Nanotechnology Spotlight – Latest Articles

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From waste to power in one step

A revolutionary new environmental biotechnology - the Microbial Fuel Cell - turns the treatment of organic wastes into a source of electricity. Fuel cell technology, despite its recent popularity as a possible solution for a fossil-fuel free future, is actually quite old. The principle of the fuel cell was discovered by German scientist Christian Friedrich Schoenbein in 1838 and published in 1839. Based on this work, the first fuel cell was developed by Welsh scientist Sir William Robert Grove in 1843. The operating principle of a fuel cell is fairly straightforward. It is an electrochemical energy conversion device that converts the chemical energy from fuel (on the anode side) and oxidant (on the cathode side) directly into electricity. Today, there are many competing types of fuel cells, depending on what kind of fuel and oxidant they use. Many combinations of fuel and oxidant are possible. For instance, hydrogen cell uses hydrogen as fuel and oxygen as oxidant. Other fuels include hydrocarbons and alcohols. An interesting - but not commercially viable yet - variant of the fuel cell is the microbial fuel cell (MFC) where bacteria oxidize compounds such as glucose, acetate or wastewater. Researchers in Spain have fabricated multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) scaffolds with a micro-channel structure in which bacteria can grow. This scaffold structure could be used as electrodes in microbial fuel cells.

Aug 9th, 2007

Carbon nanotubes as effective cancer killers

Curing cancer is on of the many promises of nanotechnology. Although scientists have been making amazing progress in this area, there are still significant challenges that need to be overcome before highly selective, targeted anti-cancer therapy becomes available for everyday clinical use. A nanotechnology-based system to eradicate cancer needs four elements: 1) Molecular imaging at the cellular level so that even the slightest overexpressions can be monitored; 2) effective molecular targeting after identifying specific surface or nucleic acid markers; 3) a technique to kill the cells, that are identified as cancerous based on molecular imaging, simultaneously by photodynamic therapy or drug delivery and 4) a post molecular imaging technique to monitor the therapeutic efficacy. One of the problems today is that these four techniques are used separately or ineffectively, resulting in an overall poor therapeutic outcome. In what could amount to a quantum leap in cancer nanotechnology, researchers have now integrated these techniques simultaneously in vitro and shown that this results in higher therapeutic efficacies for destroying cancer cells. Their demonstration of multi-component molecular targeting of surface receptors and subsequent photo-thermal destruction of cancer cells using single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) could lead to a new class of molecular delivery and cancer therapeutic systems.

Jul 11th, 2007

Nanotechnology coming to a brain near you

If you have seen the movie The Matrix then you are familiar with 'jacking in' - a brain-machine neural interface that connects a human brain to a computer network. For the time being, this is still a sci-fi scenario, but don't think that researchers are not heavily working on it. What is already reality today is something called neuroprosthetics, an area of neuroscience that uses artificial microdevices to replace the function of impaired nervous systems or sensory organs. Different biomedical devices implanted in the central nervous system, so-called neural interfaces, already have been developed to control motor disorders or to translate willful brain processes into specific actions by the control of external devices. These implants could help increase the independence of people with disabilities by allowing them to control various devices with their thoughts (not surprisingly, the other candidate for early adoption of this technology is the military). The potential of nanotechnology application in neuroscience is widely accepted. Especially single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) have received great attention because of their unique physical and chemical features, which allow the development of devices with outstanding electrical properties. In a crucial step towards a new generation of future neuroprosthetic devices, a group of European scientists developed a SWCNT/neuron hybrid system and demonstrated that carbon nanotubes can directly stimulate brain circuit activity.

Jul 5th, 2007

Nanotechnology's "magic bullet"

The ideal drug carrier may be something out of science fiction. In principle, it is injected into the body and transports itself to the correct target, such as a tumor, and delivers the required dose at this target. This idealized concept was first proposed by Paul Ehrlich at the beginning of the 20th century and was nicknamed the "magic bullet" concept. With the advent of nanotechnology and nanomedicine this dream is rapidly becoming a reality. Nanotechnology has already been applied to drug delivery and cosmetics through the use of liposomal technology, and now nanoparticles and nanotubes present an exciting and more promising alternative.

Jun 19th, 2007

Ethanol production inside carbon nanotubes

Ethanol is all the rage these days. Although we have been drinking ethanol, an alcohol, for thousands of years (fermented beverages such as beer and wine may contain up to 15-25% ethanol by volume), the recent interest has been sparked by its use as a renewable fuel alternative to gasoline. Indeed, the largest single use of ethanol is as a motor fuel and fuel additive. Ethanol is produced by fermentation when certain species of yeast metabolize sugar. The process works with all biological feedstocks that contain appreciable amounts of sugar or materials that can be converted into sugar such as starch or cellulose. The primary feedstock for ethanol production in the U.S. is corn. In Brazil, the world's leading ethanol producer, it's mostly derived from sugar cane. While there is a heated controversy over the economic and ecological benefits of using biomass for producing ethanol fuel, it seems that nanotechnology's jack-of-all-trades, the carbon nanotube (CNT), might provide a solution here as well. CNTs are increasingly recognized as promising materials for catalysis, either as catalysts themselves, as catalyst additives or as catalyst supports. Researchers in China now have used CNTs loaded with rhodium (Rh) nanoparticles as reactors to convert a gas mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen into ethanol. This appears to be the first example where the activity and selectivity of a metal-catalyzed gas-phase reaction benefits significantly from proceeding inside a nanosized CNT reaction vessel.

Jun 8th, 2007

Horseradish, carbon nanotubes and cancer therapy

cnt-dispersion-in-bottlesScientists involved in cancer research are showing a lot of interest in carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to be used in basically three cancer-fighting areas. CNTs are being developed as targeted delivery vehicles for anticancer drugs right into cancer cells - think of really, really tiny injection needles. They are also used as the therapeutic agent itself; there is research that shows that CNTs can act as nanoscale bombs that literally blow apart a cancer cell. A third area of application is using CNTs as imaging agents.

Jun 6th, 2007

DNA wrappers for carbon nanotubes

To achieve the full benefits of the amazing properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) researchers are exploring all kinds of CNT composite materials. Material engineers are interested because this will lead to lighter,stronger and tougher materials. Another fascinating area involves CNT/polymer composite structures that will lead to a vast range of improved and novel applications, from antistatic and EMI shielding to more efficient fuel and solar cells, to nanoelectronic devices. One particular area of CNT/polymer composites is dealing with DNA-CNTs hybrids. Although researchers expect a plethora of new applications, the fact that even the formation mechanism of these complexes is not yet clear shows how early in the game this research still is. This might be due to the fact that in spite of the quite large number of experimental investigations on the interaction between DNA and CNTs, the number of theoretical studies is limited. Researchers in Germany now present, for the first time, the results of a systematic quantum mechanical modeling of the stability and the electronic properties of complexes based on single-walled carbon nanotubes, which are helically wrapped by DNA molecules.

Jun 4th, 2007

Green nanotechnology - turning diesel soot into carbon nanotubes

Diesel-burning engines are a major contributor to environmental pollution. They emit a mixture of gases and fine particles that contain some 40, mostly toxic chemicals, including benzene, butadiene, dioxin and mercury compounds. Diesel exhaust is listed as a known or probable human carcinogen by several state and federal agencies in the United States. Wouldn't it be nice if we could render diesel soot harmless before it gets released into the environment? Wouldn't it even be nicer if we could use this soot to manufacture something useful? Japanese scientists have come up not only with a unique technique for effectively collecting diesel soot but also a method for using this soot as a precursor for the production of single-walled carbon nanotubes. How is that as a practical example for green nanotechnology?

May 30th, 2007