Will You Get Nanobot Infusions?

IEET - May 6, 2014, by Dick Pelletier

"You enter the wellness center and tell the receptionist avatar that you're here for an annual restoration, and though your real age is 110, you would like to be restored to the age of a 20-something. A nurse then injects billions of genome-specific 'bots non-invasively through the skin; you're now set for another year."

The above scenario may sound like something out of a sci-fi tale, but experts predict nanorobotics will one day turn this fantasy into reality. Nanotech pioneer Robert Freitas believes that as the technology matures, every adult's appearance could be restored once a year to a biological age chosen by the individual. Freitas and futurist Ray Kurzweil discuss this wonder-science in a recent interview.

Freitas has designed 'bots smaller than red blood cells that can travel through the human body destroying harmful pathogens and repairing faulty DNA. The tiny machines would be constructed of carbon atoms, and powered by utilizing glucose or natural sugars and oxygen from the body.

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Fighting obesity with nanofoods - will the public swallow?

New Scientist - 5.27.10 (by Emma Davies)

It's a small food revolution (Image: Hulton Archive/Getty.

NOTHING says summer holidays quite like ice cream. On a hot afternoon by the sea, there's little to beat the simple pleasure of a cooling scoop of your favourite flavour. Can food get much more satisfying than this?

Vic Morris thinks it can, with the help of nanotechnology. He is part of a team tweaking foods to trick the body into feeling pleasantly full long after the final mouthful - and without overeating.

Ice cream that makes you feel full could be just the beginning. Nanotechnology promises even saltier-tasting salt, less fattening fat, and to boost the nutritional value of everyday products. Nanofood supplements could even tackle global malnutrition.

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World's first working DNA nanobots

WSJ - 5.13.10

A computer-generated artist's conception of nanorobots, microscopic machines made from DNA molecules that mimic the work of living cells. (Photo Researchers)

For the first time, microscopic robots made from DNA molecules can walk, follow instructions and work together to assemble simple products on an atomic-scale assembly line, mimicking the machinery of living cells, two independent research teams announced Wednesday.

These experimental devices, described in the journal Nature, are advances in DNA nanotechnology, in which bioengineers are using the molecules of the genetic code as nuts, bolts, girders and other building materials, on a scale measured in billionths of a meter. The effort, which combines synthetic chemistry, enzymology, structural nanotechnology and computer science, takes advantage of the unique physical properties of DNA molecules to assemble shapes according to predictable chemical rules.

Until now, such experiments had yielded molecular novelties, from smiley faces so small that a billion can fit in a teaspoon to molecule-size boxes with lids that can be opened, closed and locked with a DNA key.

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Stitching wounds with lasers and nanotech

Wired - 5.5.10 (by Katie Drummond)

Forget stitches and old-school sutures. The Air Force is funding scientists who are using nano-technology and lasers to seal up wounds at a molecular level.

It might sound like Star Trek tech, but it’s actually the latest in a series of ambitious Pentagon efforts to create faster, more effective methods of treating war-zone injuries.

Last year, the military’s research agency, Darpa, requested proposals for instant injury repair using adult stem cells, and Pentagon scientists are already doing human trials of spray-on skin.

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Self-Powered Nano Sensors - Coming to your body soon

Technology Review - April 2010 (by Katherine Bourzac)

Nanoscale sensors are exquisitely sensitive, very frugal with power, and, of course, tiny. They could be useful in detecting molecular signs of disease in the blood, minute amounts of poisonous gases in the air, and trace contaminants in food. But the batteries and integrated circuits necessary to drive these devices make them difficult to fully miniaturize. The goal of Zhong Lin Wang, a materials scientist at Georgia Tech, is to bring power to the nano world with minuscule generators that take advantage of piezoelectricity. If he succeeds, biological and chemical nano sensors will be able to power themselves.

The piezoelectric effect--in which crystalline materials under mechanical stress produce an electrical potential--has been known of for more than a century. But in 2005, Wang was the first to demonstrate it at the nanoscale by bending zinc oxide nanowires with the probe of an atomic-force microscope. As the wires flex and return to their original shape, the potential produced by the zinc and oxide ions drives an electrical current. The current that Wang coaxed from the wires in his initial experiments was tiny; the electrical potential peaked at a few millivolts. But Wang rightly suspected that with enough engineering, he could design a practical nanoscale power source by harnessing the tiny vibrations all around us--sound waves, the wind, even the turbulence of blood flow over an implanted device. These subtle movements would bend nanowires, generating electricity.

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Nano-electrode attached to neurons

American Friends of Tel Aviv University - 3.22.2010

Two rat neuronal cells bound to a rough carbon nanotube mat.

Television's Six Million Dollar Man foresaw a future when man and machine would become one. New research at Tel Aviv University is making this futuristic "vision" of bionics a reality.

Prof. Yael Hanein of Tel Aviv University's School of Electrical Engineering has foundational research that may give sight to blind eyes, merging retinal nerves with electrodes to stimulate cell growth. Successful so far in animal models, this research may one day lay the groundwork for retinal implants in people.

But that's a way off, she says. Until then, her half-human, half-machine invention can be used by drug developers investigating new compounds or formulations to treat delicate nerve tissues in the brain. Prof. Hanein's research group published its work recently in the journal Nanotechnology.

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Nano-surgery in your future.

PhysOrg.com - 12.21.2009

Engineering professor's nanorobot could be performing non-invasive surgical procedures on patients with tumors within the next decade.

Nader Jalili, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, is working to create a controlled nanorobot that will be capable of performing non-invasive cancer surgery with a degree of precision not possible through existing surgical procedures.

At about the size of a ring box, nanorobots could revolutionize surgical practice within the next five to 10 years by making procedures of all sorts more precise and safer, said Jalili.

“Precision,” he said, “is one of the most important aspects of a surgical procedure.”

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Your brain doesn't mind nanowires!

ScienceDaily - 10.22.2009

The biological safety of nanotechnology, in other words, how the body reacts to nanoparticles, is a hot topic. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have managed for the first time to carry out successful experiments involving the injection of so-called 'nanowires.'

In the future it is expected that it will be possible to insert nanoscale electrodes to study learning and memory functions and to treat patients suffering from chronic pain, depression, and diseases such as Parkinson's. But it is not known what would happen if the nanoelectrodes would break away from their contact points.

Scientists at Lund University have investigated this 'worst case by injecting nanowires in rat brains. The nanowires resemble in size and shape the registration nodes of electrodes of the future. The results show that the brain 'clean-up cells' (microglia), take care of the wires. After twelve weeks only minor differences were observed between the brains of the test group and the control group. The findings are published in Nano Letters.

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Bacteria as beasts of burden

Technology Review - 10.19.2009

Attach self-propelling bacteria to a cog and they'll set it spinning for you, say Italian physicists.

Last year, we looked at an idea for a bacteria-powered motor dreamt up by Luca Angelani and pals from the University of Rome in Italy. Their idea was to place a cog with asymmetric teeth into a bath of moving bacteria and wait for them to start it spinning for you, like carthorses pushing a millstone.

We said at the time that the idea sounds a bit like extracting kinetic energy from the random motion of particles, which is impossible because the motion is symmetric in time.

But Angelani and co say there is in important difference between Brownian and bacterial motion: the former is in equilibrium but the latter is an open system with a net income of energy provided by nutrients. This breaks the time symmetry allowing energy to be extracted in the form of directed motion.

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Quantum-sized motor developed - but what kind of mileage will it get?

Technology Review - 9/18/09

Place a couple of cold atoms in an alternating magnetic field and you've got a quantum version of an electric motor.

How small can you make an electric motor? Today, Alexey Ponomarev from the University of Augsburg in Germany and a couple of pals describe how to do it with just two atoms. Yep, an electric motor made of just two ultracold atoms.

Their motor consists of one neutral atom and one charged atom trapped in a ring-shaped optical lattice. The atoms jump from one site in the lattice to the next as they travel round the ring. Placing this ring in an alternating magnetic field creates the conditions necessary to keep the charged atom moving round the the ring.

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Imaging a single molecule - a tiny leap forward for nanotech

Mail Online - August 28, 2009, by Clair Bates

The delicate inner structure of a pentacene molecule has been imaged with an atomic force microscope

It may look like a piece of honeycomb, but this lattice-shaped image is the first ever close-up view of a single molecule.

Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule.

'This is the first time that all the atoms in a molecule have been imaged,' lead researcher Leo Gross said.

The researchers focused on a single molecule of pentacene, which is commonly used in solar cells. The rectangular-shaped organic molecule is made up of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.

In the image above the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings are clear and even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be seen.

To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand.

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Using DNA to build tiny mechanical parts

Editor's Note: Unfortunately we can't shrink our submarines down to fit into the recesses of our bodies. We have to build the parts and assemble them in nanoscale. That's quite difficult, but researchers are finding ways to do it, as described in this fascinating article.

NYT - August 6, 2009, by Henry Fountain

A 12-tooth gear, about one-tenth of a micrometer in diameter, assembled from strands of DNA.

You can’t build a machine without parts. That’s true for large machines like engines and pumps, and it’s true for the tiniest machines, the kind that scientists want to build on the scale of molecules to do work inside the body.

Researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University have taken a step toward creating parts for molecular machines, out of DNA. In a paper in Science, Hendrik Dietz (who is now with the Technical University of Munich), Shawn M. Douglas and William H. Shih describe a programmable technique for twisting and curving DNA into shapes.

Dr. Shih said the method used strands of DNA that self-assemble into rigid bundles, with the individual double helixes joined by strong crosslinks. Manipulating the base pairs in the helixes — using more or fewer of them between crosslinks — creates torque that causes the bundles to twist and bend in a specific direction. The researchers were able to control the degree of bending, and were even able to make a bundle bend back on itself.

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Nano-Recipes - Designing Structures Made of Nanomaterials

Editor's note: Putting nano-sized particles together to build specific things is, as one might imagine, not a very easy thing to do. Why? Because particles at that scale are subject to laws of physics that we never experience on a macro scale. Things tend to come together, or not, in ways that are highly complex and difficult to manage. (At this point I'm thinking about George Costanza and really tiny surgical instruments.) So Microsoft steps in and comes up with a computer model that concocts recipes for making the tiny particles into something useful.

Technology Review - June 19, 2009

Microsoft researchers hope to simplify algorithms for self-assembling materials

Particle packing: Algorithms designed by Microsoft researchers predict what the forces between a group of particles must be in order for them to self-assemble into a particular structure, such as a closely packed cube. Credit: Salvatore Torquato

Making complex structures out of nanoparticles or polymers, be they for photonic computing or solar cells, typically involves a lot of expensive and time-consuming trial and error in the lab. Theorists hope to simplify the process by developing computer models that will generate recipes that always come out right, but so far, the ones that they've made have been too complex to realize in the lab. Now, in the hope of making these algorithms useful to chemists, computer scientists at Microsoft have simplified a model that creates recipes for self-assembling materials.

"If you have in mind a form or shape, the model will tell you how to get it," says Henry Cohn, principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, who led the work with MIT assistant professor of mathematics Abhinav Kumar.

The new Microsoft models, described this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are intended to speed the design of new self-assembled structures. Using trial and error, materials scientists have employed nanoparticles to make structures on what's called the mesoscale. These ordered arrangements of nanoscale particles can have remarkable optical, electrical, and other properties but are difficult to create. "Theory there is sorely lacking," says Mila Boncheva, a senior scientist at Firmenich, in Geneva, who played an important role in early research on this kind of self-assembly at Harvard University. "What people are currently doing in design is mostly trial and error based on common sense." The theoretical model is aimed at helping materials scientists figure out much more quickly what the right materials and conditions are for self-assembly of a given structure.

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Nano-Gears - Scientists invent 1.2nm molecular gear

Physorg.com - June 15, 2009

Scientists from A*STAR's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), led by Professor Christian Joachim, have scored a breakthrough in nanotechnology by becoming the first in the world to invent a molecular gear of the size of 1.2nm whose rotation can be deliberately controlled. This achievement marks a radical shift in the scientific progress of molecular machines and is published in Nature Materials, one of the most prestigious journals in materials science.

Said Prof Joachim, "Making a gear the size of a few atoms is one thing, but being able to deliberately control its motions and actions is something else altogether. What we've done at IMRE is to create a truly complete working gear that will be the fundamental piece in creating more complex molecular machines that are no bigger than a grain of sand."

"Christian and his team's discovery shows that it may one day be possible to create and manipulate molecular-level machines."

Prof Joachim and his team discovered that the way to successfully control the rotation of a single-molecule gear is via the optimization of molecular design, molecular manipulation and surface atomic chemistry. This was a breakthrough because before the team's discovery, motions of molecular rotors and gears were random and typically consisted of a mix of rotation and lateral displacement. The scientists at IMRE solved this scientific conundrum by proving that the rotation of the molecule-gear could be wellcontrolled by manipulating the electrical connection between the molecule and the tip of a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope while it was pinned on an atom axis.

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A whole new you - Progress Toward Artificial Tissue?

PhysOrg.com - May 15, 2009

For modern implants and the growth of artificial tissue and organs, it is important to generate materials with characteristics that closely emulate nature.

However, the tissue in our bodies has a combination of traits that are very hard to recreate in synthetic materials: It is both soft and very tough.

A team of Australian and Korean researchers led by Geoffrey M. Spinks and Seon Jeong Kim has now developed a novel, highly porous, sponge-like material whose mechanical properties closely resemble those of biological soft tissues. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, it consists of a robust network of DNA strands and carbon nanotubes.

This results in materials that are as elastic as the softest natural tissues while simultaneously deriving great strength from the robust DNA links.

Soft tissues, such as tendons, muscles, arteries, and skin or other organs, obtain their mechanical support from the extracellular matrix, a network of protein-based nanofibers. Different protein morphologies in the extracellular matrix produce tissue with a wide range of stiffness. Implants and scaffolding for tissue growth require porous, soft materials -- which are usually very fragile. Because many biological tissues are regularly subjected to intense mechanical loads, it is also important that the implant material have comparable elasticity in order to avoid inflammation. At the same time, the material must be very strong and resilient, or it may give out.

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Need a bigger....brain? - Novel nanotechnology method to stimulate growth of new neurons in adult brain

Nanowerk - May 20, 2009

(Nanowerk News) University at Buffalo researchers have identified a new mechanism that plays a central role in adult brain stem cell development and prompts brain stem cells to differentiate into neurons (Targeting novel integrative nuclear FGFR1 signaling by nanoparticle-mediated gene transfer stimulates neurogenesis in the adult brain).

Their discovery, known as Integrative FGFR1 Signaling (INFS), has fundamentally challenged the prevailing ideas of how signals are processed in cells during neuronal development.

The INFS mechanism is considered capable of repopulating degenerated brain areas, raising possibilities for new treatments for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders, and may be a promising anti-cancer therapy.

Michal Stachowiak, Ph.D., director of the Molecular and Structural Neurobiology and Gene Therapy Program at UB, lead the research team that discovered INFS.

The approach uses gene engineering and nanoparticles for gene delivery to activate the INFS mechanism directly and promote neuronal development. The INFS-targeting gene can prompt these stem cells to differentiate into neurons.

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Assisting self-assembly - DNA cages guide nanoparticle self-assembly

New Scientist - March 17, 2009, by Jessica Griggs

TRAPPING nanoparticles in cages made of DNA could finally allow them to self-assemble into transistors, metamaterials and even tiny robots. The technique should prevent the nanoparticles clumping together at random, one of the biggest problems with nanoscale self-assembly.

One idea for making nanoscale building kits is to coat gold nanoparticles with short sequences of single-stranded DNA. The idea is to design the DNA strands in such a way that they will bond with other strands and join the nanoparticles together in a 3D structure. But the technique has never worked well because the random position of the DNA strands on the nanoparticles makes them tend to stick together in clumps.

Now, Alexei Tkachenko and Nicolas Licata from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, have come up with a solution: trap the nanoparticles in a cage where the bars are made of DNA, and then stack the cages to form nanostructures.

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Now you see it - 'Invisibility cloak' directs light away from eye

MSNBC - March 6, 2009, by Eric Bland

This illustration shows the basic design of a new 3D metamaterial, which is lined with gold nanocups that re-direct the flow of light hitting an object. When the light is gathered and aimed away from the viewer's eye, the object appears invisible. Naomi Halas, Rice University

Nanoantenna could eliminate one of the biggest costs for solar panels

Call it what you will — the world's first 3D nanoantenna or an invisibility cloak — but a new metamaterial created by Rice University scientists could hide objects from human sight.

Call it what you will — the world's first 3D nanoantenna or an invisibility cloak — but asight.

By creating perfectly aligned dimples in a material, the scientists channeled specific wavelengths of light from many directions into one uniform direction.

"This falls into the broad class of metamaterials that have useful and unusual properties, like cloaking," said Naomi Halas, Rice University scientist and co-author of a paper describing the material in Nano Letters. "In a broader picture, you could do some very interesting things with this metamaterial."

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Making light do your bidding - Scientists Create Light-Bending Nanoparticles

PhysOrg.com - by Laura Mgrdichian

Metallic nanoparticles and other structures can manipulate light in ways that are not possible with conventional optical materials. In a recent example of this, Rice University researchers discovered that cup-shaped gold nanostructures can bend light in a controllable way. The cups act like three-dimensional nano-antennas.

When light interacts with nanoparticles and other tiny structures, many interesting and even dramatic physical effects can occur. For example, man-made "metamaterials" have very fine structures with features smaller than the wavelength of light, some just tens of atoms across, imparting them with unique and often intriguing optical behaviors. Metamaterials are of interest to scientists because they may be able to interact with light in ways that naturally occurring materials cannot.

The gold nanocups created in this research interact with light in two main ways: axially, the up-down direction, or transverse, the left-right direction. The transverse mode is by far the stronger of the two.

"When we illuminated the nanocups, the transverse interaction exhibited a strong scattering resonance," said Rice University researcher Naomi Halas, the study's corresponding scientist, to PhysOrg.com. She conducted the study with colleague Nikolay Mirin. "We learned that the direction of the transverse resonant light scattering depends on the orientation of the cups, a property that has not been observed in studies of similar structures."

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Edible technology - Swallow this sensor, please

The Industry Standard - January 19 2009, by Sindya Bhanoo

Proteus Biomedicals, a company in California, has developed an intelligent pill that sends digital signals to an external receiver after being swallowed.

The pill still works as an ordinary drug that a patient might take to control a health issue such as heart trouble or a psychiatric disorder.

But it also has digestible sensors that are made of food products and are activated by stomach fluids. Once swallowed, the sensors can send a digital signal through the body to a receiver. The receiver date- and time-stamps, decodes, and records information about the drug and the dosage. It also measures and reports heart rate, activity, and respiratory rate.

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