to create the next-generation vehicle for minimally invasive targeted drug delivery that can reach even deeper tissues inside the body with even more difficult access routes than what was previously possible,” Metin Sitti, Director of Physical Intelligence at the Max Planck Society, said in a press release.

Solar Technology Breakthrough: World Record Quantum Dot Solar Cell Efficiency

The development of next-generation solar power technology that has potential to be used as a flexible ‘skin’ over hard surfaces has moved a step closer, thanks to a significant breakthrough at The University of Queensland.

UQ researchers set a world record for the conversion of solar energy to electricity via the use of tiny nanoparticles called ‘quantum dots’, which pass electrons between one another and generate electrical current when exposed to solar energy in a solar cell device.

The development represents a significant step towards making the technology commercially-viable and supporting global renewable energy targets.

Magnetic core–shell nanowires as MRI contrast agents for cell tracking

Interesting articles on theranostic iron nanowires. I’m interested in watching all aspects of development of nanobots, because I think it may lead to new forms of treatments for superlongevity and superintelligence.

Phys.org: Iron nanorobots go undercover to do surveillance on living cells in real time:

https://phys.org/…/2020–05-iron-nanorobots-undercover-surve…

Identifying the precise location of cells and their migration dynamics is of utmost importance for achieving the therapeutic potential of cells after implantation into a host. Magnetic resonance imaging is a suitable, non-invasive technique for cell monitoring when used in combination with contrast agents.

This work shows that nanowires with an iron core and an iron oxide shell are excellent materials for this application, due to their customizable magnetic properties and biocompatibility. The longitudinal and transverse magnetic relaxivities of the core–shell nanowires were evaluated at 1.5 T, revealing a high performance as T2 contrast agents. Different levels of oxidation and various surface coatings were tested at 7 T. Their effects on the T2 contrast were reflected in the tailored transverse relaxivities. Finally, the detection of nanowire-labeled breast cancer cells was demonstrated in T2-weighted images of cells implanted in both, in vitro in tissue-mimicking phantoms and in vivo in mouse brain. Labeling the cells with a nanowire concentration of 0.8 μg of Fe/mL allowed the detection of 25 cells/µL in vitro, diminishing the possibility of side effects.

Intermolecular vibrational energy transfer via microcavity strong light-matter coupling

Strong coupling between cavity photon modes and donor/acceptor molecules can form polaritons (hybrid particles made of a photon strongly coupled to an electric dipole) to facilitate selective vibrational energy transfer between molecules in the liquid phase. The process is typically arduous and hampered by weak intermolecular forces. In a new report now published on Science, Bo Xiang, and a team of scientists in materials science, engineering and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, U.S., reported a state-of-the-art strategy to engineer strong light-matter coupling. Using pump-probe and two-dimensional (2-D) infrared spectroscopy, Xiang et al. found that strong coupling in the cavity mode enhanced the vibrational energy transfer of two solute molecules. The team increased the energy transfer by increasing the cavity lifetime, suggesting the energy transfer process to be a polaritonic process. This pathway on vibrational energy transfer will open new directions for applications in remote chemistry, vibration polariton condensation and sensing mechanisms.

Vibrational energy transfer (VET) is a universal process ranging from chemical catalysis to biological signal transduction and molecular recognition. Selective intermolecular vibrational energy transfer (VET) from solute-to-solute is relatively rare due to weak intermolecular forces. As a result, intermolecular VET is often unclear in the presence of intramolecular vibrational redistribution (IVR). In this work, Xiang et al. detailed a state-of-the-art method to engineer intermolecular vibrational interactions via strong light-matter coupling. To accomplish this, they inserted a highly concentrated molecular sample into an optical microcavity or placed it onto a plasmonic nanostructure. The confined electromagnetic modes in the setup then reversibly interacted with collective macroscopic molecular vibrational polarization for hybridized light-matter states known as vibrational polaritons.

A deep-learning-enhanced e-skin that can decode complex human motions

Researchers at Seoul National University and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have recently developed a sensor that can act as an electronic skin and integrated it with a deep neural network. This deep learning-enhanced e-skin system, presented in a paper published in Nature Communications, can capture human dynamic motions, such as rapid finger movements, from a distance.

The new system stems from an interdisciplinary collaboration that involves experts in the fields of mechanical engineering and computer science. The two researchers who led the recent study are Seung Hwan Ko, a professor of mechanical engineering at Soul National University and Sungho Jo, a computing professor at KAIST.

For several years, Prof. Ko had been trying to develop highly sensitive strain by generating cracks in metal nanoparticle films using laser technology. The resulting sensor arrays were then applied to a virtual reality (VR) glove designed to detect the movements of people’s fingers.

Nano UAVs for Military Applications

Over the past several years, the increased application of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) in a wide variety of industries has inspired both public and private research laboratories to not only continually improve this technology, but to also support the miniaturization of these devices. The development of both micro- and nano-UAVs is directly related to the ability of researchers to miniaturize the major components of these devices, some of which include micro-processors, sensors, batteries and all necessary wireless communication units that allow UAVs to function properly in any given settings.

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