If you have a proposal on how nanotech could address a critical national and societal need, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wants to hear from you.
Nanowerk News reports that an international nanotech collaboration of American and Korean scientists, funded by the Korean government, has developed multifunctional gold-coated nanowires that are designed to swim through the blood stream and attach to cancerous cells via antibodies against the cancer cells. Exposure to an electromagnetic field should heat the nanowires and destroy the… Continue reading Nanotechnology-produced wires to swim through blood, attach to, and kill cancer cells
A new nanotech method of DNA sequencing is 30,000 times faster than current DNA sequencing methods.
The following is an edited and revised version of the talk I gave at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference that was held in conjunction with Convergence 08 (and which I reprised for Convergence). I’m posting it here because it seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thing Foresight was founded for: to… Continue reading The weather machine
A method of depositing dense arrays of highly aligned carbon nanotubes on either rigid or flexible substrates promises transparent nanotech transistors for a variety of electronic applications.
A recent paper from Feynman Prize winner James Tour’s group at Rice relates an interesting new form of memory based on a bistable 2-terminal graphitic switch. Once developed, the switch could form the basis of a high-density non-volatile storage which might replace flash devices (which are already beginning to replace magnetic disks). Rice press release
The Allen Institute for Brain Science is using nanotech methods to map in which cells in the brain which genes are expressed.
Computational nanotech studies have shown that deliberate introduction of structural defects at specific sites in carbon nanotubes can guide electrons along specific paths, providing a way to fabricate complex electronic circuits from nanotubes.
Using a promising nanotech approach to deliver the RNA molecules, a type of nanoparticle described as a neutral liposome was administered to mice bearing melanoma tumors and found to cause a significant decrease in tumor growth and in the number of metastatic tumor colonies.
Previously unknown spectral properties of carbon nanotubes functionalized with DNA have been exploited to create nanotech sensors that can simultaneously detect several different substances, in real time, within living cells, to single molecule sensitivity.
