Remember the movie “Fantastic Voyage” about a submarine that was reduced to microscopic size and injected into a dying man’s body so the tiny scientists could operate on him from inside? It had Raquel Welch in a skintight suit and everything!
Now, advances in nanotech and robotics have made it possible for doctors to use ingestible surgical robots so they can operate on patients without having to open up the body even minimally. It’s a technology still in its infancy, and might yet benefit from other rapidly advancing techs such as haptics (touch feedback), but likely to be used more frequently in the near future.
Big-boobed assistants in revealing garments are not covered by your insurance, however, so too bad there.
For centuries, blades made of Damascus steel were know to be among the sharpest and strongest in the world. The steel itself, called wootz, bears distinctive patterns created during the forging of the metal, and the understanding was that impurities in the iron ore used to make the steel were the cause of these patterns. The technique for making Damascus steel was discontinued in the 18th century, but many examples of the metal and the craftsmanship involved in turning it into blades remain.
The journal “Nature” reports that researchers at Dreseden University in Germany have subjected some sample blades to electron microscopy and have discovered that the steel actually contains a type of carbon nanotubes and also nanowires that come from the use of the mineral cementite. The nanostructures are responsible for the added strength of the material, according to the researchers, however there are critics who discount the findings.
Imagine being able to dip a piece of paper into a solution made up of nanotubes and microscopic wires and coming away with a super battery that can last through 40,000 charge-discharge cycles. That’s the promise of Stanford University’s Yi Cui, who has developed the basic process and is ready to take it to commercial development. Being able to use ordinary paper as the substrate material for long-use batteries addresses many of the engineering limitations of current battery technologies for the automotive industry, among others. The batteries even work if the paper is crumpled or even soaked in acid. Paper has an advantage over other materials because of its ability to bond with the nanoparticles, but it’s also likely that other materials could be treated with the nano-ink and turned into batteries or supercapacitors.
Science geeks all over the web are talking about the story on New Scientist.com about atomic force photography. Researchers at IBM have taken the first ever photos of an object at its molecular level. The image above shows an organic compound called pentacene and its five benzene rings (ugh, I just had a painful flashback to the organic chemistry section from high school).
Pentacene is pretty cool in and of itself; it’s used along with our old friend buckminsterfullerene (“Buckyballs”) to make organic photovoltaic devices, and turns up in things like the ultra-thin plastic OLED video display Sony showed off at CES this year. (link goes to YouTube video). But that’s another topic entirely.
Being able to photograph molecules and atoms at the level of resolution IBM has achieved will someday pay off in terms of being able to arrange individual molecules into microscopic computing devices that could make almost any object “smart”.
I haven’t been reading much on the nanotechnology front lately, but this article in The Economist’s technology section was worth a quick look: researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a process for applying a solution containing nanotubes made out of a chemical called Nafion (which is a derivative of Teflon) to cotton fabric. Multiple applications to the fabric allow the nanotube solution to bind to individual cotton fibers. Nafion is conductive, and so the adherence of the nanotubes to the cotton fibers makes the fabric itself conductive. In tests, the researchers have discovered that the coated fabric can detect the presence of blood from its albumin levels, suggesting the possible application for the fabric in sensor garments that can monitor the physical status of medical patients or even soldiers in the field.
The fabric conducts enough electricity to power a single LED, so it doesn’t take much imagination to come up with all the stupid and frivolous applications of “electric cotton”. It also doesn’t take much to think up a variety of scenarios where wearing electrically conductive clothing might be rather less than desirable. So I hope this particular breakthrough gets a good, long, hard look before electric underpants start selling at Sears.
Just a couple of links to share about the convergence of nanotechnology and biotechnology
There are a lot of bad tattoos in this world. I don’t get the thinking that makes people want to have them in the first place, nor why the fad has gone on as long as it has, but that’s for another day I guess. The biotech firm Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, MA has announced that they’ve developed an ink that contains nanoparticles which can sense blood glucose levels and change color to indicate the blood sugar level of a person with diabetes. The particles can be embedded in the skin like a tattoo, making it significantly easier for diabetics to monitor their blood sugar and eliminating the need for the irritating needle-pokes they must do with existing monitors. It will probably be a good ten years or so before this could actually be turned into a marketable product, due to the long time frames for medical device research and testing, but a great application of nanotech.
Of course, if you’re going to get a nanotattoo, you’ll need to make sure you don’t put it on the arm with the nanotube bionic muscles. Scientists at the University of Texas in Dallas have published their results with work on developing artificial muscles using carbon nanotubes pulled into ribbons and then twisted into bundles. When stimulated by electricity, the bundles can expand and contract like muscle tissue. There have been other efforts to make artificial muscles out of carbon nanotubes and silicon polymers previously, but these particular experiments show much greater elasticity and hardness, making the material a better candidate for use in prosthetics.
One of the major concerns as nanotechnology continues to be applied to biology and medicine is the lack of understanding about possible interactions between nano-sized objects and living tissue. Much of what is known about toxicity and long-term side effects of many substances is simply not applicable at the sub-molecular level. Much attention in the biomedical world is being given to the use of nanoparticles as drug-delivery devices particularly as a way to more effectively target cancer cells with chemo and radioactive medications without harming healthy surrounding tissue. Researchers at University of California in San Diego have developed a silicon nanoparticle that glows temporarily and then biodegrades harmlessly after a few days. These particles, combined with targeted chemotherapeutic medication, can attach themselves to tumors and cancerous cells, allowing for easier detection by doctors, without some of the lasting harmful effects of other luminescent chemicals currently in use.
I can’t find the post right now, but some time ago I know I had a link to an article about some scientists who had formed a sheet of material made from nanothreads made up of billions and billions of buckyballs. They ended up with a single sheet that was as strong as steel but ten times thinner than paper.
Today, this blog post at Discover magazine says that researchers think they will be able to produce a sheet of what they now call “buckypaper” that will rival the strongest composite materials in production and do it before the end of this year. They think they can have a commercially-usable version of buckypaper developed sometime in 2009 that would be suitable for military applications such as lighter armor or some aviation uses; dreams of building cars, airplanes or even space vehicles out of buckypaper are a bit farther down the road but could happen in less than a decade.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
