Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology, in its original sense, refers to the projected ability to construct items from the bottom up, using techniques and tools being developed today to make com­plete, high performance products. Nano­technology is the engineering offunctional systems at the molecular scale.

The Meaning K. Eric Drexler popularised the word 'nanotechnology' in the 1980's, by talking about building machines on the scale of molecules, a few nanometers widemotors, robot arms, and even whole computers, far smaller than a cell.

Much of the work being done today that carries the name 'nanotechnology' is not nanotechnology in the original meaning oftheword. Nanotechnology, in its tradi­tional sense, means building things from the bottom up, with atomic precision.

This theoretical capability was envisioned as early as 1959 by the renowned physicist Richard Feynman.

Four Generations

2000 1st. Passive Nanostructures First generation products: (a) aerosols, colloids (b) coatings, nanoparticies rein­forced composites, polymers, ceramics, nanostructured metals, etc.

2005 Active Nanostructures Second generation products: (a) bio-active like targeted drugs, bio-devices (b) Physico-chemical active - 3D transistors, actuators, etc.

2010 Nano­systems Third generation products: (a) guided assembling, 3D networking, robot­ics 2015/20Moiecuiar Nanosystems Fourth generation products: molecular devices, atomic design, etc.

World's fastest supercomputer

IBM has developed a one-petaflop su­percomputer, 'Roadrunner: that runs on open-source Linux software from Red Hat. The computer is built for the US De­partment of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. It will primarily be used to ensure the safety and reliabil­ity of the US' nuclear weapons stockpile and for research into astronomy, ener­gy, human genome science and climate change. It cost about $100 million, and is twice as fast as the current No.1 IBM Blue Gene system.

A robot surgeon

NeuroArm, a robot has helped surgeons in Canada  to remove a tumour from page  Nickason, a 21 year-old woman' brain. Doctors controlled the NeuroArm from a computer workstation to guide the two-armed device through Paige's brain during a nine-hour operation. the NeuroArm is more precise and works with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan. It is able to move in far smaller increments than a surgeon's hand. According to DL Garnette Suther­land, who led the University of Calgary team that developed the robot, "Neu­roArm will improve surgical outcomes as it is less invasive and more delicate in its touch."

Want to exist forever ?

An Aussie company DNA Solutions, as per a contract with the Australian De­fence started taking delivery of DNA samples from more than 70,000 full­time and reserve military personnel. The defence department collected the DNA by taking a drop of blood on a card con­taining a chemical compound that traps DNA at room temperature. DNA sam­ples collected using a technology developed by the Melbourne-based firm will ce used only to positively identify dead troops. This card is capable of storing the sample for at least 100 years. After storing DNA samples for thousands .: defence personnel, the Aussie company is now planning to do the same for the general public, with more and more people wishing to exist forever. The DNA business is witnessing a boon, as people would like to place a small part of themselves into storage.

Dinosaur Tracks in Arabia

Scientists have found dinosaur tracks on the Arabian Peninsula, a discovery, believed to shed more light on where dinosaurs lived, their migration patterns and how they evolved the way they did.

The discovery of tracks of a large orni­thopod dinosaur and a herd of 11 sau­ropods walking along a coastal mudflat in Yemen was reported in the journal PLoS ONE. Preserved in rocks at the site are the footprints of 11 small and large sauropods long-necked, herbivorous dinosaurs that lived in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

Microwave rock drill

Tunnelling through soft ground is rela­tively easy. Set a drilling machine to work in hard rock such as granite or ba­salt, the rate of progress drops dramati­cally because of slow cutting speed and the increased rate at which drill bits wear

out. One way to speed up drilling would be to heat up the rock ahead, causing it to crack. Engineers have attempted to do this using gas jets, lasers and even electric heaters, but with little success.

Jacques Ouelett, a mining engineer at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, suggests fitting a drilling head with a low energy microwave generator to heat rock just ahead of the drill bit. This fractures the rock efficiently making it much easier to cut.

Toxic toys

A child's prized possession could be a potential source of great risk to them, as a recent study has pointed out that these contained high levels of toxic metals.

Toxics Link, an NGO working for a toxies-free world, recently conducted a research to ascertain the levels of total lead and cadmium in soft plastic toys, under which a total of 111 non-branded toy samples, purchased randomly from the three metropolitan cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, were analysed.

According to Toxies Link Director Ravi Agarwal, toys made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) are potentially toxic to children as PVC contains both lead and cadmium.

Moreover, they are used in pigments to give bright colours to toys in order to attract children. Since metals in materi­als and paints are loosely bound to the surface, it can leach easily. The chew­ing, licking and swallowing behaviour of children expose them to lead and cad­mium exposure.

Nanopaper

A team at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology has produced the "nanopa­per" from a biological material found in conventional paper -- cellulose. This long sugar molecule is a principal com­ponent of plant cell walls and is the most common organic compound on Earth.

According to Lars Berglund,"the new paper could be used to reinforce con­ventional paper, produce extra-strong sticky tape or help create tough synthet­ic replacements for biological tissues."

The new method involves breaking down wood pulp with enzymes and then fragmenting it using a mechanical beater. The shear forces produced cause the cellulose to disintegrate into its component fibres. The end result is undamaged cellulose fibres suspended in water. When the wa­ter is drained away, they found that the fibres join together into networks held by hydrogen bonds, forming flat sheets of "nanopaper."

T-rays at room temperature

INNOVATIONS IN LASER technology have led a team of Harvard research­ers to create the world's first electri­cally-pumped semiconductor source of coherent Terahertz (THz) radiation at room temperature.

Previously, electrically-pumped, Tera­hertz semiconductor lasers were im­practical to use, due to the significant amounts of cryogenic cooling needed to make them work properly, but the new findings could prove to be a break­through in the field of Terahertz (THz) radiation, or T -rays.

Life Found a Mile Below Sea floor

The Ocean Drilling Program obtained core samples from deep under the ocean, allowing scientists to detect extreme microbes living a kilometre or two below the sea floor. A coring sample off the coast of Newfoundland turned up single-celled microbes living in searing temperatures about 1,626 meters below the sea floor. According to R. John  Parkes, Geobiologist, Cardiff University -in Wales, "these are probably not only the deepest, but the hottest organisms found in deep marine sediments. It's

fascinating to know what proportion of our planet actually has living organisms in it." Parkes and his colleagues analysed core samples returned from the Ocean drilling Program. They found evidence for  prokaryotic cells, which lack a central nucleus, that appear to be from the archaea family, a sister domain to bacteria. The newly-discovered life likely gets its energy from methane. It thrives in 111 million-year-old rocks, enduring temperatures between 60 to 100 de­grees Celsius. There's no light around and there's no oxygen around. In this extreme environment, life is relatively. sparse.

Nano-Iron

Iron that is made up of nanoscale crys­tals are far stronger and harder than its traditional counterpart, but the benefits of this "nano-iron" have been limited by the fact that its nanocrystalline structure breaks down at relatively modest tem­peratures. According to Dr. Carl C. Koch, Professor at National Carolina State Uni­versity of materials science engineering who worked on the project, the alloy essentially consists of 1 % zirconium and 99% iron. The zirconium allows the alloy to retain its nanocrystalline structure un­der high temperatures -1,300 degrees Celsius - approaching the melting point of iron. The new alloy is also economically vi­able, since "it costs virtually the same amount to produce the alloy" as it does :0 create nano-iron.

Plastic red blood cells

Red blood cells travel through the blood­stream delivering vital oxygen to body tissues and taking away unwanted car­bon dioxide - and they have to squeeze through blood vessels as thin as 3 rni­crometres across to do it. But in some diseases, such as malaria and sickle cell disease, red blood cells lose this ability to deform.

Now, Joseph DeSimone, a chemi­cal engineer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, has created tiny sacks of the polymer polyethylene glycol just 8 micrometres across - in the range of human red blood cells - that are capable of deforming in a way that allows them to pass through the tiniest capillaries. Polyethylene glycol is biologically benign.

'Himadri,' at the Arctic

India has opened a station in the Arctic. Equipped with state-of-the-art facilities for year-round scientific work, the sta­tion is at Ny-Alesund in Norway, which is the northern-most permanent human settlement, 1,200 km from the North Pole. With Himadri, India has become the 11 th country to have established a fullfledged research station here. The others are Britain, Germany, France, Italy, China, Japan, South Korea, The Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. India began its Arctic research programme in August 2007 with five scientists. The National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research (NCAOR), an autonomous in­stitution under the Ministry of Earth Sci­ences, based in Goa manages Himadri and has been 'coordinating India's polar research.

Indian designs a 'flying saucer'

A scientist of Indian origin from the Uni­versityof Florida in the US has conceptu­alised the design for a plasma-propelled flying saucer. Subrata Roy, University of Florida mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor has submitted a patent application for a circular, spinning aircraft design. He calls his design a "wingless electromagnetic air vehicle," or WEAV. The proposed prototype is small - measure less than 15 cm across - and will be efficient enough to be powered by onboard batteries. The propulsion system for Roy's saucer sprouts from his extensive US air force funded plasma actuator research. Ac­cording to Roy the design can be scaled up and theoretically should work in a much larger form.