Amazing Nano Masterpieces

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

Lookin' at DNA Nanostructures

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

Playing Pinball with Atoms

Many of you may have played pinball in an arcade before. How small is that pinball be? The size of a marble? The size of an ant? What if you could play pinball with something much much smaller? What's the smallest thing you can think of?

Researchers in the Netherlands have developed an atomic scale mechanical device by using electrical current to make two atom pairs behave like the flippers on a atomic-sized pinball machine.

On a piece of germanium, platinum atoms heated under a very high vacuum, which causes them to form dimer chains. Platinum dimers are structures that consist of two platinum atoms linked together. When electrons are injected into the platinum dimers using a scanning tunneling microscope tip, the atom pairs can switch to as many as six different configurations!

Source: ACS Publications

The Physics of Pizza Tossing

Interested in learning the art of a perfect pizza toss? Well, so are Monash University scientists who are studying the pizza toss in order to design the next generation of micro motors thinner than a single human hair. How does the dough travel through the air? How much does the dough rotate? How quickly does it spin?

The Monash's team of scientists are modeling the pizza toss mathematically, and have found that tossing pizza dough continuously without stopping to catch it requires your hands to move in circles. This model could help researchers design better ultrasonic motors, which operate on similar principles as pizza tossing. In the future, these tiny motors could be used in minimally invasive neuro-microsurgery procedures, giving surgeons more control and precision during brain surgery.

Source: EurekAlert!
Image Source: Seattlepi.com

How Much Force Does It Take...

... to move a single atom?

Scientists at IBM have collaborated with the University of Regensburg in Germany to measure the tiny forces it takes to move individual atoms on a surface. About twenty years ago, IBM's Don Eigler made history by writing I-B-M with individual Xenon atoms. Today, a new set of researchers are looking at the forces required to move atoms over different surfaces. A cobalt atom requires 210 piconewtons to move across a smooth platinum surface, but only requires 17 piconewtons to move across a copper surface. How much is a piconewton? Well, the force required to lift a copper penny that weighs only three grams is nearly 30 billion piconewtons! So the forces needed to move atoms are really tiny!

Researchers use a powerful microscope called an atomic force microscope to measure the strength and direction of the force applied on an atom. A sharp tip on the end of a flexible beam (like a tiny diving board!) is used to move the atoms and make sensitive measurements.

Why is it important to understand these forces? The key to future nanotechnologies lies in being able to manipulate tiny atoms to create atomic-scale structures for future computer chips, medical devices, and more!

Source: IBM Scientists First to Measure Force Required to Move Individual Atoms

Watch nanotubes grow!

Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have used in situ time-lapse photography and laser irradiation to watch and record the growth of carbon nanotubes. Laser irradiation of the growing nanotubes help prove that the nanotubes grow from catalyst particles at their bases. Researchers are interested in finding ways to grow the longest tubes in the fastest amount of time while still maintaining good nanotube quality. Irradiating the nanotubes with a laser during growth has also been shown to increase the growth rate of the arrays.

Watch cool videos of growing nanotubes HERE!

Why are carbon nanotubes so interesting? They can be used to make things lighter and stronger, build space elevators, and even combat cancer!

Nano Barcodes

Researchers at Northwestern University have been studying how to use nanometer sized disks of gold and nickel to encrypt information. These nanodisks can form a pattern much like a barcode, which means that each pattern would have a unique response to a stimulus, such as electromagnetic radiation or light, depending on what type of molecule (or molecules) are attached to the disks. Their small size would also allow them to be invisible to the naked eye, and easily hidden in different materials or objects.

Chad Mirkin and his research group have made nanodisk arrays as long as 12 micrometers, which can support as many as 10 disk pairs, which yields 287 physical nanodisk codes. The researchers have functionalized these disks with dye molecules called chromophores that emit a unique light spectrum when illuminated with a laser beam. These disks could be used as biological labels in applications such as DNA detection, or as tags for tracking goods and personal.

Source: Nanodisk Codes

The "Nano" Lisa

What is the smallest picture you can paint? At IBM, researchers have created one of the tiniest pieces of art ever made - an image of the sun made from 20,000 microscopic particles of gold. The sun paining was etched onto a silicon wafer by manipulating gold particles. These gold particles are just 60 nanometers in diameter - that's 60 billionths of a meter and that's really small!

Scientists at IBM have been working to make super-small circuits for many years - they showed long ago that they could spell out the company's name in individual atoms. This new sun painting is different because it uses a method that is much cheaper and more efficient than previous methods. These super-small structures could be used in the future to make really small circuits or to test for really small traces of a disease.

Source: IBM Claims Ultra-Tiny Art Project Nature Nanotechnology

The World's Smallest Book

A new Guinness record has been broken at Simon Fraser University's Nano Imaging Lab - the world's smallest published book! It even has it's own International Standard Book Number (ISBN-978 -1-894897-17-4)!! How small? Well, a head of a pin is about 2 mm. At 0.07 mm x 0.10 mm, “Teeny Ted from Turnip Town” is a tinier read than the two smallest books cited by the Guinness Book of World Records: the New Testament of the King James Bible (5 x 5 mm, produced by MIT in 2001) and Chekhov’s Chameleon (0.9 x 0.9 mm, Palkovic, 2002).

What's the catch? Well, you're going to need a scanning electron microscope to read it!

Publisher Robert Chaplin, with the help of SFU scientists Li Yang and Karen Kavanagh, produced a nanoscale book made up of 30 silicon microtablets. The story, written by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin, is a fable about Teeny Ted’s victory in the turnip contest at the annual county fair. These scientists used electron microscopes and a focused-gallium-ion beam of only seven nanometers in diameter to carve the space surrounding each letter of the book. Since this book is considered an intricate work of contemporary art, the book is available in a signature edition (100 copies) from the publisher, through the SFU lab.

Source:Nano lab produces world’s smallest book

Colorful Fossils

Professor Andrew Parker, a scientist at the Natural History Museum, has discovered a way to discover the iridescent colors in animals from fossils of extinct animals. Tiny structures on the surface of the animal fossil cause sunlight to be split (like a prism) into the colors of a rainbow. Colors that result from these tiny structures are known as iridescent colors, like the colors that you see on a CD. These colors are very different from the chemically generated colors found in paints, skin, hair, or animal fur.

The tiny structures act as a diffraction grating (which is a reflecting surface covered in small parallel grooves), and exists in a lot of things naturally. You can find them in the antennae of seed srhimp, in the wing of a butterfly, and also in 515 million-year-old Burgess Shale fossils (shown right).

In the past, any color given to the skin, feathers, or fur of extinct animals have mostly guesswork, but now with this new discovery, we can pinpoint more accurately the color of extinct animals. But the next question that Parker wants to answer is: "Why were the animals at that time so colorful? When did the first eye exist on Earth and what happened when it did?"

Source:Colouring in the Fossil Past

Look Ma, No Light!

Maybe you've heard a lot about nanotechnology in the news but haven't actually seen any products available in the market. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Planet82 displayed new prototype cameras called the "Nano-Cam".

What is a Nano-Cam? Well, Planet82 used nanotechnology to produce imaging sensors that could give cameras "nightvision". The images aren't crystal clear, but they can spot just about anything in the dark.

One possible application of Planet82's technology is to spot children or pets that may be behind your car in a pitch black driveway.

Source: See in the dark with nanotechnology

Playing with Soap Bubbles

Wouldn't it be cool to earn your living by playing with soap bubbles? Well, that's what Paul Steen does. Paul Steen, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University studies the self assembly of thins films by surface tension. One of his latest project is an electrical switch made of water. By using electricity to create and release an adhesive bond between a droplet of water and a flat plate, Steen demonstrates the power of surface tension. A palm beetle can cling to a leaf with a strength equal to 100 times its body weight - which would be equivalent of Steen supporting six or seven cars with a bead of spit!

The device has no solid moving parts, turns on and off in under a second, runs on less than five volts and can be used either by itself or in larger arrays. If engineered down to the nanometer scale, an array of switches could allow Steen to walk across the ceiling of his office, focus the lens of a cell phone camera, or act as a microscopic, energy-efficient lab-on-a-chip.

Source: Paul Steen's latest invention makes a walk on the ceiling not so far-fetched

On The Cutting Edge

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder have designed a carbon nanotube knife that could theoretically work like a tight-wire cheese slicer. The conventional diamond or glass knives that biologists use to cut frozen cell samples often force samples to bend and crack. Because carbon nanotubes are extremely strong and slender in diameter, they make ideal materials for thinly cutting precise slivers of cells.

Why do we need to slice cells? Electron tomography can create 3D images of cells and tissues for scientists to stuy, but the sample needs to be less than 300 nanometers thick. The nanoknife is a carbon nanotude welded to two electrochemically sharpened tungsten needles. The research team has found that the welds were the weakest points in the nanoknife, and are now looking for new and improved welding techniques.

Source:On The Cutting Edge: Carbon Nanotube Cutlery