The classic paper towels you used for cleaning your keyboard after spilling Coke on it are very close to being replaced by something far more advanced and efficient. These Nanomesh Paper Towels can absorb up to 20 times their weight, and so far, they are only made for oil stains.

The recyclable nanomesh towel created at MIT uses potassium manganese oxide fibers and can be cleaned up (and the oil recovered) and re-used. They look and feel like a regular paper towel, but they only collect oil, leaving every drop of water behind.

Scientists are already thinking of using them in water filtration, and they have a great advantage in the cheap production costs and, unlike many nanomaterials, the possibility of fabrication in large quantities.

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A recent study reveals that carbon nanotubes could be linked to lung cancer and other respiratory problems. Turns out that mice injected with nanotubes of different lenghts developed lung deficiencies and other problems very similar to those caused by asbestos.

It seems that the lining of the lungs is affected by the long nanotubes meant to deal with particular matters, and could cause inflammation, scarring and ‘probably cancer in the long term’. However, that is a big ‘probably’, because, at least at this point, it’s hard to prove the connectio between nanotubes and cancer. The Nanotechnology Industries Association assured us that they’ll get into the issue and make sure people will not be harmed by nanotubes.

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This won’t be the first year nanosoccer is played at the 2008 US RoboCup Open, however, this will be the first time the public is allowed to spectate at a soccer game between the microscopic players. The players are, in fact, computer-driven robots the size of unicellular organisms, and their ball will have the diameter of a human hair.

The nanobots will demonstrate thus their capacities of response to computer control, maneuverability, and ability to move objects. All these could prove extremely useful in primarily the medical and technological areas, in applications such as microsurgery in our bodies or manufacturing nano components for microscopic electronic devices.

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Nanotechnology is definitely one of the most important branch of technology and nanoscaled components and other parts have proven to be very efficient and helpful. Using nanotechnology, researchers from the UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT have created “nanoworms” which can circulate freely through bloodstream without interefering with the immune system.

These nanoworms are a very important discovery because they could fight against tumors, as the doctors might find and unveil the exact location of tiny tumors which cannot be detected with conventional technology and equipment.

According to Michael Sailor, chemistry and biochemistry professor at the UC San Diego, the nanoworms are very efficient because “most nanoparticles are recognized by the body’s protective mechanisms, which capture and remove them from the bloodstream within a few minutes”, and thanks to “a combination of their shape and to a polymer coating on their surfaces that allows the nanoworms to evade these natural elimination processes. As a result, our nanoworms can circulate in the body of a mouse for many hours”.

An important role in the research was played by Sangeeta Bhatia, physician, bioengineer and professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT, who said that “these nanoworms could offer physicians the ability to increase the efficacy of drugs by allowing them to deliver them directly to the tumors”. This means that now we can treat tumors without any negative impacts on healthy tissue and the anti-cancer drugs will “concentrate” all their attention on tumors.

The nanoworms are made of spherical iron oxide nanoparticles which tend to get together in order to develop gummy worms that measure 30 nanometers long. They are very similar to earthworms saving-that they are 3 million times smaller. The nanoworms were built from iron-oxide because this composition is destined to come out very brightly at the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging).

Iron-oxide’s properties are explained better by Prof Sailor who stated that “the magnetism of the individual iron oxide segments, typically eight per nanoworm, combine to provide a much larger signal than can be observed if the segments are separated. This translates to a better ability to see smaller tumors, hopefully enabling physicians to make their diagnosis of cancer at earlier stages of development”.

The thing that allows the nanoworms to trace the tumor is the F3 peptide which is a molecule with a specific purpose: targeting the tumor. The F3 peptide was developed Erkki Ruoslahti, cell biologist and professor at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research at UC Santa Barbara.

I have to say that this discovery was kind of an accident, but we have to thank for that to Ji-Ho Park, UC San Diego graduate student in materials science and engineering, who noticed that the nanoworms wandered for hours in the bloodstream of the mice with tumors that were being tested.

ji-Ho Park stated that “this is an important property because the longer these nanoworms can stay in the bloodstream, the more chances they have to hit their targets, the tumors”.

Now, the scientists are trying to develop chemical “zip codes” with the purpose of specifically delivering the nanoworms anywhere in the body. Prof Ruoslahti is working to build “tumor-targeting nanodevices” which “will improve the diagnostic imaging of cancer and allow pinpoint targeting of treatments into cancerous tumors”. We can only hope that the people affected by cancer will finally suffer less and cure faster.

Nanotechnology in combination with carbon can lead to many things but one of the most important items - carbon nanotubes. With the help of these carbon nanotubes, a team of researchers from the UAB Research Park managed to create the first nanomotor powered by temperature changes.

Thanks to this breakthrough, in the future the developers will be able to design nano-devices that will perform mechanical tasks that will be applied in biomedicine or to some futuristic materials. The nanomotor is based on carbon nanotubes and in addition, it’s covered by a tiny concentric nanotube acting like a rotor.

The movements of the nanomotor are controlled by applying various temperatures at the extremities of a longer nanotube. The precision of the movements is of less than the diameter of an atom. The researchers are extremely confident that this technique will be applied in many other domains in the future because of its huge potential in nanotechnology.

Lithium-ion batteries of the future will be much better than current technology thanks to a breakthrough that will increase their life. The lithium-ion batteries will be improved with the help of carbon nanotubes that will prevent them to lose their capacity of charge over time.

The researchers from the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, China, have used carbon nanotubes and they improved the silicon (previous attempts using silicon led to a faster degradation of Li-ion batteries) therefore they were able to grow CNT on the surface of mini particles of silicon and a small part of them produced sugar at very high temperatures.

The researchers compared the results between the use of silicon with carbon nanotubes and the new material made of sugar-coated silicon. The conclusion is amazing - the silicon in combination with CNT achieved 727 mAh per gram and the sugar-coated material dropped to 363 mAh per gram.

Nanotechnology is a fast-growing technologies and in the future it will continue to show a huge potential. Even though it could provide the answer for curing cancer and to develop cloaking devices. But there are some critics who showed that nanotechnology could have negative impacts on the environment.

Researchers from the Arizona State University demonstrated that the silver nanoparticles found in shoes, socks and computer mice can manage to find their way into local waterways due to washing machines. According to Paul Westerhoff and Troy Brenn, engineers at the ASU, the ionic silver kills the fish by disrupting their blood and tissue chemistries.

For the moment this is not a certainty and they need to take their tests further and hope to complete them soon because the world needs to know whether silver nanoparticles are environmentally friendly.

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Researcher Wayne Frasch from the Arizona State University is working on a method that could eliminate the long lines formed by airports security or revolutionize health screenings. He recently discovered that the F1- ATPase enzyme can be equipped with an optical probe called ‘gold nanorod’ which would enable us to ‘train’ it to emit a signal whenever it finds a molecule of suspect DNA.

The enzyme F1- ATPase (F1-adenosine triphosphatase) has a diameter of only 10 to 12 nanometers and is part of a set of proteins critical in creating energy in all living things. Scientists that previously studied it have been awarded two Nobel Prizes back in 1979 and 1997.

For now, researchers are working on a prototype of the molecule detector but they refused to give a prognosis about the time when the new nanodevice will be ready to use. Think about all the time we waste in hospitals for screenings or for security checks, in airports. This could spare us of all those annoying moments and use that time in much more pleasant ways.

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This technology could be better than hybrid and gasoline powered cars because we will drive them thousands of miles at a lower cost. The leader of the study is Liviu Popa-Simil and his project is based on thermoelectric materials that the US and the Soviet Union employed for spacecrafts.

This new material transforms the radiation into electricity using nuclear materials and reactions and they are also very efficient because they will convert about 20 times more energy than thermoelectric materials.

For the moment, the researchers are testing the technique and they are very confident in the success of the nanomaterials that convert radiation into electricity and it seems like this already have been labelled as the future of nuclear power.

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It measures only 5 microns in diameter, has a thickness of 300 nanometers and has been made by scientists from the University of Melbourne as a component in a device for producing and detecting single photons. There is no diamond mounted on the ring, the ring itself is an artificially made diamond. The scientists chose diamond as the perfect material for this component as it looks like diamond is an excellent electrical insulator and heat conductor, and seems that it would be a great host for qubits.

Qubits are a special kind of bits, that can have a value of 1 and 0 at the same time. The researchers from Center for Quantum Computer Technology, the ones that are doing the fundamental studies on qubits are the group that could set the basics for creating the first quantum computer. For that, there is lots and lots of work to be done, starting with studying and implementing a great deal of optical networking, that will enable qubits to be entangled, to work together, as a system. This system will be a sort of CPU, to compare them to a standard computer`s architecture from this decade.

After this stage, which will not be completed too soon, trust me, the other PC hardware corporations will need to adapt their products to the needs of a super-processor like this, which will require, again, a pretty long time, if you think of the level of technology a device like this would imply. This development appears to be the far future of PCs, and I can only hope that my grandchildren will benefit from it.

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