Carbon nanotubes have been proposed for use in everything from space elevators to synthetic muscles to sports equipment. But a new study shows that they can severely damage lungs if inhaled. There have long been fears that the nanotubes might cause mesothelioma, cancer of the lining of the lungs, because of their structural similarity to asbestos fibers. Now research has shown significant health risks from the tubes, which confirms previous studies about the dangers of this comparatively simple nanotech.

The research comes out of North Carolina State University, and is published in this month's Nature Nanotechnology. It showed that within a day of exposure, mice's lungs were reacting to the particles, with clusters of immune cells gathering on the outer walls (pleura) of their lungs. Within two weeks, fibrosis, or localized scarification, had occurred. This same scarring occurs after exposure to asbestos. Three months after this single exposure, the scarification and immune response had dissipated. However, chronic exposure might lead to a different result, with cancer as one possible outcome. And chronic exposure is exactly what humans have to worry about, when carbon nanotubes are rolled out for use in a variety of technologies. Workers may be exposed to the tiny tubes every day.

Previous studies out of the UK and Japan show similar results: that the nanotubes have a nasty habit of reaching the outer tissue of your lungs, the same location where asbestos causes cancer. The Japanese study from 2007 is particularly damning, as researchers were able to induce mesothelioma in mice using the carbon nanotubes.

Given the already-existing issues with asbestos remaining in the environment, and the unknown ecological impact of carbon nanofibers, this raises very troubling issues for the tube's long term effects. As useful as they may be, what will happen if they have a tendency to hang around in the local ecosystem for a very long time? Will its potentially damaging side effects overrule the mammoth benefits it may have in modern production? What about the safe disposal of objects containing nanotubes? If they do become ubiquitous, getting rid of the things may be a major problem. For all the fears of grey goo, it might just be one of the simplest forms of nanotech that does us in.

via Nature Nanotechnology

Nanoparticles, objects less than 100 nanometers long in any direction, are already in use commercially and in medicine. Manufacturers integrate nanoparticles into socks to fight bacteria and odor (possibly poisoning wildlife in the process), and medical professionals use them in cancer research, brain imaging, and artificial hearts. But it looks like the era of nanoparticle-based drugs is just dawning, as one of the first such drugs has just passed animal testing.

So what does the first of these new wonder drugs treat? Erectile dysfunction. Researchers are working on a topical cream that employs nanoparticles to treat ED with fewer side effects. Nanoparticles are wrapped around traditional ED medications, allowing those medications to remain in their gaseous form until they are applied directly to the affected area. This allows the ED to be treated without the side effects that come with pills delivering the same medications, such as headaches, nausea, and dizziness.

Treating erectile dysfunction may not be on the same level as treating cancer, but the principles the researchers believe that the principles involved in their topical cream will apply to future nanoparticle-based drugs down the line. They have just finished a successful test of the cream on rats and plan a human trial some time in 2011.

The Era of Nanoparticle Drugs Begins With Erection Cream [Discover Magazine via Reddit]

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?

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa created a silicon-gold circuit by embedding gold nanoparticles in a silicon wafer. They then had 40 cancer patients and 56 people with healthy lungs fill mylar bags with healthy air, and had the air blown over the silicon-gold circuits.

Tumorous growths tear certain chemicals out of tissue, so that air in cancer-affected lungs contains molecules that healthy lungs do not. The research team chose to track four such chemicals: decane, trimethylbenzene, ethylbenzene, and heptanol. When the chemicals bind to the organic coat on the nanowires, they change the circuit's electrical resistance in a predictable way.

With some tweaking, the team hopes that the device will prove a reliable test for lung cancer, and, since the the circuits can be reused, it would be a relatively inexpensive, not to mention portable, method of detection. But aside from its convenience, breath testing could have another thing up on existing methods of lung cancer diagnosis: it could detect cancer too small to show up on an X-ray or CT scan, meaning it might detect lung cancer at a much earlier stage.

A Breathalyzer for Cancer [ScienceNOW]

The company hopes this new method will enable it to manufacture increasingly small computer chips.

While Moore's Law states that circuit density doubles each year, therefore enabling devices to increase their computing power even as they shrink in size, many industry watchers fear Moore's Law has reached its end, and that there are finite limits to hose small a circuit may be. In an attempt to keep our computers shrinking, companies like IBM have been trying to build a better nanowire, something that can effectively transmit data, but can only be viewed through an electron microscope.

Much of the research into nanowire manufacture involves advanced photolithographic techniques: making the incredibly small wires through photo etching. But Frances Ross, a researcher at IBM, takes a very different approach. Rather than cutting silicon into microscopic slices, she's developing a process for growing the wires in a lab, bit by bit. She sprinkles gold nanoparticles on the ends of the wires, then suffuses the particles with a superheated silicon gas. The particles become saturated with the silicon gas, and solid silicon begins to form at the end of the wire, producing the gradually growing wires you see above.

The effect is pretty, but the technology is still a ways off from usability. In order for her nanowires to be useful for chip makers, Ross will need to find a way to keep the surfaces of each wire perfectly regular and uniform.

After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm [NY Times]

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]

A team led by Lawrence Livermore Lab scientists Nipun Misraa and Julio A. Martinez worked on the discovery, and their results were published earlier this week in PNAS. According to a release about the research:

[The researchers] created a biomechanical hybrid in which nanowires are coated in a lipid bilayer-the same type of membrane that envelopes cells and controls the passage of molecules in and out of the cell. The authors incorporated gated channels in this membrane, and used molecular transport through these channels to trigger an electric signal. The researchers show that the nanowire circuit can be used to make the channels open and close as they would in a biological cell. Although their work is currently in an early stage, later versions of the nanowire technology could find applications in biosensing, neuroscience, and medicine.

There are two things that are very exciting about this early-stage research. One, it means that cellular membranes could be incorporated into computerized devices that are designed to respond to molecules in the environment. Essentially, you could have a cellular sensor at the end of a nanowire.

But the applications for neuroscience and medicine are even greater. The membrane that these researchers have learned to manipulate is part of the same system that controls cell-to-cell communication in the human body. Proteins that arrange themselves on the surface of cells serve as signal transducer, conveying information between genetic material inside each cell to proteins or chemicals in the blood (and vice versa). For example, when a cell malfunctions, it usually sends out a signal asking to be destroyed by the cells around it. In cancer and AIDS, however, this signal is interrupted so that the diseased cells continue to thrive and infect more of the body. Being able to control those cellular signals with nanowires could potentially help contain some cancers.

It would also open up a very weird area of medicine whose consequences we can't know for certain. What would it mean if you could control cellular signals, sending very precise messages to cells or cell groups? Obviously it would be great for controlling healing, but could it also be a method of physical enhancement? A way to lose weight by telling fat cells to die? It's possible.

via PNAS

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.

Yale University's Hong Tang, whose team previously showed an ability to manipulate circuits on a silicon board with attractive light, has developed a method to do the same with repulsive light. The light causes miniature components on silicone chips to move perpendicularly from the direction the light is traveling, rather than being a triggered by a beam of light shining upon it directly.

In order to create the force, scientists split a beam of infrared light and forced it down two different nanowires. The more the two beams moved out of phase with one another, the greater the force they were able to exert upon the components around the nanowires on the chips. The ability to create repulsive light will allow scientists to manipulate nanocomponents on silicon boards without the use of electricity, eliminating the need to vast wiring systems and reducing interference. Tang's discovery is just one more step towards creating functional nanodevices and exponentially expanding the scale of electronic miniaturization.

Scientists Discover Light Force with 'Push' Power [PhysOrg]

[Image via Hong Tang]

The gear is made of carbon compounds and can freely rotate around a central axis. The A*STAR team can control the rotation of the molecular gear using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope. It's the smallest molecular gear yet made, and since its rotation is controlled and not random, scientists are calling it a break-through in nanotechnology.

This first step could lead to limitless possible applications, including complex robots no larger than a grain of sand. Or maybe this is just another step towards the inevitable "gray goo" panic. Either way, this discovery could mean working robots that are only a few molecules across or machines that can travel along strands of DNA in the near future.

A*STAR Scientists Invent The World's Only Controllable Molecule-Gear Of Minuscule Size Of 1.2nm [A*STAR]
Paper abstract [Nature]

(Image: Sandia National Laboratories.)

Wired's Danger Room blog rounds up the progress reports on the Programmable Matter project, in which teams at Harvard and MIT, backed by Pentagon research arm DARPA, are creating modular sheets and strands that can be programmed to fold themselves origami-style into shapes or build themselves into Lego-like solids. The project is already five months into its second phase, with a number of simple shape-shifting solids expected to be ready by next spring.

Meanwhile, Intel is doing its own Programmable Matter research, with the idea of creating hologram-like models for demonstration purposes, only the models would be physical objects that can be touched and manipulated.

The DARPA scientists are, of course, looking at the defense applications of this technology — morphing blobs of goo into instant weapons, building robots that can squeeze through barriers or tight spaces and then reassemble themselves. This may sound frighteningly close to Terminator territory, but the Intel app , with its suggestion of tactile virtual reality, implies a more hedonistic use for the technology. As with other Pentagon-spawned innovations (like, say, the Internet), what started as a military tool will probably end up as porn.

At Bristol University, scientists were able to precisely control the movement of 4 photons on a silicon chip using a metal electrode lithographed on the surface. It was the first time that scientists have reported being able to precisely manipulate the photons and cause them to interact with one another. According to a university press release:

A commentary on the work that appeared in the same issue described it as "an important step in the quest for quantum computation" and concluded: "The most exciting thing about this work is its potential for scalability. The small size of the [device] means that far greater complexity is possible than with large-scale optics."

The engravings through which the photons moved were similar in function to optical fibers, meaning that there is a potential path forward for utilizing or improving existing optical technologies.

Meanwhile, scientists at the University of Texas at Austin created the thinnest superconducting metal. The metal was applied to — yes — a silicon chip in a two-atom thick layer. What's the big deal about something so small?

Superconductors are unique because they can maintain an electrical current indefinitely with no power source. They are used in MRI machines, particle accelerators, quantum interference devices and other applications.

The development of the thin superconducting sheets of lead lays the groundwork for future advancements in superconductor technologies.

"To be able to control this material-to shape it into new geometries-and explore what happens is very exciting," says Shih, the Jane and Roland Blumberg Professor in Physics. "My hope is that this superconductive surface will enable one to build devices and study new properties of superconductivity."

The scientists are hoping that by successfully miniaturizing the technology, they can build new applications that need not require an external power source, among other things.

Finally, scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have successfully replaced copper interconnects on integrated circuits with nanoribbons of graphene, which are thin layers of graphite. The decreasing resistance of copper interconnects on circuits has long bedeviled scientists involved in miniaturizing electronics.

"As you make copper interconnects narrower and narrower, the resistivity increases as the true nanoscale properties of the material become apparent," said Raghunath Murali, a research engineer in Georgia Tech's Microelectronics Research Center and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Our experimental demonstration of graphene nanowire interconnects on the scale of 20 nanometers shows that their performance is comparable to even the most optimistic projections for copper interconnects at that scale. Under real-world conditions, our graphene interconnects probably already out-perform copper at this size scale."

Beyond resistivity improvement, graphene interconnects would offer higher electron mobility, better thermal conductivity, higher mechanical strength and reduced capacitance coupling between adjacent wires.

In other words, the same stuff that's now in your pencil will eventually be powering the computer that will replace your pencil... and maybe the chip that will replace your free will.

Manipulating light on a chip for quantum technologies [Bristol University]
Thinnest superconducting metal created [EurekAlert]
Graphene May Have Advantages Over Copper For IC Interconnects At The Nanoscale [Science Daily]

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]

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]

Never before has a technology that's done so little gone so far in literature. We can basically do almost nothing useful with nanotechnology, but sci-fi writers dream up these magical scenarios where nanotechnology can do anything and everything. It can make people gods or destroy the world in a variety of gray goo scenarios. Mind you, we can do basically nothing with it right now. But discussions of gray goo scenarios give a fictional depth to a book. There happens a lot in modern sci-fi literature, I feel.

He also explains why Charles Stross' vision of the future in books lke Glasshouse and Accelerando is entirely based on Dungeons & Dragons, which is an argument I hadn't heard before. [cpxprex]

A group of researchers in France and Italy have published a paper today in Nature Nanotechnology that carbon nanotubes can act as neural workarounds in the brain, forming tight contacts with the already-existing nerve cells and conducting electricity between them exactly the way neurons do with each other.

According to Henry Markram, a lead scientist on the project at Laboratory of Neural Microcircuitry in Switzerland:

The new carbon nanotube-based interface technology discovered together with state of the art simulations of brain-machine interfaces is the key to developing all types of neuroprosthetics — sight, sound, smell, motion, vetoing epileptic attacks, spinal bypasses, as well as repairing and even enhancing cognitive functions.

If we use technologies like this to cure Alzheimer's patients, we may wind up with a generation of hyper-intelligent seniors ready to invent the next brain-boosting technology.

SOURCE: EPFL

Image of carbon nanotubes via Nanolab.

Each nano-missile, which its inventors also call (charmingly) a "chocolate-covered nut cluster," is able to evade detection in the body for hours because it's coated in a specially-modified lipid (the chocolate coating) that makes it look like a typical cell as it tumbles through your bloodstream. Attached to the outside of the missile is a protein called F3, a molecule that binds to cancer cells. F3 does surveillance, looking for target cells. When the missile finds those cells, it releases its payload — cancer drugs and florescent markers called quantum dots that tell doctors where cancer cells have been hit. (You can see the glow of the quantum dots in a vial full of the nano at left.)

Essentially, these researchers have developed one of the first smart drug delivery systems. This is a drug that literally seeks out diseased tissue and hits only that tissue with its payload. Ji-Ho Park, a researcher who worked on the study, said:

This study provides the first example of a single nanomaterial used for simultaneous drug delivery and multimode imaging of diseased tissue in a live animal.

The nano-missile has been tested in mice. Next, the researchers hope to make the missiles even more targeted by coating them with proteins that seek out specific tumors or organs.

Researchers Develop Nano-Sized Cargo Ships [via UC San Diego News]

How about an article on the current cutting edge cancer research/treatments? Is there anything out there that is promising? Will there be a cure in our lifetimes?

Sadly, cancer is not a single disease, but a class of diseases - while we may effectively cure some forms of cancer, it's doubtful that we'll be able to cure them all, and unlikely that a single form of treatment will be effective against all or even a wide range of cancers. The cells in our bodies are tightly regulated, but over time entropy has its way, and some lose their original genetic programming. Often these breakdowns are harmless and strictly local, but in the case of cancer, they can be catastrophic.

If you look at the human body as an ecosystem, it's remarkably well-behaved. Various types of cells fulfill their proper roles in their proper places. The rapid cellular growth that is appropriate in the lining of our guts, for example, would be hazardous in the adult brain. Cells are regulated by their microenvironment (hormones, the surrounding tissue, etc.), with healthy cells reacting as you would expect. Cells with DNA damage resulting from viral infections, exposure to carcinogenic chemicals or radiation, or simple error during division are not so predictable.

The body is not entirely unprepared for damaged cells. Our immune system seeks them out, and there are mechanisms within the cell designed to sense damage and cause apoptosis - programmed self-termination. These systems catch many dangerous cells, but not all.


If a damaged cell escapes the immune system and its own self-destruct devices, it will often grow more damaged with time, accumulating mutations. A "successful" cancer will acquire additional mutations that allow it to grow uncontrollably into a tumor, feed itself via the formation of blood vessels, and metastasize - break away from the original tumor to form new colonies elsewhere in the body. Not every cell in the tumor needs to be the same for this to happen; if even a small population of cells hits a combination of errors that allows it to break away and take root elsewhere, the prognosis can be bleak.

I'm talking about cancer in a very general sense, but it's important to remember that not all cancers are the same. The types of cellular breakdown that lead to an aggressive breast cancer are not necessarily the same as the damage that would give you leukemia (though there may be a few gross similarities), and they originated with different kinds of cells in the first place, housed in different tissue niches. Nor are all cancers of the same general type the same - for example, some breast cancers overexpress a protein called HER2, but not all. So, a tumor is composed of a mixture of cells which share some (but not all) of the same kinds of breakage with their immediate neighbors, cancers of the same type in other patients, and cancers of a different type entirely. It's hard to come up with a generalized cure when there are so many different ways for cells to flip out.

Early detection of a treatable cancer is critical. If you can catch the tumor before it metastasizes, you have only a single tumor to deal with. Imaging techniques like mammograms, X-rays, and MRIs can be used to detect tumors, though more exotic techniques for detection are on the way. Dogs have been shown to be capable of smelling cancer, and research into the compounds they detect could lead to an artificial diagnostic nose.

Cellular therapies are another option. If your immune system is full of fail, perhaps it's time to send in the cavalry? Immune cells from cancer-resistant mice can be used to kill advanced tumors in normal mice (well, "normal" for lab mice, anyway). Cells can also be used to target existing treatments to the site of the cancer, by using genetically modified cells that home in on a tumor and, once there, activate an anti-cancer drug, reducing the wear and tear of side-effects on your healthy tissue. Since viruses are already quite good at homing in on cells, they're another potential cancer-busting option.

Nanotechnology has a few tricks up its sleeve if cells and viruses don't do the trick. Nanotubes can be loaded with drugs and "capped", potentially capable of releasing an anti-cancer payload on demand (though the "demand" part is still under construction). Once localized to a cancer cell, light at an appropriate wavelength zaps the nanotube, which absorbs it and heats up, effectively cooking the tumor.

Nanotubes in green, cancer cell nuclei in red.

Similar results have been achieved using gold-plated nanoparticles, while bundles of nanorods form light-activated cancer-shredding cluster bombs.

"As if billions of cancer cells cried out...and were suddenly silenced."

It's likely that not all of these approaches will bear fruit - if every cancer cure that worked on rats also worked on humans, I probably wouldn't have to answer this question. With a disease as diverse as cancer, however, it makes sense to approach a wide variety of possible treatments.

Do you have questions you've always wanted to ask a biogeek? You can email Terry Johnson.