Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: nanotechnology – Page 2

Researchers at MIT have developed a noninvasive medical monitoring device powerful enough to detect single cells within blood vessels, yet small enough to wear like a wristwatch. One important aspect of this wearable device is that it can enable continuous monitoring of circulating cells in the human body. The technology was reported in npj Biosensing.

The device—named CircTrek—was developed by researchers in the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek research group, led by Deblina Sarkar, assistant professor at MIT and AT&T Career Development Chair at the MIT Media Lab. This technology could greatly facilitate early diagnosis of disease, detection of disease relapse, assessment of infection risk, and determination of whether a disease treatment is working, among other medical processes.

Whereas traditional blood tests are like a snapshot of a patient’s condition, CircTrek was designed to present real-time assessment, referred to in the npj Biosensing paper as having been “an unmet goal to date.” A different technology that offers monitoring of cells in the bloodstream with some continuity, in vivo flow cytometry, “requires a room-sized microscope, and patients need to be there for a long time,” says Kyuho Jang, a Ph.D. student in Sarkar’s lab.

Read more | >

If you haven’t heard of a tardigrade before, prepare to be wowed. These clumsy, eight-legged creatures, nicknamed water bears, are about half a millimeter long and can survive practically anything: freezing temperatures, near starvation, high pressure, radiation exposure, outer space and more. Researchers reporting in the journal Nano Letters took advantage of the tardigrade’s nearly indestructible nature and gave the critters tiny “tattoos” to test a microfabrication technique to build microscopic, biocompatible devices.

“Through this technology, we’re not just creating micro-tattoos on tardigrades—we’re extending this capability to various living organisms, including bacteria,” explains Ding Zhao, a co-author of the paper.

Microfabrication has revolutionized electronics and photonics, creating micro-and nanoscale devices ranging from microprocessors and solar cells to biosensors that detect food contamination or cancerous cells. But the technology could also advance medicine and , if researchers can adapt to make them compatible with the biological realm.

Read more | >

Over the past decades, electronics engineers developed increasingly small, flexible and sophisticated sensors that can pick up a wide range of signals, ranging from human motions to heartrate and other biological signals. These sensors have in turn enabled the development of new electronics, including smartwatches, biomedical devices that can help monitor the health of users over time and other wearable or implantable systems.

Strain , which are designed to convert mechanical force into , are among the most widely used sensing devices within the , as they can be valuable for tracking both human movements and health-related biological signals. While these sensors are already embedded in many electronic devices, most existing solutions are only able to track movements in one direction.

Sensors that can accurately pick up movements and forces in multiple directions could be highly advantageous, as they could be applied to a wider range of scenarios. In addition, these sensors could be embedded in existing electronic devices to broaden their functions or enhance their capabilities.

Read more | >

Suppose you want to make a tiny robot to perform surgery inside a human patient. To avoid damaging healthy tissue and to squeeze into tight spots, the robot should be squishy. And manipulating the robot’s movements with magnetic fields would make sense, as tissues don’t respond to magnetism. But what material would you use for the robot’s limbs? Magnetic materials are stiff and brittle. Embedding tiny particles of them in a rubbery matrix could work, but the thinner—and therefore bendier—you make the composite material, the less it responds to a magnetic field. Heinrich Jaeger of the University of Chicago, Monica Olvera de la Cruz of Northwestern University, Illinois, and their collaborators have now overcome that obstacle by making thin, flexible sheets out of self-assembled nanoparticles of magnetite [1]. Even a modest field of 100 milliteslas can lift a sheet and bend it by 50°, they found.

At room temperature, magnetite (Fe3O4) is ferrimagnetic—that is, the magnetic moments in its two sublattices align in opposite directions but with unequal magnitudes, yielding a net magnetization. The smaller a ferrimagnet, the greater the chance that it has a single domain, and therefore the lower the temperature at which the domain’s magnetization will flip. When the sample size gets down to a few tens of nanometers, a ferrimagnet made of randomly flipping particles becomes, in effect, a paramagnet—that is, it lacks a net magnetization and is attracted by an applied magnetic field. The attraction can be strong. The discoverers of this phenomenon in 1959 dubbed it superparamagnetism [2].

The researchers realized that a sheet made from a single layer of superparamagnetic particles could serve as a viable material for the magnetic actuation of small soft robots. To create the layers, they suspended magnetite nanoparticles in droplets of water coated with an organic solvent. The solvent attracted the nanoparticles, which migrated to a droplet’s surface. The water slowly evaporated, leaving behind a layer of closely packed nanoparticles draped on the droplet’s support structure, a square copper grid. Each of the 20 × 20 µm squares supported a single sheet. As shown in the figure, some of the sheets happened to have a single unattached corner.

Read more | >

In order to showcase ultra-strong artificial muscles, Ray Baughman from the University of Texas at Dallas and his colleagues built a catapult.

The scientists published their findings in the journal Science. The device contains yarns similar in diameter to human hair, spun from carbon nanotubes and soaked in paraffin wax. When a current is passed through the yarn, the wax heats up and expands. As the yarn swells, its particular helical weave causes it to shorten, and the muscle contracts. As it cools, the yarn relaxes and returns to its original length. When coiled lightly or heated to high enough temperatures, wax-free yarns behave in the same fashion.

The torque produced by the twisting and untwisting of the yarns is sufficient to power a miniature catapult. The yarn can haul 200 times the weight that a natural muscle of the same size can, and generates more torque than a large electric motor if compared by weight. Currently, the available manufacturing techniques have limited the weight of the yarn. They can make yarn that lifts up 50 grams. That doesn’t sound like much, but researchers have shown the nanotube yarns lifting loads as much as 50,000 times greater than their own weight.

Read more | >

Nanobots aren’t just microscopic machines—they could come in countless shapes and sizes, each designed for a unique purpose. From medical nanobots that repair cells to swarming micro-robots that build structures at the atomic level, the future of nanotechnology is limitless. Could these tiny machines revolutionize medicine, industry, and even space exploration? #Nanotech #Nanobots #FutureTech #Science #Innovation …

Read more | >

Condensation is critical for applications like power generation, water harvesting, and cooling systems. However, traditional surfaces suffer from a drop in performance under high subcooling, when the surface temperature is much lower than the surrounding vapor. This leads to water flooding and reduced heat transfer.

To tackle this long-standing challenge, researchers at National Taiwan University and National Chung Hsing University have developed a novel three-dimensional (3D) hybrid surface that significantly enhances performance and avoids flooding, even at high subcooling. The paper is published in Small Structures.

The new surface integrates short hydrophobic nanowires and hydrophilic microchannels in a structured pattern. This combination helps guide water droplets efficiently off the surface, preventing the accumulation of water that typically hampers heat transfer.

Read more | >

There are a seemingly endless number of quantum states that describe quantum matter and the strange phenomena that emerge when large numbers of electrons interact. For decades, many of these states have been theoretical: mathematical and computational predictions potentially hiding among real-life materials—a zoo, as many scientists are coming to refer to it, with new “species” just waiting to be discovered and described.

In a new study published on April 3 in Nature, researchers added over a dozen states to the growing quantum zoo.

“Some of these states have never been seen before,” said lead author Xiaoyang Zhu, Howard Family Professor of Nanoscience at Columbia. “And we didn’t expect to see so many either.”

Read more | >

In nature and technology, crystallization plays a pivotal role, from forming snowflakes and pharmaceuticals to creating advanced batteries and desalination membranes. Despite its importance, crystallization at the nanoscale is poorly understood, mainly because observing the process directly at this scale is exceptionally challenging. My research overcame this hurdle by employing state-of-the-art computational methods, allowing them to visualize atomic interactions in unprecedented detail.

Published in Chemical Science, my research has uncovered new details about how salt crystals form in tiny nanometer-sized spaces, which could pave the way for and improved electrochemical technologies.

This research used sophisticated enhanced by cutting-edge machine learning techniques to study how (NaCl), common table salt, crystallizes when confined between two graphene sheets separated by just a few billionths of a meter. These , known as nano-confinement, drastically alter how molecules behave compared to bulk, everyday conditions.

Read more | >