Very nice.
Many technologies rely upon nanomaterials that can absorb or release atoms quickly and repeatedly. New work by Jennifer Dionne’s research group provides a first look inside these phase-changing nanoparticles, showing how their shape and crystallinity affect their performance for battery applications.
In a new study, researchers detail the culturing and transfecting of cells with genetic material on an array of carbon nanotubes, which appears to overcome the limitations of other gene editing technologies.
Gene editing techniques hold great promise. They allow targeted and specific edits of genes, and have nearly limitless possibilities in the field of medicine.
Which is not to say that they are perfect. These techniques still have a range of limitations, from precision to toxicity. But a new study shows that can be changed.
Who says playing around is a waste of time?
Researchers at the University of California at Irvine (UCI) said that’s exactly what they were doing when they discovered how to increase the tensile strength of nanowires that could be used to make lithium-ion batteries last virtually forever.
Researchers have pursued using nanowires in batteries for years because the filaments, thousands of times thinner than a human hair, are highly conductive and have a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons.
Nice
A group of physicists recently built the smallest engine ever created from just a single atom. Like any other engine it converts heat energy into movement — but it does so on a smaller scale than ever seen before. The atom is trapped in a cone of electromagnetic energy and lasers are used to heat it up and cool it down, which causes the atom to move back and forth in the cone like an engine piston.
The scientists from the University of Mainz in Germany who are behind the invention don’t have a particular use in mind for the engine. But it’s a good illustration of how we are increasingly able to replicate the everyday machines we rely on at a tiny scale. This is opening the way for some exciting possibilities in the future, particularly in the use of nanorobots in medicine, that could be sent into the body to release targeted drugs or even fight diseases such as cancer.
Nanotechnology deals with ultra-small objects equivalent to one billionth of a meter in size, which sounds an impossibly tiny scale at which to build machines. But size is relative to how close you are to an object. We can’t see things at the nanoscale with the naked eye, just as we can’t see the outer planets of the solar system. Yet if we zoom in — with a telescope for the planets or a powerful electron microscope for nano-objects — then we change the frame of reference and things look very different.
Swarms of graphene-coated nanobots could be our best hope yet of cleaning up the murky oceans, with scientists demonstrating that new microscopic underwater warriors can remove up to 95 percent of lead in wastewater in just 1 hour.
The invention couldn’t have come at a better time, with ocean pollution at an all-time high, much of it stemming from industrial activities such as electronics manufacturing. By 2050, it’s estimated that there will be more plastic than fish in the world’s oceans, and waste metals such as lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium, and chromium are affecting the delicate ecological balance that will make things very difficult for any animal that relies on it for food — including humans — in the near future.
Developed by an international team of researchers, the newly developed nanobots have three key components: a graphene oxide exterior to absorb lead (or another heavy metal); a nickel core that enables researchers to control the nanobots’ movement via a magnetic field; and an inner platinum coating that functions as an engine and propels the bots forward via a chemical reaction with hydrogen peroxide.
Australia’s Quantum Data Bus; nice. We’re getting closer and within the next 7 years we will more than likely have quantum in mainstream computing at this rate.
RMIT University researchers have trialled a quantum processor capable of routing quantum information from different locations in a critical breakthrough for quantum computing.
The work opens a pathway towards the “quantum data bus”, a vital component of future quantum technologies.
The research team from the Quantum Photonics Laboratory at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the CNR in Italy and the South University of Science and Technology of China, have demonstrated for the first time the perfect state transfer of an entangled quantum bit (qubit) on an integrated photonic device.
“This technology could revolutionize the field of telecommunications,” says Krishnaswamy, director of the Columbia High-Speed and Mm-wave IC (CoSMIC) Lab. “Our circulator is the first to be put on a silicon chip, and we get literally orders of magnitude better performance than prior work. Full-duplex communications, where the transmitter and the receiver operate at the same time and at the same frequency, has become a critical research area and now we’ve shown that WiFi capacity can be doubled on a nanoscale silicon chip with a single antenna. This has enormous implications for devices like smartphones and tablets.”
Krishnaswamy’s group has been working on silicon radio chips for full duplex communications for several years and became particularly interested in the role of the circulator, a component that enables full-duplex communications where the transmitter and the receiver share the same antenna. In order to do this, the circulator has to “break” Lorentz Reciprocity, a fundamental physical characteristic of most electronic structures that requires electromagnetic waves travel in the same manner in forward and reverse directions.
“Reciprocal circuits and systems are quite restrictive because you can’t control the signal freely,” says PhD student Negar Reiskarimian, who developed the circulator and is lead author of the Nature Communications paper. “We wanted to create a simple and efficient way, using conventional materials, to break Lorentz Reciprocity and build a low-cost nanoscale circulator that would fit on a chip. This could open up the door to all kinds of exciting new applications.”