No doubt. Sliding down the street on a layer of ice is fun until you find yourself doing it in a car. All by yourself, it might be a tough stop but for a while it is pretty cool. Ice on the wing of a plane is bad news, and that is why in the winter time, airplanes need to be 'de-iced' which is where they pull the plane over and a person squirts lots of soapy stuff all over the plane.
So you can jump on a rocket and get blasted into outer space or you can hit a button and take an elevator ride up into orbit. Whoa. A space elevator? Well the idea is cool but practically it isn't quite there yet but someday in the future it might be possible. Scientists have been thinking for a while about the idea of having a satellite up in space in something called a 'geosynchronous' orbit. Meaning that the satellite stays in one place. Then you drop a line from the satellite to the Earth and pull yourself up! What you need are long very very strong lines and that is where nanotechnology comes in. Carbon nanotubes! stronger than steel.
Naked molecule exposed!!!Did that attract your attention? Scientists at IBM using a very powerful microscope took a picture of a molecule. That might not seem like much but we are talking about a picture where you can 'see' things that are less than a nanometer. The molecule is pentacene which is important for organic transistors. Those are switches made of things that aren't like the current ones which are made from silicon. Pentacene is a hydrocarbon, so a bunch of carbon atoms arranged in rings. The microscope that they used is an atomic force microscope which doesn't have a lens but has a very sharp tip. On the tip these scientists put a molecule of carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide as it was dragged across the pentacene interacted with it and the result is a picture of pentacene. Is this useful? For sure. Useful for making tiny transistors out of single molecules. (for more info go to www.ibm.com)
Energy sipping chips
We don't think about energy when it comes to computers. Yea it gets warm especially those laptops. But energy is a big concern for computer makers because where there is energy there is heat and heat is not good. In the last year nanotechnology has made it possible to create parts of computers that are about 45 nanometers. That means that about 2000 would fit across the width of a hair. Not only are they making these computer chips with smaller parts but they are consuming less energy? How much? If you figure how much progress has been made in computer chips and figure the same amount of progress in cars----your car would get 100,000 miles to the gallon. That is about four times around the world on a gallon of gas. (from Intel)
At the Materials Research Society December 2008 and April 2009 meetings, the popular "Science as Art" competition yielded some amazing images from the fields of nanotechnology. Some of prize winners include:
1. The Nano Teddy Bear which shows zinc oxide nanostructures deposited on an indium oxide coated glass substrate using an electrochemical deposition technique.
2. Carbon NanoEden
3. Nano Spaghetti and Meatballs where the 'spaghetti' is a collection of electrodeposited gold nanowires and the 'meatballs' are silicon nanoparticles.
4. Nanoflower made of crystalline wurtzite indium nitride made using a molecular bean epitaxy process.
5. The Nano-Grip composed of thick epoxy crystals self-assembled onto a 2.5 micron polystyrene sphere.
6. Modern Stonehenge consists of silicon nanopillars created using gallium implantation and deep reactive-ion etching.
Source: Nanowerk
Many DNA nanostructures have been constructed by scientists for many different kinds of applications, such as drug delivery, medical diagnosis, and DNA-based computers. But in order to be successful in designing these nanostructures, we must first find out what exactly the 3D structure of DNA looks like!
But how can we look at the structure DNA helix? It's so small! Well, scientists have built powerful microscopes to try and visualize DNA. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a powerful technique but does not visualize in 3D very well. Another powerful tool that has been built is called the electron cryomicroscopy (cryoEM).
CryoEM can be used to look at the structure of a 7 nm self-assembled DNA tetrahedron, which is an incredible achievenment for scientists. Never before has such a small biological molecule been looked at with such high resolution!
Source: Nano Letters
Tired of mopping and sweeping your floors? Now cleaning has become so much easier!
Let this new crawling vacuum introduced by Panasonic do all the dirty work! It's called Fukitorimushi, which means "Wipe-up Bug" in japanese. Working with textile maker Teijin, they have developed an autonomous floor-cleaning robot that crawls around like an inchworm. The robot is covered in a super-absorbent polyester nanofiber cloth that picks up microscopic dust and residue that ordinary vacuums leave behind.
The specially designed nanofibers significantly increase the fabric's surface area and porosity, giving it super wiping characteristics and the ability to absorb oil and ultra-fine dust particles less than one micrometer in diameter. How small is a micrometer? Well, to give you an idea, a single human hair is approximately 100 micrometers in diameter. So it's really small! The large surface contact area also increases the fabric's friction with the floor, allowing it to use this friction to push itself forward while wiping the floor. Check out the cool video!
