Nanotechnology: Do You Know What It Is? Do You Care?

August 24, 2009

No. Nanotechnology is not what makes iPod's Nano possible. If only it were that simple. But it really begs the question, Do you know what nanotech is? And for those of you who have a pretty good idea, Do you care?

The reason I ask is that lately I've been noticing a flutter of announcements, commentaries, and news pieces about whether nanotechnology is safe or not. For example, last fall, Andrew Maynard, chief scientist at Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, testified before the U.S. Congress’s House Science Committee, saying that the government is not doing enough to ensure the safety of these materials.

Carbon Lightning

December 18, 2008

One of my favorite things about nanotechnology are the images that scientists create as part of their research. Those images are windows into a world too small for us to see and too distant to fully comprehend. But they awe nonetheless. This image is from the Materials Research Society, who also recognizes that importance of this imagery. And about every 6 months holds a contest, showcasing some of the most intriguing images made on the nanoscale.

This one is called Carbon Lightning and was done by Trevor Simmons of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. In the image, bundles of single wall carbon nanotubes are randomly oriented along the bottom. But when pulled up, they align.

Paper-Thin Speakers from Carbon Nanotubes

November 14, 2008

Researchers in China discovered that if they fed very thin carbon nanotube films particular electric currents, the films would emit loud sounds. A light bulb went on. Or maybe in this case, a bell went off. The researchers realized they could make loudspeakers out a material that was thinner than paper, transparent, flexible, stretchable and magnet-free.

Such a speaker could change not only how we listen to music, but how we hear anything coming from an electronic device, whether it be a cell phone, a laptop, a television. You could imagine a speaker for your mobile phone that you stick into your ear, or turn your shirt pocket into a speaker or a flag (below) that's a speaker or a poster that works as a speaker.

The researchers are reporting their work in an upcoming issue of Nano Letters.

Images courtesy American Chemical Society

Power of Nanotubes

September 17, 2008

Spend two-and-a-half days in a nano-bio conference and you here a lot stuff about nanotechnology and it's potential. I can't share all of the stuff I heard with you here, but I can share some of it. Namely some numbers that I find pretty impressive:

• Carbon nanotubes (the cool kids say CNTs) are 10 times more thermal conductive than silicon (this means they can theoretically wick away all of that heat being generated by those hard-working processors in your computer).
• Electrons travel 100 times faster through CNTs than through silicon.
• CNTs are 500 times stronger than steel by weight.
• CNTs are 1000 times more conductive than copper.

This is why everyone is so darned excited about carbon nanotubes, even though it may be years and years and years before they reach their desired potential.

Photo: The Image Bank

"Stretchtronics" from Carbon Nanotubes

August 08, 2008

This is pretty cool. Imagine being able to roll up your computer monitor or stretch a thin solar panel over a curved facade or wrap electronic sensors around the arm of a robot. You can't do that today because most electronics are built on rigid semiconductor surfaces.

But a team of Japanese researchers have designed a super-stretchy, rubbery material that could make way for all of those things I mentioned above. Their material is made from a carbon nanotube-elastomer composite material that incorporates an array of organic transistors.

The sheet can be stretched in several different directions more than 70 percent more than its original shape without any damage occurring to the electronics.

The team report their work in this week's issue of Science.

Photo: Courtesy of Science/AAAS

The Week (According to Me)

July 13, 2008

Bionic humans, crowdsourcing the flu vaccine, lemony socks and solar concentrators. These are the coolest tech related stories I read this past week.

July 4 / Guardian
2b or Not 2b
Language is like life. It evolves. Get over it and stop fretting so darn much over whether text messaging will destroy linguistics. In fact, according to professor David Crystal, it improves children's writing and spelling.

July 4 / New Scientist
Do We Have the Technology to Build a Bionic Human?
Scientist can engineer organs, bones, retinas and much, much more. (Yet they still haven't found a way to prevent baldness. Huh.)

July 4 / Guardian
It's the Screens, Not the Internet, That are Making Us Stupid
We may be reading less, but we're staring at computer screens way more. It's enough to give you a stupid headache.

July 7 / Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
Lemon-Filled Odorless Socks
What's better: socks that smell like citrus? Or those that smell like cheese? You make the call.

July 7 / Wired
Researchers Track Disease With Google News, Google.org Money
What year is it now? 2008. Right. To World Health Organization: Welcome to the age of the Interwebosphere. Finally, you've put together a website that can be used to track new disease outbreaks.

July 9 / Webmonkey
Yahoo’s New ‘Build Your Own’ Search Engine Nips at Google’s Lead
Yikes. Yahoo has a new open source initiative that could allow outside web developers to hack into the company's search engine code to produce customized results and mashups. Yahoo is doing it to compete with search engine giant, Google. Will David defeat Goliath? Duh, duh, duh, duh (dramatic music). Stay tuned.

July 9 / Wired
Nanotubes Hold Promise for Next-Generation Computing
It's carbon nanotube this and carbon nanotube that. Blah, blah, blah. It's all lab talk. Show me the money, man.

July 9 / New York Times
Designing Cars for Low-Carbon Chic
Lighter and sleeker automatically improve gas mileage without even tinkering with the engine. Not only that, but these kinds of cars will just look cool.

July 10 / Discovery News
Implant Designed to Shrink Waistline
Wouldn't an implant for the waistline, by definition, make the midsection bigger? Au, contraire, Monfraire. This one quells hunger pangs and the desire to feed one's pie hole.

July 10 / Super Duper Sustainable Tech
Solar-Powered Home, No Panels Needed
Special dyes designed to capture specific spectrums of sunlight could turn regular old windows into  solar-harnessing power panels. That's genius-level thinking, guys.

July 10 / Wired
Crowdsourcing the Flu Vaccine
More words about how the internet (via data sharing and networking) could help health workers develop a better flu vaccine.

July 10 / IEEE Spectrum
Our First Electric Cars May Be Trucks
Personally, I'd like an electric scooter, but more fuel-efficient trucks could sure help bring those food prices down. 

Copper Nanorods Could Cool Hot Computer Chips

July 11, 2008

The past few of days were sweltering in Boston. Near 90 with lots of humidity. (Finally it rained and temps came down). I work from home without air conditioning and so when the temps rise in the summer, I get a little uncomfortable. Fingers sweating on keyboard and such.

My laptop seemed to be getting quite uncomfortable, too. Its fan was whirring on much more frequently than normal. I was starting to think that something was wrong. Or that my lap was about to lift off and dock with the International Space Station.

That's why this little piece of news from Rensselaer (one "n," two "s's") caught my attention. Researchers found that if they added a layer of copper nanorods to the bottom of a metal vessel, it helped increase the boiling efficiency of water inside. You can see in the photo that the nanorods grow upright like trees and have little spaces between them. Those pockets trap air that eventually escapes as nanobubbles. When the nanobubbles break free, they scurry into nearby microscopic cavities found within the interior surface of the vessel. That net abundance of air helps promote boiling. And boiling is a way to transfer heat.

It seems a little counter-intuitive, right? That boiling would help COOL off something. So I emailed the lead scientist, associate professor Nikhil Koratkar, and asked him how this technique could work to cool computer chips. You wouldn't boil the chip in your computer while you were using it, would you? Correct me if I'm wrong, but circuits and water don't seem to go together.

"You are right that it cannot be water since water would short the circuit," said Koratkar.

He told me that the fluid would be a coolant. But how do you get some liquid near a circuit and still not short out your system?

"There will have to be an automated micro-plumbing system that will release coolant when the temperature exceeds a critical threshold level," said Koratkar. "The concept is called 'pool boiling,' and many companies are exploring it as an alternative to traditional air cooling systems."

It's like a little radiator for your computer. Neat.


Photo credit: Rensselaer Polytechnic University/Koratkar

The Week (According to Me)

June 20, 2008

Don't spend all that time scanning your RSS feed reader. Just read my list.

13 June 08 / The Atlantic
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Nick Carr writes about how the Internet is changing the way we think.

June 13 / Tech Crunch
Quillpill: A Twitter For Cell-Phone Novelists
Even if they could, few people have the time to write a book. But what if they could Twitter one? For all those aspiring novelists out there, Quillpill might be the app to get them started.

13 June 08 / Guardian
Where Are All the Older Female Geeks?
Since starting her blog, Natalie d'Arbeloff has found that she is not the only older woman in the cybervillage. But they are still in the minority. Come on, she says, what are you waiting for?

June 13 / Wired
Potential New Weapon Against TB: Free Cell Minutes
Researchers at MIT believe they've discovered a new weapon in the battle against tuberculosis: Free cell phone minutes. For years, doctors have struggled to get some TB patients to take all their medication, which generally involves a six-month regimen of multiple drugs. Now a student-led group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a way to use cell phones to let patients test themselves. And if the tests show patients are following doctor's orders, they get rewarded with free minutes.

June 13 / Wired
IBM's Drumming Car Reads Your Lips. Seriously
The people at IBM are hard at work developing technology we never knew we don't need -- a steering wheel that reads your lips, responds to your facial expressions and turns into a drum machine. Tapping out a beat on the steering wheel while jamming to your favorite tunes will never be the same again.

June 13 / Technology Review
Doubling Laptop Battery Life
Intel's new integrated power management could dramatically reduce power consumption in your laptop by shutting down operations not being used.

June 13 / Technology Review
You've Had a Genetic Test. Now What?
A new project aims to incorporate the results of genetic screening into medicine.

June 16 / Discovery
Robots to Become Lovers, Predict Researchers
Romantic human-robot relationships are no longer the stuff of science fiction -- researchers expect them to become reality within four decades.

June 16 / Science Daily
Using Brainwaves To Chat And Stroll Through Second Life: World's First
On 7th June 2008, Keio University succeeded in the world’s first demonstration experiment with the help of a disabled person to use brainwave to chat and stroll through the virtual world.

June 16 / Nanowerk
NASA nanotechnology research into shape-shifting airplanes
Aircraft of the future will not be built of traditional, multiple, mechanically connected parts and systems. Instead, aircraft wing construction will employ fully integrated, nanotechnology enabled embedded 'smart' materials and actuators that will enable aircraft wings with unprecedented levels of aerodynamic efficiencies and aircraft control.

June 17 / BBC News
Victim of Its Own Success
Life without the internet is unimaginable for the millions who use it every day. But one of the world's leading academics on the impact of the net warns we could be facing its destruction.

June 17 / New York Times
Philadelphia Revives Citywide Wi-Fi Project
Philadelphia revived an effort on Tuesday to provide free citywide wireless Internet access in a project to be run by a new group of investors. The city aims to provide free-of-charge outdoor Web access throughout its 135 square miles, which would be the largest area covered by public Wi-fi of any U.S. city.

June 17 / Webmonkey
Clock Browser Speeds with Webmonkey’s Stopwatch
With Firefox 3, Opera 9.5 and Safari all claiming “faster than ever” speeds with its latest versions, we started wondering which one is really the fastest. After loading some pages and scratching our heads, we hacked together a small JavaScript stopwatch to find out.

June 17 / Discovery
Talking Robofish to Swim in Puget Sound
Marine creatures have communicated with each other for millions of years. Now swimming robots can too.

June 18 / Scientific American
Hands On Computing: How Multi-touch Screens Could Change The Way We Interact With Computers and Each Other
Multi-touch computing could one day free us from the mouse as our primary computer interface, the way the mouse freed us from keyboards.

June 18 / Scientific American
Wi-Maxing That Wireless Internet Connection
A wireless technology called Wi-Max has a much bigger range than Wi-Fi, making it possible to supply wireless internet accessibility to large areas with a few base stations. Christopher Intagliata reports.

June 19 / Etherized
Snail (And We Do Mean Snail) Mail
A group of artists, whose URL reads "boredomresearch," have created Real Snail Mail, the world's first web mail service using live snails. Yep. Three snails (Cecil, Austin and Muriel) have been fitted with RFID chips and antennae that can pick up data from hardware located in their enclosure. You fill out an email form, hit send and they take things from there.

June 19 / Technovelgy
Never-Stop Rail Transit System Proposed
Taiwanese inventor Peng Yu-lun imagines a main track with a large commuter train that does not stop. The train is serviced by smaller train cars that drop off new passengers while picking up those who wish to leave the train.

June 19 / The Engineer
Solar System
A team from MIT has tested a prototype of a new solar power system that consists of a 12ft-wide dish made from a frame of thin, aluminium tubing and strips of mirror.

June 19 / Discovery
New 'Terminator' Robots Go in Harm's Way
IRobot, best known for their cute Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, has teamed up with Metal Storm, purveyors of the million-rounds-per-minute electric gun, to create a slick, Terminator-like war robot for the U.S. military.

June 19 / New Scientist
Scrapping MPG Could Boost Sales of Greener Cars
What sounds like an arithmetic brain teaser could in fact hold the key to reducing the amount of gas consumed by Americans – and by extension their CO2 emissions. Richard Larrick and Jack Soll of Duke University in the US say that a simple switch from expressing a car's fuel efficiency in miles per gallon (mpg) to gallons per 100 miles makes it much easier for people to assess how much money they could save on fuel.

The Week (According to Me)

June 13, 2008

Starting today and every Friday hence, I'm going to post a summary of the coolest tech stories and blogs I came across over the past week. The post will be here and also on my website, Discovery Tech. This week: Engineered cells, shape-shifting cars, wirelessly networked cows, bacteria that eat plastic, and gold nanoparticles that block HIV caught my attention, among others. Enjoy

06 June 2008 / Wired
ITP: The Ultimate Sweet-Talking Jacket for Geeks
The CyranoSuit, uses a series of sensors embedded in the arms and chest to detect physical interaction with a woman and then a hacked receipt printer delivers romantic lines straight to the breast pocket.

07 June 2008 / Powrtalk
Un
The Man wants us to write about technology. Energy and technology. But sometimes we want to write about un-technology. About not doing things. Avoidance strategies. Nega-watts. Nega-barrels. Things that are related to energy but that are distinctly un-tech.

08 June 2008 / Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
Wirelessly Networking Cows
U.S. researchers have developed a Walkman-like headset for cows. This device enables them to 'whisper wireless commands to cows to control their movements

09 June 2008 / New Scientist
Bacteria Make Major Evolutionary Shift in the Lab
A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

10 June / Super Duper Sustainable Stuff
Los Angeles Has Got Some Balls. No, Really.
The the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power unloaded 400,000 black plastic "shade balls" into the 58-million-gallon reservoir to protect it--nearly one for every customer.

10 June 2008 / Wired
BMW Builds a Shape-Shifting Car Out of Cloth
Instead of steel, aluminum or even carbon fiber, the GINA Light Visionary Model has a body of seamless fabric stretched over a movable metal frame that allows the driver to change its shape at will.

10 June 2008 / Scientific American
The Midas Touch: Using Gold Nanoparticles to Block HIV
Researchers find that attaching 12 molecules of a drug compound to one gold nanoparticle restores the drug's ability to prevent HIV infection.

10 June 2008 / Scientific American
Scientists Close to Reconstructing First Living Cell
Harvard Medical School researchers report in Nature that they have built a model of what they believe the very first living cell may have looked like, which contains a strip of genetic material surrounded by a fatty membrane.

11 June 2008 / The Guardian
Can Mobile Phones Really Be Ssed to Cook Popcorn?
If four separate homemade videos on YouTube are to be believed, it's now possible to cook popcorn using the energy emitted from ordinary ringing mobiles.

11 June 2008 / Discovery News
Experiment Mimics Earth’s Spinning Core
By spinning a 26-ton steel sphere filled with boiling metal at about 90 miles an hour, Dan Lathrop, a scientist at the University of Maryland, hopes to unlock Earth's spinning magnetic heart.

11 June 2008 / New Scientist
Human Egg Makes Accidental Debut on Camera
These are the clearest pictures ever taken of what is the starting point of every human life: ovulation occurring inside a woman's body.

11 June 2008 / The Engineer
Towering Fuel Cell
The New York Power Authority (NYPA) has inked a $10.6m deal with UTC Power that will make the redeveloped World Trade Center the site of one of the largest fuel cell installations in the world.

12 June 2008 / Technovelgy.com
Bacteria Eats Plastic; What Could Go Wrong?
Microorganisms dine on polythene bags

12 June 2008 / Science Daily
U.S. Still Leads the World in Science and Technology
Despite perceptions that the nation is losing its competitive edge, the United States remains the dominant leader in science and technology worldwide, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

12 June 2008 / BBC
Thinking Up Beautiful Music
Musicians may soon be able to play instruments using just the power of the mind.

Photo: BMW

Still Can't Comprehend the Size of a Nanotube?

May 20, 2008

Here's a great image to help you out.

The tiny squiggles are a network of electrically charged carbon nanotubes. The thick chunk overlaying them is a single human hair. The image was taken using a scanning electron microscope, so the color information color was added artificially.

Credit: J. Chech/Science Foto/Getty