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]

What initially inspired your interest in writing about nanotech futures?

That's pretty easy, on the face of it, but it gets complicated.

In 1990, I read [Eric] Drexler's The Engines of Creation, arguably one of the most radical views of what a true and fully functioning nanotech might do. I suppose you could call it the strong view of nanotech.

At the same time, I was working on a novella that had large flowers on top of buildings, which came from something that came into my mind while I was meditating or running—similar states.

These two visions meshed.

There were a lot of other vectors that went into the writing of Queen City Jazz, of course. The study of honeybees—their vision, their means of communication (dance, and pheromones); the sisterhood of bees and the utopian attempt of Mother Ann's Shaker vision to create a society in which sex and sexual differences did not overwhelm the social structure; the history of Cincinnati; Scott Joplin's music and other American arts such as comics and jazz. However, the empowering element in it was nanotechnology, as well as something I called bionan.

Queen City Jazz was the first nanotech novel to be published, but it was not terrifically publisher-backed, as was Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, which came out a few months later, so this is not generally known.

I think that, for me, nanotech has been a metaphor for the power of thought, and for the power of language. This may sound odd, but it seems that the more we understand matter and the more we are able to manipulate it and to make decisions about how and why to do so, the better we understand ourselves. In the category of "ourselves," I include everything that lives, according to our possibly limited definition.

Why do you think there was an explosion of so-called nanopunk writing in the 1990s, but not so much in the 2000s? It seems odd to me that an era when nanotech is actually making headway as a science (ie, the last five years) hasn't been accompanied by a rich SF tradition.

Maybe it's because what is called nanotech seems to be put to mundane uses. There are a lot of fabulous things coming down the pike in the realm of molecular engineering, but right now, what the public knows about nanotech is that it is used as an advertising buzzword—what I call "weak" nanotech. In science fiction, it is routinely used as "the sufficiently advanced technology that seems like magic." It is not really seen as a powerful possible agent of the very foundations of what makes us human. When it is too difficult to explain how something works, it is just "nanotech."

Do you want your Nanotech Quartet to be read by nanotech developers as a warning?

Absolutely not! As a warning, perhaps, that we should not create Flower-Cities—as if anyone would? I am an inventor, an artist, a writer telling stories. As a writer, I work very hard to make my novels and stories real. I want the reader to be completely immersed. If scientists read my books and find them plausible—and they have—so much the better, in terms of the science in the science fictional work. But science fiction is not predictive. In an odd way, I am always writing about the present. It could hardly be otherwise, because the present is where I live. I use the language of the present, with all its freight of the present. Judging from history, the beam our headlights cast does not illuminate anything very far into the future.

And finally, a slightly orthogonal question: who would be your pick for the most futuristic jazz composer of the last 30 years?

Because I was immersed in WWII for so many years as I wrote In War Times, I must say that I'm rather partial, musically, to that period. Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, and John Coltrane all spring to mind as those who set out in new directions and who remain timeless in their explorations, even though they don't really fall into the thirty-year limit.

[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.