Nanoboxes

Researchers at Washington University in St Louis have developed tiny gold cubes called nanoboxes which could deliver drugs to precisely targeted areas of the body. How? These boxes only open up and spill their drug contents when exposed to light.

The nanoscale boxes will come packed with a drug, and then release it when hit by a laser. To do this, nanoscale gold boxes are created, and then coated with a polymer called poly(N-isopropylacrylamide). The polymers cling to the outer walls of the cube like hairs on a muppet, and seal the pores on the cube, thus preventing any of the payload from leaking. When the gold is hit by light of a resonant frequency, it absorbs it and converts it to heat, and when the polymer is warmed, it shrinks and collapses, releasing the medicine. Once the light is turned off, the polymers stand on end again, re-sealing the boxes.

According to Dr. Jingyi Chen, one of the principal investigators on the technology, the opening and closing is nearly instantaneous. The nanocubes heat up "from a nanosecond to a femtosecond, [the drugs] are released a little bit slower, that takes around a millisecond." They cool down at the same rate, which allows for extremely fine targeting of dosage. The really cool part is that both the gold and polymer can be fine tuned to work under specific conditions. By thickening the gold walls, the wavelength of light that it can absorb shifts. In this case, they're aiming for the 750-900 nanometer range. Why this wavelength? Because at this point it can penetrate the human body very easily, and can travel inches into the body, as the muscle and blood doesn't easily absorb this wavelength of light. The polymer is then tuned to react to a level of heat that won't kill any cells, but is still above the normal temperature of the body. In trials, the boxes were exposed to a laser of the correct frequency, releasing their dose, and then closing up once the light was turned off. Researchers used the boxes as a way of delivering targeted chemotherapy drugs and antibiotics to a controlled area.

Synthetic Skin

If you're dealing with open wounds, once you flush out any possible bacteria, you need to deal with the realities of closing the flesh. In situations where an injury is over a certain size, it can't be relied on to close normally. Through the use of collagen extracted from skin, doctors can induce new skin to grow by giving it a framework over which to expand. The collagen can be extracted and grown from a variety of sources, such as donated skin, baby's foreskins (apparently up to four football fields worth, which is an utterly disturbing mental image), or from non-human sources, such as mammal organs or reptile skin. The collagen can also be impregnated with other ingredients, such as silver, which is naturally antibiotic. For anything from burns to bedsores, this skin scaffolding can lead to impressive regrowth and healing.

Nerve Regeneration

With spinal injuries, on the other hand, growth is a major problem. The creation of scar tissue around damaged areas of the central nervous system can prevent nerves from healing and regaining function. Previously, the enzyme chrondroitinase ABC (chABC) was used to reduce the scar tissue, but it functioned poorly at body temperature. Within an hour of being injected, it loses half of its potency, and the rest within a few days. Due to this a catheter or pump has to be installed, so that the enzymes can be repeatedly delivered over the two weeks required for it to be effective. Researchers at Georgia Tech have discovered away to reduce the thermal sensitivity of the enzyme, so it can stay in your body effectively for weeks, by bonding the chABC with the sugar trehalose. They also developed a new way to deliver the drug, via an injection of hydrogel filled with microtubes, which allowed deeper penetration than catheters, and slowly releases the drugs over a two week period. This means that the spinal scar tissue can be effectively reduced by a single injection, rather than weeks of constant exposure, and without requiring invasive implants.

A new article in the Miami Herald raises a terrifying prospect for nanotech warfare:

Jane's, the London-based research group that publishes the industry standard Jane's All the World's Aircraft, warns that nanotechnology can be used to create entirely new hazards such as miniaturized nuclear weapons that are smaller, lighter, easier to transport and hide and smuggle into unsuspecting countries. It says nano techniques designed to deliver medicines in a more-targeted way also can deliver toxic substances in a form of bioterrorism.

Nanotechnology, in which materials are machined on a molecule-by-molecule, or atom-by-atom basis, could produce super-nukes that are so tiny, they don't technically qualify as weapons of mass destruction, Jane's has warned in past articles.

In one 2003 article, Jane's warns that "some advanced technology, such as superlaser" could trigger a relatively small thermonuclear explosion involving a deuterium-tritium mixture, in a device weighing no more than a few kilograms. The device could go from a fraction of a ton to "many tens of tons" of high-explosive equivalent yield, and because they use little to no fissionable materials, they would have "virtually no radioactive fallout." Self-replicating nanotech could also produce conventional weapons in such quantities that they would become WMDs.

Are you scared yet?

Apparently, the carbon nanotubes help with water uptake, and seeds exposed to carbon nanotubes contain more moisture. Actually, it doesn't look like this tech will be leading to giant fruits and vegetables in the near future — for now, here's what the researchers, from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's Nanotech Center said:

Here, we demonstrated that the exposure of carbon nanotubes to seeds of valuable crops, such as tomatoes, can increase the germination percentage and support and enhance the growth of seedlings. Furthering these findings could result in significant developments of improved plants for the area of energy, by taking advantage of the enhancement in the biomass of the plants when they are exposed to nanosized materials and fertilizers.

And here's a cool picture:

[ACS Nano via Technology Review]

Scientists at Wake Forest University injected multi-walled carbon nanotubes into tumors and then heated them up using a laser, a technique researchers have been talking about for a few years now. But what's exciting is the results of the latest study, published in the Procedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. The mice that received the highest level of treatment saw their tumors disappear completely in 80 percent of cases.

Says Nanowerk:

Using a mouse model, the researchers injected kidney tumors with different quantities of MWCNTs and exposed the area to a 3-watt laser for 30 seconds. They found that the mice that received no treatment for their tumors died about 30 days into the study. Mice that received the nanotubes alone or laser treatment alone survived for a similar length of time. However, in the mice that received the MWCNTs followed by a 30-second laser treatment, the higher the quantity of nanotubes injected, the longer the mice lived and the less tumor regrowth was seen. In fact, in the group that received the highest dose of MWCNTs, tumors completely disappeared in 80% of the mice. Many of those mice continued to live tumor free through the completion of the study, about 9 months later.

You could actually watch the tumors shrinking, say researchers. And the mice maintained their weight and appeared healthy and normal.

A separate bit of research is also encouraging. A new method of delivering diptheria toxin-encoding DNA into ovarian tumors is at least as effective as chemotherapy — with no harmful side effects. And it could be tested in humans as soon as 18 to 24 months from now. In a nutshell, researchers injected nanoparticles into the peritoneal cavity, where ovarian cancer first starts to spread. And the nanoparticles delivered diptheria toxin that was genetically engineered to attack only ovarian cells. The toxin destroyed cells' ability to manufacture proteins.

In the past, scientists have worked on using viruses to deliver toxin-encoding DNA to a tumor, but using biodegradable nanoparticles instead is safer. And the treatment could also work in brain, lung and liver cancers.
Image from Nanotechweb.

[Nanowerk and Nanowerk]

Metamaterials are materials engineered to do things nature didn't intend them to do. (We've covered them before.) The most commonly built kind of metamaterials are "optically active" metamaterials, or materials that make light behave in strange ways. They do this by making light bend around tiny folds or dip into nano-sized wells.

The strange interactions between light and metamaterials come with limitations, though. For any seriously strong light effects you traditionally need a lot of this material, something like a hundred wavelengths thick. But researcher Justyna Gansel and a team of scientists have devised a way to get strong optic effects with a lot less metamaterial.

As revealed in their paper published in Science, the secret is actually tiny gold corkscrews. The team used lasers to carve these tiny nano-scale coils out of gold, and the resulting array of golden pigtails is their secret for strong optical effects. What took a hundred wavelengths' thickness of material to have the desired effect before now takes only one wavelength's thickness.

In practical terms (and the field of metamaterials is getting closer and closer to being practical), this means that your theoretical invisibility device just went from being an invisibility wall to an invisibility fabric.

Another major limitation on the metamaterial field is tunability. A material built to manipulate a certain wavelength of light can't easily do the same for another wavelength. In other words, a polarizer for blue light can't easily polarize red light.

A team headed by Tom Driscoll has developed a solution, also published in Science. They have devised a type of metamaterial that is not only tunable (it can be warped and changed to serve different wavelengths and functions), but it can remember its different states. Going back to the polarizer example, this would mean that your red light polarizer could switch easily between red and blue light, and any number of other states.

When taken together, these two discoveries pave an interesting path. Metamaterials have gone from custom-made, one-use, bulky set-ups to versatile, programmable, and best of all very thin materials. And the path that these discoveries delineate leads towards increasingly strange and impressive metamaterials.

Gold Helix Photonic Metamaterial as Broadband Circular Polarizer [Science]

Memory Metamaterials [Science]

The individual fibers are composed of two rolled-up semiconducting glass layers, coated in an insulator. When light interacts with the semiconductor, the current changes through the fibers, thus providing a way of measuring how much light is hitting the fabric.

The resulting data can be run through a computer to create a "photograph" of whatever is near the fabric. The color of the light can be determined by comparing one semiconductor sheet's data with the other.

All of that data eventually becomes a full scale photo of the fabric's surroundings. The researchers tested their fabric camera, too, reporting their results in Nano Letters. The material could take a photo of an 800 micron smiley face.

Further development could lead to larger fabric samples, or even military uniforms that can record what's happening all around a soldier. The possible applications of this are pretty amazing.

Flexible fabric that takes 'takes pictures' [via PhysicsWorld]
Paper, "Exploiting Collective Effects of Multiple Optoelectronic Devices Integrated in a Single Fiber" [Nano Letters]

We were lucky enough to get a copy of Max Allan Collins' novelization of G.I. Joe: The Rise Of COBRA. And we had not fully appreciated the dementia of this storyline, which really is all about nanotech and how it'll eat the world.

In the G.I. Joe universe, nanotech can do almost anything — turn regular people into super-soldiers, control your mind, devour the Eiffel Tower. I wouldn't be surprised if this movie's script was actually written by nanobots, which sliced up a million other action-movie scripts and mashed them up into a wonderfully incoherent mess. There are undigested scraps of Sho Kosugi movies and bad war movies floating around this gray goo of a story, and it's nice to watch them sail past.

This might actually be the most prominent nanotech action movie ever — I'm straining to think of another movie where nanotechnology is so central to the plot.

The central villain of the movie, of course, is the Scottish James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), an arms merchant who secretly hungers for power. In a flashback, his ancestor gets tortured by the French by being fitted with a searing-hot metal mask, and so McCullen has a special hatred for French people. When we meet the present-day McCullen, he's selling the NATO brass on his latest weapon — nanomites, which are basically nanomachines that eat anything metal, until you hit their "Kill Switch" and turn them off. They can disarm an opponent without the need for bloodshed, and so one NATO suit jokes that McCullen may be the first arms merchant to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

But McCullen, of course, has other plans — after he delivers the nanomites to NATO, he launches an attack of his Neo-Vipers to steal them back. The Neo-Vipers are supersoldiers who have been enhanced by nanotechnology — which also controls their minds. At one point, McCullen gloats that his troops still have their own thoughts, but they're incapable of doing anything but obey his orders. The convoy escorting the nanomites is led by Conrad "Duke" Hauser and Wallace "Ripcord" Weems, and they're the only ones who are prepared when the Neo-Vipers attack.

The convoy gets wiped out, but luckily the G.I. JOE squad shows up — an international team of super-experts who don't officially exist, but appear as if by magic when they're needed. There's Heavy Duty, who's heavy and does his duty. There's Scarlett, who has red hair. There's Cover Girl, who's blonde. There's Breaker, who... uh, breaks things. And there's Snake Eyes, a ninja who's taken a vow of silence. And then their leader, General Hawk. The JOEs save the day, but Duke is loath to hand over his hard-won nanomite cargo to them, so they take him and Ripcord back to their secret base. And of course, Duke and Ripcord wind up joining the team, to the sound of people shouting "Yo JOE!" (That's their rallying cry.)

Meanwhile, McCullen has his own colorful squad. There's Zartan, a fiendishly exotic killer who can impersonate anyone. The Baroness, who turns out to be Duke's ex-fiancee — but now she's married to a Baron, who's not allowed to touch her, or a ninja will kill him. (Seriously, it's a running subplot: if her husband so much as kisses her, the always-watchful ninja will kill him. Try bringing THAT up in marriage counseling.) There's the ninja, Storm Shadow, who's taken a vow of nastiness towards Snake Eyes. And finally, the Doctor, the fiendish nanotechnology genius with a crazy mask who makes the whole wacky operation possible.

When Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes finally face off, Storm Shadow hisses in Japanese, "You took a vow of silence... Now you will die without a word." Sho Kosugi, eat your heart out.

There's also this great bit, towards the end:

Heavy Duty told them: "You know the mission: Find Duke..."

"...grab the warheads," Rip said.

"And kill all the bad guys," Scarlett said.

"Roger that," Heavy D said.

Snake Eyes, of course, said nothing.

But they all knew that when it came to killing bad guys, he was the man.

Snake Eyes can't talk, but he can send text messages, which is kind of cute.

Eventually, we learn that the reason why Duke and the Baroness are no longer together is because Duke got the Baroness' brother killed on a mission. Except that there's a shocking twist, and if you can't see it coming a mile off, I have no hope for you.

Last year's summer movies were all about the relentless advances of weapons technology, and what they cost us. Iron Man was about a remorseful weapons maker, Incredible Hulk was about a remorseful military experiment, and The Dark Knight bemoaned the fact that all of Bruce Wayne's fancy armaments only spurred on the homicidal maniacs. This year, though, it's gung-ho militarism season, spearheaded by toy movies — literally, movies based on toys.

The advantage that G.I. Joe has over this summer's other Hasbro movie, Transformers 2, is that its human characters are action figures. In Transformers, the robots were toys but the people were just standard movie characters — almost every movie nowadays has an Italian Jewish male stripper who blogs about killer robots, after all. But in G.I. Joe, every single character feels like an action figure walking around — reading the novelization is like watching a five-year-old play with figurines, while a middle-aged guy narrates portentously. In other words, it's probably the most perfect action-adventure novel ever.

So because this is all about toys, there are lots and lots of loving descriptions of military hardware, from flying drones to fighter jets to a stealth van called the Scarab. You've already seen the ridiculous Iron Man-esque power suits which Duke and Ripcord wear in one crucial Paris sequence, but the story is loaded with insane hardware. Scarlett gets to wear a special combat suit, which renders her totally invisible.

At one point, Collins refers to Heavy Duty as wielding a massive "machine-gun-cum-grenade-launcher," which put a mental image in my mind that I don't think he intended.

When the Vipers attack the convoy, they arrive in a super-armored stealth ship called a Typhoon, shooting pulse lasers that fling the dead bodies of Duke's Special Forces squad "like discarded refuse." And then there's this great description of the Baroness, who shows up on the scene:

The neckline of the body armor exposed the upper part of her swelling bosom, an exposure of flesh that arrogantly dared bullets to try for her, as if she could walk blithely across the battlescape.

Even amidst an army of plastic characters and silly dialogue, the biggest problem is probably Ripcord, who's played by Marlon Wayans in the movie and is exactly as emasculated as you might have feared. Towards the beginning, when the convoy is attacked, Ripcord gets startled by a shape coming up behind him, and squeals "like a Girl Scout whose cookies had been snatched from her" — before he realizes it's just a stray cow. Later, in the big Paris chase scene, Ripcord runs through a lingerie store and winds up with a bra on his powersuit helmet. He's the one who spouts the jokes about "kung-fu grip," and he's the dumb one who needs everything explained to him. He's constantly saying things like "I'm livin' a brother's dream, man." To be fair, though, he does get to save the day in the end, and he has a quasi-romance with Scarlett.

Here's my favorite passage in the whole book, after the JOE squad gets back to their base:

In his stateroom, General Hawk was in the office area, at his desk, humming a jaunty military tune.

He was going over the paperwork regarding the new JOEs, Hauser and Weems, when a crisp knock came at the door. He rose, answered it, and found his lovely blonde aide, with the smart tablet in one hand and a stylus in the other.

"Sorry to disturb you, sir."

"Not at all, Cover Girl."

"I just need you to sign here, here, and here..."

He did so.

Then she said, "And here, and here."

This he also did.

"Anything else?" he asked.

"No, sir, just this..." She gave him a rare, unguarded smile. "And another thirty-six pages."

He grinned at her. "Maybe you should step inside."

She hugged the smart tablet to her, and began to say something, but it never got said, because the tip of a Katar dagger thrust through the tablet, having taken a path through Cover Girl's back.

As she fell to her knees, eyes large with the shock of dying, the figure of Zartan in camo-cap and jacket revealed the source of the blade.

Her name is Cover Girl... but she gets stabbed in the back. Get it? Get it??

A lot of the violence is amazingly sexualized, actually — there are several scenes between Duke and Baroness where they're so close they can feel each other's breath, as they grapple or wield guns at each other, and it's the nearest and hottest they've been since they used to make love. When the Baroness and Scarlett have their inevitable girl fight, Collins describes the two women as being "locked in a violent embrace." There's a flashback where the young Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes train together and vie for the approval of their teacher, the Hard Master.

Oh, and I should mention that Max Allan Collins is one of my fave writers, and he does a great job with an incredibly silly story. His Ms. Tree is one of my favorite comics of all time, and I love his work on Batman. Here, he occasionally manages to channel the great Mickey Spillane, his idol with whom he collaborated on the underrated Mike Danger series, with some very loopy prose and action-packed jaw-gritting.

It all explodes into a James Bond villain-esque climax where McCullen plans to wipe out three major cities and do something unspeakable to the U.S. president. (And it ends on a genuinely lunatic cliffhanger, which I won't spoil.) The nanotech threatens to devour everything, unless our heroes can hit the kill switches, or unless Ripcord can shoot down the nanotech warheads in mid-air. And as you've probably heard, James McCullen's face gets hideously scarred, and he winds up with a new mask made out of nanotech. A mask made out of nanotech! Sadly, it doesn't reshape itself into new forms or create emoticons or anything.

In the end, that's the thing that still gives me hope for G.I. Joe — with Christopher Eccleston playing McCullen/Destro and Joseph Gordon Levitt playing The Doctor/Cobra Commander, all of this over-the-top growling about using nanotech warheads to blow up the world may actually cure our recent villain ennui. Like so much else about this film, it really depends on whether flesh-and-blood actors can fully embody the plastic miens and jerky-limbed heroism of the toys of your youth. If not, you can always buy the newest line of toys and zoom them around your bed while you read Collins' musky prose.

The minuscule robot is powered and directed by external magnetic fields. That means no wires or batteries. The robot uses its tiny arms to grip walls and propel itself forward. Once it's in, it can operate essentially autonomously, relentlessly trolling through the desired areas of a human body.

The ViRob can crawl at 9mm per second through openings no wider than 3mm. To put this in perspective, the average ear canal is about 7mm in diameter, while veins can be up to 6mm in diameter. The ViRob would have no problem with either of those.

The Technion is still working on actual applications, but they postulate that the ViRob will be useful in microsurgery and imaging. It's also useful as a frightening glimpse at future nano-tech gone wild.

The ViRob in action [YouTube]
White paper [Technion]

"Aesthetic Imperfections" by Dr. Hans Danzebrink was chosen as part of last fall's "Science As Art" exhibition, and purchased by Jennifer Millar, who blogged about it:

Entitled "Aesthetic Imperfections", the atomic force photomicrograph reveals dislocations in a photonic crystal arrangement of polystyrene nanospheres. Without the vivid colours generated by computer software, these transparent structures are instead defined by their topography, geometry and symmetry. It is these characteristics which give rise to the optical effects in the material, visible to the human eye. It is fascinating to ponder the interplay between different faces of the same object- the colourless world of the nano scale, and the iridescent play of colours on the macro scale.

The creator of "Aesthetic Imperfections" is Dr Hans Danzebrink of the German metrology institute, Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. Upon seeing the artwork exhibited as part of RIT's "Images From Science", I contacted Dr Danzebrink to ask him more about it. I was thrilled by his prompt response- he was only too happy to impart his experience, and pronounced himself honoured by my request to reproduce the image. It was refreshing to encounter a research scientist so willing to share his work! The exhibition recognises the impact of photography in science, which is perhaps not appreciated to the same degree as in the art world. The plethora of images presents scientific data artistically, thus making scientific concepts accessible to society at large.

Here's the full image, plus another Hanzebrink original, "Data Channels," showing data moving through a computer chip:

I totally love the video, above, of the hamster hooked up to the nanowire, generating enough power to drive some nano-devices. If you attached four nanowires to the plucky critter, you'd have 200 millivolts, and you'd be in business. I'm picturing a whole program of bagging and tagging, with nanowires being attached to tons of forest creatures to provide a power source for devices that bag and tag other forest creatures. The ultimate perpetual motion machine!

Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor has an interview with Nadrian Seeman, a New York University professor who may be the "Henry Ford of nanotechnology." Seeman talks about his struggle to create cheap, easily replicated nanomachines out of DNA, with two arms and error correction on the fly:

Seeman has been working on nanorobotics for several years. He first perfected a one-armed version in 2006. It was the first time anyone had put together such a device in a DNA array, he says.

Now, that he's pulled off a two-arm design, Seeman says that his team can finally build things.

The big leap in Seeman's work is the ability to "remote control" the DNA arms, says Milan Stojanovic, a professor of medicine at Columbia University and director of the National Science Foundation's Center for Molecular Cybernetics. Finally, his team can set up a protocol to fix errors along the way.

Seeman says he got inspiration from an M.C. Escher print to think about ways to create nanomachines from DNA rather than from inorganic materials, which was the standard back in the 1980s.

[Wired and Christian Science Monitor]

Schmoranzer's microscopy images of "wounded monolayers," "starved fibroblasts" and a "nuclear face" come from the 2008-2009 NanoArt competition organized by NanoArt21.org.

Schmoranzer is a group leader and head of the BioImaging facility at the Molecular Cancer Research Center of Charite Berlin. He says:

Seeing the beauty of cellular structures, like microtubules, after many hours of tiring and repetitive lab-work often gives me the kick to go on. I am glad that scientist like me receive public attention for display of scientific imagery and I am excited to expand on projects like ‘Cell Portraits' by exploring different cellular structures and cell types. I believe that visualizing science – the process of research as well as its end products – will gain importance in the future, not only to draw attention to a particular scientific subject, but also for science education itself.

You can see the rest of the gorgeous nano-art here. [via AzoNano]

Researchers at the University of Southern California say, in a new paper, that they've succeeded in fabricating transparent thin-film transistors (TTFTs) at low temperatures, by using carbon nanotubes. Colder fabrication means it's cheaper to make them, and it also raises the "device mobility," which enables fast operation and lowers power consumption. It also allows you to put the TTFTs into more flexible substances, as opposed to just panes of glass.

In other words, low-temperature fabrication and high mobility is the key to dream applications, like "e-paper, wearable display, smart tag, and artificial skin (E-skin)." I totally want my skin to have tattoos that change color or shape depending on my mood or level of drunkenness. Can we have that by next week, please? [ACS Nano via Nanowerk]

Luckily, molecules that can crawl already exist in nature. Kinesin, for example, is a protein that crawls along microtubules in our cells - hitch a bit of cellular cargo to it, and it'll go along for the ride.

Molecules with "legs" made of DNA can be coaxed into a vaguely similar "walk" on a surface also composed of DNA, while less biological variations could be useful in the computing industry. There are a number of molecular motors that can convert chemical or light energy into motion - getting useful work out of that motion, however, can be tricky.

Not all tiny robots are nano, of course. Dartmouth's "inchworm" is relatively huge at over a hundred microns in length, and this six-legged crab-bot is even larger - the chassis is made of polymer with an engine composed of rat heart tissue. When the tissue contracts, it provides power to crawl the 'bot at about 0.002 miles per hour. Not bad for a ride less than a millimeter long.

When nature provides a convenient source of motility, like heart tissue or bacterial gliding, harnessing it can be a lot easier than building a molecular machine from scratch. The micromotor below harnesses bacteria to turn its rotors.

The bacteria move from the center of A into the channels. When they meet the circle at the end (B, C) , they tend to be going in one direction (D). The rotor (E, F) fits into the circle and is coated with sialic protein which the bacteria stick to and push. It's like the beginning of Conan: The Barbarian, except microscopic, and with better acting.

While true nanobots would have to be even smaller than the crab or this rotor, they do show an interest in producing useful locomotion in increasingly smaller packages. Besides, to produce a useful bot may require a collection of various nanoscale parts that assembled together produce a larger-than-nanoscale 'bot.

If you can't crawl, you're going to have to swim. Again, nature is ahead of us with the flagellum - basically, a propeller for microbes.

The adaptability and motility of these bacteria are a few of the reasons why researchers are using them as inspiration for their own devices and working to modify them to deliver drugs to cancer cells, and perhaps heart disease follow. If it's not bacterial in origin, don't be surprised if the world's first medical nanobot is sperm-propelled.

Building nanoscale machines from scratch that can swim is harder than it sounds (and it ought to sound pretty hard). For one thing, our physical intuition about swimming breaks down at the nanoscale. If you were to shrink, Fantastic Voyage-style and find yourself swimming in water, you'd think the water had turned into a highly viscous liquid like molasses. This has to do with the dynamics of fluids at different length scales, as E.M. Purcell discussed in his Life at Low Reynold's Number talk. Simply shrinking a design that swims well at the macroscale is no guarantee that it'll zoom along at the micro- or nanoscale.

Once you have a nanoswimmer or nanocrawler (or have appropriated one from nature), you're going to have to figure out how to guide it towards your target and either release its payload or do whatever repairs need to be done. As far as heart disease is concerned, it's going to be a race between the nanobots and extensive genetic tinkering to prevent the problem in the first place.

Burton notes that, while there are certain taboos against the commodification of the human body, there are places in the world that permit the sale of organs, spawning a transplant tourism industry. And some people already treat their bodies as farms, growing out and lopping off their hair for sale. But if nanotechnology gives us the ability to grow body parts and pharmaceuticals directly on our skin, more humans would be able, and perhaps encouraged, to participate in that commodification:

Do we really have a choice in our future?

How will future technologies indirectly influence the evolution of the body in certain social-economic extremes?

What circumstances would it take to reconsider your body as a source of income?

A subset of pictures, entitled “Stem,” was inspired at recent advances in harvesting stem cell from adipose fat, supposing that it could be an early form of body farming. It also calls to mind a more fantastical scenario from recent science fiction:

[Michael Burton via Next Nature]

A transmission electron microscope like the Titan doesn't produce a visual image directly. Instead, it fires a focused electron beam through the viewing material. Some electrons pass through, some are deflected. Sensors on the other side detect the electrons and can produce a spatial image, like the image of a surgical mesh above. The Titan achieves amazingly high resolution by using devices that correct spherical aberration and can produce an extremely narrow wavelength electron beam. It's so sensitive that the building will be isolated from sound and vibration, and the operator can't even be in the same room as the microscope.

Seeing the molecular structure of objects with such fine detail will be a boon to nanotech. MacMaster reports that the Titan will be used for research in a variety of fields:

The microscope will be used to help produce more efficient lighting and better solar cells, study proteins and drug-delivery materials to target cancers. It will assess atmospheric particulates, and help create lighter and stronger automotive materials, more effective cosmetics, and higher density memory storage for faster electronic and telecommunication devices.

Image by: National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

McMaster University unveils world's most advanced microscope. [EurekAlerts!]

DNA sequencing is slow and takes a lot of computational power. To put it into Homer Simpson terms, the DNA is replicated, torn into little pieces, sorted out and analyzed bit by bit, then reassembled by a computer. The SMRT sequencer improves on the process because it "watches" the DNA as it is being replicated by the polymerase, reading each piece of DNA in something called the Zero-Mode Waveguide. The ZMW is a "nanophotonic visualization chamber" made by making a hole just a few tens of nanometers across in a metal film just 100 nanometers thick. Chemicals introduced into the reaction give off tiny flashes of colored light, which are detected by the highly parallel optics system (pictured). The CCD can detect the lights, and computers use that information to figure out which base pairs are in which ZMW window, decoding long strands of DNA in real-time. You could be running down to the DNA-Mart for a quick DNA scan as soon as 2013. Image by: Pacific Biosciences.

Long Reads, Short Run Time, and High Quality Data at Lower Cost. [Pacific Biosciences]

We've actually had nano-iron for a while - the crystalline structure that gives iron its physical properties is improved, making it significantly harder and stronger. One problem: at moderately high temperatures, the stuff is about as durable as an ice cream cone on a summer day. Since most manufacturing methods using iron involve high temperatures and pressures, that made previous versions of nano-iron even less useful than an ice cream cone on a summer day (melty nano-iron is neither tasty nor refreshing).

The NC State team's solution was to add one percent zirconium to the iron, giving it heat resistance somewhere near the melting point of regular iron, but all the awesomeness of nano-iron. They even gave the stuff a catchy name: Nanocrystalline FeZr Alloy (those are the chemical symbols for iron and zirconium, for those playing along at home).

We ran that by Tony Stark, but he says "FeZr Man" has poor branding potential. Image by: Marvel Studios.

Super-hard Nanocrystalline Iron Developed That Can Take The Heat. [Science Daily]

The Korean researchers used nanotechnology to build the shape of the virus, then added self-assembling molecules. The result: an artificial virus with the filament shapes seen in the image. Such a shape will allow it to last longer inside a person's body.

Why is this important? Medication delivered directly to cells with an artificial virus is like using a professional assassin to take out your target. By comparison, conventional medication techniques are more like running around a city firing a shotgun in random directions. The other major bonus? That thing totally looks like some kind of microscopic spawn of Cthulhu. Image by: Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Filamentous Artificial Virus from a Self-Assembled Discrete Nanoribbon [Angewandte Chemie International Edition] via Nobel Intent.

The usual Scoville test involves diluting a sauce until taste testers can't detect heat anymore — the amount required to dilute it gives it a rating on the Scoville Scale. Chromatography can give you an accurate reading of capsaicinoids, but it's neither cheap nor easy. The new test uses carbon nanotube electrodes to draw in capsaicin molecules, which have a unique electrochemical response. When the capsaicinoids react, the device measures the current change and determines exactly how many were present. It can even translate this number into Scoville Units.

While the developers think this will be very useful in the food industry, where it can be deployed right on the production line, I've got a better idea. We can use it to develop a hot sauce so intense that we can cover our bodies with it to protect us from hungry robots. Image by: Viewoftheworld.

Chemists Measure Chilli Sauce Hotness With Nanotubes. [Science Daily]

These "sunflowers" are actually nanowires arranged in a naturally-occurring pattern.

Wired's Aaron Rowe writes:

When S.K. Hark, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, looked at some [nanowires] under a scanning electron microscope, he saw flowers. Unlike plants, their fertilizers were gallium and gold catalysts — which allowed them to grow to several microns in length while maintaining a roughly 10-nanometer diameter.

While there are several bizarre items in the nano-cookware category such as "antibacterial cookware," and the "nano silver teapot," the best items are the nano health supplements that just reek of futuristic quackery. How about the "LifePak Nano" supplement, that promises:

Lifepak® nano is a nutritional anti-aging program formulated to nourish and protect cells, tissues, and organs in the body with the specific purpose to guard against the ravages of aging. Lifepak® nano offers the highest bioavailability with a first-ever nanotechnology process and advanced levels of key anti-aging nutrients in a comprehensive formula.

This technology is called NSSL (Nano-sized self assembled structured liquids), which is a development of minute compressed micelles, which are called nanodrops. These minute micelles serve as a liquid carrier, which allows penetration of healthy components (such as vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals) that are insoluble in water or fats. The micelles are added to the food product, and thus pass through the digestive system effectively, without sinking or breaking up, to the absorption site. The minute micelles carry the phytosterols to the large micelles that the body produces from the bile acid, where they compete with cholesterol for entry into the micelle. The phytosterols enter the micelle, thereby inhibiting transportation of cholesterol from the digestive system into the bloodstream. This advanced technology was applied in the development of Canola Active oil, produced by Shemen Industries.

You can search through the nano-product goldmine at the E-Nano Project for yourself.

Consumer Products [Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies]

Here's the movie's premise: the G.I. Joe team, led by Duke (Channing Tatum), fights for freedom wherever there is trouble. And their arch nemesis is Cobra Commander and his Cobra Force. The movie is based on a Hasbro line of toys, but also on a comic-book series from the 1980s, which had the Joe squad working out of "The Pit."

CC2K has an early review of the movie's script, and apparently it includes:

• "Accelerator suits," which allow the G.I. Joe squad to run faster, jump super-high, smash through walls, and shrug off bullets.
• A "nano-bomb" that the Cobra Commander wants to launch — which launches a swarm of nanites that eat all of the buildings and machinery, without harming any of the people. (And how do the nanites know when to stop eating all the non-organic matter? Will this be explained at all?)
• The Neo-Vipers, super-soldiers enhanced by nanotech, so they can't feel pain or remorse. (And maybe they can actually regenerate from injuries? It's not clear.) A mad scientist, known only as the Doctor, creates these soldiers for Destro, who's horribly disfigured after a fight with Duke. Destro wears a mask made out of nanotechnology, which allows the Doctor, aka Commander, to control his mind.
• hawt babe Scarlett (Rachel Nichols, see pic above) who is a virgin, despite wearing breast-exaggerating armor (which can turn invisible.) Marlon Wayans' wacky sidekick character Ripcord has the hots for Scarlett, who says she'll date him if he can shoot her on an obstacle course. He fails to hit her, and later realizes he was actually shooting real arrows instead of "training arrows." Also, Dennis Quaid plays "Hawk," their leader, and The Rock is rumored to play Shipwreck, another one of the good guys.
• a weird backstory involving a romance between Channing Tatum's Duke and Sienna Miller's evil Baroness. They almost got married, and now she's a Nazi or something. The Baroness says things like, "Deep down, you're still the man I fell in love with." And "Do it, Duke. You've already killed me once."
• futuristic killer ninjas, as we already mentioned a while back. [CinCity2000]

This superstrength could make the bacteria the perfect ingredient in nanotech devices that have to exert strong pulls on objects around them. Many scientists are already repurposing viruses and bacteria for use in nanotech machines, and now bacteria's mega-power may make it the killer app.

According to New Scientist:

Scientists knew that Neisseria gonorhoeae bacteria use "type four" pili to crawl along a surface and to attach to cells and infect them.

What they didn't know was that these bacteria can bundle pili together to exert long, strong pulls. Michael Sheetz and colleagues at Columbia University in New York put the bacteria in a field of tiny gel "pillars" and measured the amount the bacteria could bend them as a way of measuring the force of their pull.

They mostly saw a lot of short grabs. But one pull in a hundred started out at the same strength as these short pulls, then increased in increments about equal to the force of the original pull, as if the bacteria were calling in more individual pili to help out the first.

This eventually resulted in a pull that was up to ten times stronger than the initial short grab, and it could last for several hours.

Sexually-transmitted bug is the strongest organism [New Scientist]

There's still a lot of uncertainty flying around about just how toxic nanomaterials that make their way into air, soil, and water supplies (or whether they're even toxic at all). And the researchers — Virginia Miller and John Lieske, say they're not sure whether these nanoparticles are naturally formed in the body, or if they're picked up from the environment. You can listen to an interview called with them here called "Nanoparticles and Disease." They'll also be heading up a session on nanotech and physiology at the Experimental Biology 2008 conference on Wednesday.

In her work, Miller injected lab animals' artery walls with nanoparticles and the walls became inflamed. Inflammatory response is a first step towards hardening, but clearly a lot more work is going to be needed before the issue of nanotoxicity is laid to rest. Still, would it hurt if Britta started making water filters that we could set to "nano"?

Source: NanoTechWire

Image: 3dscience.com, via ScienceBlog

Products laced with silver nanoparticles have become popular in running shoes, socks, and even mice (the kind used for surfing the web). But silver is also highly toxic in some forms. The researchers, Paul Westerhoff and Troy Benn, say that ionic silver is "a pretty efficient" fish killer because it migrates in through the animals' gills, disrupting blood and tissue chemistries. Westerhoff and Benn note that no one's sure whether nanoparticle silver is as poisonous as its ionic form (which usually comes in the form of silver nitrate), but in simulated sock-washing experiments they found silver leaching into the water.

Source: American Chemical Society

Photo: Future Hi

I spoke with one of the researchers, Professor Vincent M. Rotello of the UMass Department of Chemistry, who foresees its use in medicine as a far more efficient bacteria test than today's "put it in a petri dish and wait" method. He also explained plans for a device usable in the fields of environmental protection or homeland security:

Our methodology should also be useful for environmental applications, including contamination of water and food through bioterrorism or less nefarious routes. We are thinking of a test-strip method, where you dip the strip into the solution to be analyzed, or alternatively rub against a surface, put it in the instrument and read out [the result].

Here's how it works: The researchers took a negatively charged polymer that fluoresces and combined it with gold nanoparticles, which suppressed the fluorescence. When the substance came in contact with bacteria, which are inherently negatively charged, the polymer was displaced from the gold nanoparticles, allowing it to fluoresce again. Photo by: Argonne National Laboratory.

Rapid and Efficient Identification of Bacteria Using Gold-Nanoparticle-Poly(para-phenyleneethynylene) Constructs. [Angewandte Chemie International Edition.]

According to a release from the National Science Foundation, which partially funded the research:

Zhong Lin Wang and collaborators Xudong Wang and Yong Qin have made more than 200 of the fiber nanogenerators. Each is tested on an apparatus that uses a spring and wheel to move one fiber against the other. The fibers are rubbed together for up to 30 minutes to test their durability and power production.

The researchers have measured current of about four nanoamperes and output voltage of about four millivolts from a nanogenerator that included two fibers that were each one centimeter long. With a much improved design, Wang estimates that a square meter of fabric made from the special fibers could theoretically generate as much as 80 milliwatts of power.

So far, there is only one wrinkle in the fabric, so to speak - washing it. Zinc oxide is sensitive to moisture, so in real shirts or jackets, the nanowires would have to be protected from the effects of the washing machine.

Nanowire Shirt [NSF]

[Cheap Tubes Inc.]

Image of carbon nanotube on gold filaments from Singapore Nanotech Institute. [Wired]

Apparently, sperm tails contain their own energy-producing system that grabs glucose out of your blood and coverts it instantly to fuel. That special engine is why Cornell scientists are saying they want to model nanobots on sperm: spermbots will manufacture energy from their host bodies. Image courtesy of Azonano.com.

Sperm is the ideal model [The Daily Galaxy]

Rather than buying her sister's affection with $175 jeans and red wine, Jamie would try to set boundaries for Becca—and impress upon her the repercussions for bad behavior. Becca might still act out, but we'd believe she liked 70s punk and Broadway musicals. In fact, everybody would have a believably complex personality, not just the appurtenances of one; a show can buy all the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and New York Dolls songs and vintage GTOS it wants, but these aren't a substitute for good writing. The word "Good!" shouldn't be the first to spring to a viewer's mind when a character collapses after being poisoned.

Because Jamie wouldn't be working for the Berkut Group, she wouldn't have a boss like Antonio, who plays the Wise Black Man one week, and the Scary Black Man Threatening A White Woman the next. Ruth's authoritative manner and short haircut wouldn't immediately rate the questioning of her sexuality ("Is she a lesbian?").

Would it be a better show? I don't know—but I think I'd rather watch it than this one.