Scientists Discover New Way to Generate Electricity
This animation of a rotating carbon nanotube shows its 3D structure. By Schwarzm, made with C4D/Cartoonrenderer, GNU FDL
By Michelle Bryner for TechNewsDaily.com:
Researchers have found a way to produce large amounts of electricity from tiny cylinders made from carbon atoms.
The achievement could replace decades-old methods of generating electricity, such as combustion engines and turbines, the researchers say.
In the future, coated carbon nanotubes crafted from individual atoms could power everything from cell phones to hybrid-electric vehicles. The team envisions such nanotube-based power being available to consumers in the next five years.
Carbon nanotubes are thin sheets of carbon rolled up into teensy tubes each with a diameter about 30,000 times smaller than a strand of hair.
When carbon — one of the most abundant elements on Earth — is rolled up into tubes, it…
Under the Weather? Just Swallow A Doctor
Steve Connor writes in the Independent:
The day when patients can “swallow their doctor” has come a step closer with the development of a submicroscopic nanoparticle that acts as an intelligent pill to deliver drugs when and where they are needed in the body.
Each nanoparticle is built to target a specific part of the body and to release their drugs in a controlled manner over a given period of time. They are so small that millions of them could be injected into the bloodstream without harming healthy tissues.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge have designed the first nanoparticles designed to target the walls of the arteries around the heart. They bind specifically to the proteins that only stick out from the inner lining of the these blood…
World’s Smallest Robot Can Move Atoms!
Prof. Nadrian "Ned" C. Seeman
A New York professor just built the world’s smallest robot The nano-scopic device is just 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size – and over a million of them could fit inside a single red blood cell!
The tiny nanorobotic device has the ability to place specific atoms and molecules wherever scientists want them to. And it can even build nanoscale structures and machines – including a nano-sized walking biped!
Researchers Create Subatomic Digital Switch
Researchers at Berkeley’s NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center have successfully used plasmons, a subatomic particle, to create a digital switch. “I’m personally optimistic we’ll see chips like this in ten to twenty years,” says Dr. Thomas Zentgraf, who also notes that light photons don’t collide with each other and “they don’t react with other materials” — so they’ll dissipate less heat and allow much smaller chips and devices. “You can’t move electrons any faster, but photons are constantly going at the speed of light,” says the researcher.
As this article suggests Moore’s law now “starts to look more like a temporary statute,” and light “also has the advantage of being the fastest thing in the universe.”
Nanotech Breakthrough: Nanotube Woven Into Commercially-Viable Yarn
Here’s a cool photograph of “the first macroscopic, commercially usable boron nitride nanotubes”, spun into a piece of BNNT “yarn”.
Visible to the naked eye, these nanotubes are now long enough to be woven into fibers, “and thus capable of being used for a vast number of commercial applications.” While it’s small in size, it’s being hailed as a significant sign of “the coming of the one technology that can definitively (in theory) bring about abundance…within a decade or less from the time when we get a complete grasp on its use as a production technology.”
Military Funds Tiny Flying “Spy Hummingbird”
“It looks like a hummingbird!” But it’s an unmanned military aerial vehicle with a 5-inch wingspan for which DARPA is providing a second round of funding!
The ’spy hummingbird’ weighs just 10 grams (about the weight of two nickels) and can perform “controlled hovering flight” using only an on-board power source and flapping its two wings…
This article appeared in the latest edition of H+ magazine.
Could Nanotech Create Paper-Thin Solar Cells?
Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs have “found a simple and yet powerful way to induce nanoparticles to assemble themselves into complex arrays,” and are now working on paper-thin printable solar cells!
Led by Ting Xu (one of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10″ young researchers), their technique also “promises to revolutionize the data storage industry, eventually leading to the contents of hundreds of DVDs fitting into a space the size of a thumbnail,” and could also create ultra-small electronic devices.
