Here’s a talk happening next Tuesday at UCLA: NanoSystems Seminar Series Title: High-speed AFM meets the Holographic Assembler Mervyn Miles Physics Bristol University Abstract: High-speed AFM is important for following processes occurring on short time scales inaccessible to conventional AFM. We are working on two versions: one is capable of extremely high imaging rates and… Continue reading High-speed AFM meets the Holographic Assembler
Nanoparticle Breakthrough Can Make Higher Efficiency Solar Cells and Speed Development of Nanotechnology. Brian Wang at Next Big Future has the story of a classic case of serendipity in research. The yellow is what the sun puts out that hits the top of the atmosphere (what a solar power satellite would see, for example). The… Continue reading Nanoparticle Breakthrough Can Make Higher Efficiency Solar Cells and Speed Development of Nanotechnology
Superconductor World Record Surpasses 250K. Superconductors.ORG herein reports the observation of record high superconductivity near 254 Kelvin (-19C, -2F). This temperature critical (Tc) is believed accurate +/- 2 degrees, making this the first material to enter a superconductive state at temperatures commonly found in household freezers. In 3 months, it will be colder than that… Continue reading Superconductor World Record Surpasses 250K
Josh Hall, on his way to catch a plane, sends us this news from Technology Review’s Katherine Bourzac: A California company is using silicon ink patterned on top of silicon wafers to boost the efficiency of solar cells. The Sunnyvale, CA, firm Innovalight says that the inkjet process is a cheaper route to more-efficient solar power.… Continue reading Solar cells with nanocrystal ink reach 18 percent efficiency
A nice article in New Scientist about the search for substances harder than diamond. This is important for nanomechanical engineering because hardness translates into properties useful in machine parts at the nanoscale. A nanocrystalline form of diamond, sometimes called aggregated diamond nanorods, was described in 2003 by Tetsuo Irifune and his colleagues at Ehime University… Continue reading Harder than diamond?
From nanowerk: Nanotechnology speeds desalination. This story illustrates both the best and worst of near-term nanotech research and reporting. It’s a valuable result in a very important application: “Current desalination methods force seawater through a filter using energies four times larger than necessary. Throughout the desalination process salt must be removed from one side of… Continue reading Nanotechnology speeds desalination
Brian Wang over at Next Big Future has an article about improving the properties of aluminum as a structural material by filling with buckytubes, the way plastics are made stronger by filling by fiberglass. This isn’t particularly new: what’s new is that Bayer appears to be able to make nanotubes in enough quantity to make… Continue reading Buckytube-filled aluminum
The Nanomanufacturing Summit, held in Boston recently, was largely what you would have expected — near-term bulk-tech approaches to nanostructured materials, some interesting research aimed at new electronics, and so forth. Notable, however, was a plenary talk by M. C. Roco, who appears to have changed his tune to the extent of predicting nanorobotics and… Continue reading Nanorobots from the NNI?
What will your car run on in 2020 or 2030? What form of energy storage and transmission will allow intermittent energy sources, such as wind and solar, to be a viable input to the economy? There’s a good chance, of course, that cars will still run on gasoline — its demise has been predicted early… Continue reading The Fuel of the Future
From Physorg.com: Russian Academy of Sciences have developed a method of nanofabrication using an atom pinhole camera…. The technique could produce individual nanostructures down to 30 nm, a size reduction of 10,000 times compared with the original object. “Our present experimental results show the resolution about 30 nm, but our calculations (the theoretical prediction) tell… Continue reading Nanoconstruction by Pinhole Camera
