Nanotechnology Jobs, Nanotechnology Books » Medical Nanotechnology News

Robot Uses Lizard Tail to Leap

SiliconValleyNano.com — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:59:08 +0000

Science fiction often envisions worlds populated by humanoid robots. In reality, insects, reptiles and nonhuman animals often serve as a more practical template for automatons. The more legs a robot has, the more easily it can navigate tough terrain. Likewise, claws are less challenging to emulate than primate-esque hands, and, as a team of researchers reported recently, tails are an incredibly versatile stabilizing mechanism.

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Carbon Nanotubes Impale Compulsive Cells

SiliconValleyNano.com — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:00:11 +0000

Asbestos increases the risk for certain cancers. The fibers are thought to do so by skewering cells, setting off chemical reactions that lead to inflammation, DNA damage and cell death. Some studies have suggested carbon nanotubes might have similar effects–because they’re long and spiky, like asbestos. But why would a cell draw in a nanotube, essentially impaling itself on a microscopic lance? [More]

View full post on Scientific American Topic – Medical Nanotechnology

10 Unsolved Mysteries in Chemistry (preview)

SiliconValleyNano.com — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:59:05 +0000

1 How Did Life Begin? The moment when the first living beings arose from inanimate matter almost four billion years ago is still shrouded in mystery. How did relatively simple molecules in the primordial broth give rise to more and more complex compounds? And how did some of those compounds begin to process energy and replicate (two of the defining characteristics of life)? At the molecular level, all of those steps are, of course, chemical reactions, which makes the question of how life began one of chemistry.

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View full post on Scientific American Topic – Medical Nanotechnology

Digging Mars: Mars Science Lab Set to Blast Off (preview)

SiliconValleyNano.com — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:59:05 +0000

This month NASA plans to launch its latest and most sophisticated mission ever to the Red Planet: the Mars Science Laboratory. After a dramatic landing in Gale Crater using a skycrane for the final descent, the nuclear-powered rover will drive around one of the richest deposits of clays and sulfates on the planet–the remains of a water-rich era when rivers carved out valley networks.

The size of a small car, the rover (named Curiosity) will spend a Martian year exploring the base of the central peak in the crater, thought to be the oldest section. Then, if NASA approves an extended mission, Curiosity will begin to climb the five-kilometer-high debris pile that fills the center of the crater, moving up the geologic timeline toward deposits made in the modern era, scrutinizing the aqueous minerals layer by layer. A robot arm can retrieve samples and feed them to an onboard chemistry lab through a port on top of the rover. Inside, analyzers will determine the mineral structures and elemental composition. These instruments also can sense organic materials and will attempt to decide whether Mars used to be habitable.

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View full post on Scientific American Topic – Medical Nanotechnology

Lindau Nobel Meeting–Bearing the Fruits of Global Health Research

SiliconValleyNano.com — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:14:30 +0000

The panel on global health at the opening ceremony of the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau well and truly laid the gauntlet down to young researchers from around the world. On the panel was: Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft and co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Ada Yonath, Noble Laureate in Chemistry 2009 for her groundbreaking crystallography work revealing the structure and function of the ribosome; Sandra Chishimba , a malaria researcher from Zambia; and Jonathan Carlson, a researcher into HIV/AIDS at Microsoft Research.

Bill Gates said that we must pay more attention to the ‘silent voices’ in poor countries, who don’t have their medical needs met by funding from their governments or companies. It sounds unbelievable, but he told us that 10 times more research funding goes into finding a cure for male baldness than finding a cure for malaria – which kills 850,000 people a year.

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View full post on Scientific American Topic – Medical Nanotechnology

Alzheimer’s Moment: Researchers Shore Up Antibody Effectiveness Against the Disease

SiliconValleyNano.com — Thu, 26 May 2011 15:02:29 +0000

The search for ways to prevent or treat Alzheimer’s disease has been stymied in part by difficulties in reliably delivering therapeutics into the brain to prevent proteins there from depositing fibrous plaques that damage synapses and ultimately wreck one’s cognitive abilities. Researchers have experimented with antibodies, peptides and even nanoparticles to find some way of effectively preventing plaque formation but these efforts have yet to yield an anti-Alzheimer’s drug. [More]

View full post on Scientific American Topic – Medical Nanotechnology

Bloom with a View: Robot Subs Help Researchers Study Mysterious Antarctic Sea Life [Slide Show]

SiliconValleyNano.com — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:00:25 +0000

After decades of riding icebreakers in Antarctica’s icy waters hoping to better understand the fragile ecosystem on and around this frigid continent scientists have begun delegating data collection to satellite-guided robotic subs. The hope is that these sea gliders, which can dive hundreds of meters and stay in the water for months at a time, will help to unlock the secrets of phytoplankton blooms that nourish the organisms in Antarctica’s Ross Sea for a few months each year before mysteriously disappearing. [More]

View full post on Scientific American Topic – Medical Nanotechnology

The Immortal Ambitions of Ray Kurzweil: A Review of ‘Transcendent Man

SiliconValleyNano.com — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:59:17 +0000

Against a swirling montage of cosmic birth and destruction, and newsreel-style stills from his personal history, the celebrated inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil sits in silhouette, contemplating death. He broods over mortality’s toll in waste and pain, and the hopelessness and loss that people must experience in their last moments of life. "It’s such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it," he admits.

Then, cheerfully, he adds, "So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die."

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Origami Observatory: Behind the Scenes with the Webb Space Telescope (preview)

SiliconValleyNano.com — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:59:29 +0000

The mirror, a perfect hexagon of gunmetal gray, stands vertically on a low platform. It is about two inches thick and more than four feet wide, a precisely carved slab of beryllium that gleams in the low light of this optics laboratory near San Francisco Bay. My guide, chief engineer Jay Daniel, watches my footing as I step gingerly in front of the mirror to see my reflection. “It’s like your bathroom mirror,” Daniel says, chuckling.

The other side of this looking glass, though, is nothing like a household vanity. The slab of metal is mostly hollow, drilled out by machinists to leave an intricate triangular scaffold of narrow ribs. It is beautiful in its geometric precision, and I resist the urge to touch one of the knifelike edges. The polished front layer that remains, Daniel says, is a mere 2.5 millimeters thick. From its starting weight of 250 kilograms, the entire mirror now weighs just 21 kilos. That is light enough for a rocket to hoist 18 of them deep into space, where the curved mirrors will join as one to form the heart of the most audacious space observatory ever launched.

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James Webb Space Telescope – Space observatory – Mirror – San Francisco – NASA

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Filming the Invisible in 4D: New Microscopy Makes Movies of Nanoscale Objects in Action (preview)

SiliconValleyNano.com — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 18:00:46 +0000

The human eye is limited in its vision. We cannot see objects much thinner than a human hair (a fraction of a millimeter) or resolve motions quicker than a blink (a tenth of a second). Advances in optics and microscopy over the past millennium have, of course, let us peer far beyond the limits of the naked eye, to view exquisite images such as a micrograph of a virus or a stroboscopic photograph of a bullet at the millisecond it punched through a lightbulb. But if we were shown a movie depicting atoms jiggling around, until recently we could be reasonably sure we were looking at a cartoon, an artist’s impression or a simulation of some sort.

In the past 10 years my research group at the California Institute of Technology has developed a new form of imaging, unveiling motions that occur at the size scale of atoms and over time intervals as short as a femtosecond (a million billionth of a second). Because the technique enables imaging in both space and time and is based on the venerable electron microscope, I dubbed it four-dimensional (4-D) electron microscopy. We have used it to visualize phenomena such as the vibration of cantilevers a few billionths of a meter wide, the motion of sheets of carbon atoms in graphite vibrating like a drum after being “struck” by a laser pulse, and the transformation of matter from one state to another. We have also imaged individual proteins and cells.

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Electron microscope – Microscope – California Institute of Technology – Methods and Techniques – Microscopy

View full post on Scientific American Topic – Medical Nanotechnology