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August 25th, 2010
ACS Fall meeting
Inbetween meetings yesterday I managed to attend a few lectures here in (an extremely rainy!) Boston. Vince Rotello of UMass and Richard Lambert of Cambridge delivered the 2010 Langmuir lectures, both of which were excellent. Other interesting talks included Jin Zhang of UC Santa Cruz discussing his group’s work in the field of solar cell technology using gold nanoparticles, and M Park (from the Rotello group) discussing dendrimer-nanoparticle composite films.
Today boasts another strong line up of speakers including Chad Mirkin. Unfortunately the rain doesn’t appear to have given up just yet though…
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August 20th, 2010
Fall ACS and COMS2010
I’m heading off to the States next week to spend a couple of days at the Fall ACS meeting in Boston, followed by a brief stop in New Mexico for this year’s COMS event (where I’ll be presenting a short paper).
Drop me a line if you are attending either event and want to meet up for a chat about our latest programmes.
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August 11th, 2010
Antimicrobial gold
This paper from Professor Carole Perry’s lab at Nottingham Trent University has been getting a lot of press attention this week, for good reason. The article describes the development of a method which allows the generation of gold nanoparticles tethered to the antibiotic Cefaclor which is known to neutralise dangerous bacteria such as Escherichia Coli (E Coli). The real promise lies in the fact that these functionalised GNPs could then be inpregnated into various materials, potentially offering all sorts of robust antibacterial surfaces.
Professor Perry will be presenting this work at the Fall ACS meeting in a couple of weeks time in Boston. I will also be attending the meeting, so drop me a line if you are attending and want to meet up.
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August 4th, 2010
Golden beam pen arrays
Chad Mirkin’s group at Northwestern always seem to come up with elegent ideas, and this latest one is no different. Follwing on from the group’s development of polymer-pen lithography (PPL) in 2008 and Dip-Pen Nanolithography (DPN) in 1999, Beam-Pen lithography uses an array of tiny pyramidal pens made of a gold coated polymer to print patterns over large areas with nanoscopic through macroscopic resolution. The team used the technology to print the Chicago skyline 15,000 times in the space of just a few square centimetres, as shown above.Such miniturisation technologies have great potential in a range of fields including medical diagnostics and new electronic devices
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August 2nd, 2010
Normal service to be resumed
Some of you may have noticed it’s been a bit quiet here of late. The reason is that we (in London) have just moved office, an activity which makes a house move resemble a walk in the park…So, we hope to be back to normal in the coming few days. Until then you may want to check out this book which is due for release any day now.
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July 26th, 2010
New Era for Gold Bulletin
I want to inform you of a very significant change to the publication of Gold Bulletin due to be implemented from 1st January 2011.
As you may be aware Gold Bulletin dates back to 1968, when the first issue was published by the Chamber of Mines in South Africa. Since 1987 the World Gold Council (WGC) has published the journal. A major change occurred in 2005 when Gold Bulletin became an e-journal and was published on its own website, www.goldbulletin.org . This change enabled the journal to increase in size and reach a larger and growing readership. The archive of back issues was also placed on the website, so enabling ready access to the complete set of volumes published to date. During recent years the journal has achieved some very impressive Impact Factors (IF). Our current IF is 2.324.
As the size of the journal has increased we have found that the costs of producing Gold Bulletin ‘in-house’ at World Gold Council have also substantially increased. We have also found that the world of academic publishing has become increasingly complex and specialised ; producing a journal that meets current demands has become very time consuming for the WGC team, who manage many other activities alongside Gold Bulletin.
With these challenges in mind we are announcing that WGC has signed an agreement with Springer www.springer.com to facilitate the publication of Gold Bulletin from the end of this year. The journal will be published by Springer through the sponsorship of WGC. Importantly, the journal will:
- remain a free, peer reviewed, open access journal
- continue to completely focus on the science and industrial applications of gold
- benefit from Springer’s wider distribution channels and academic publishing expertise
I confirm that I will be remaining as Editor of the journal next year and will be sharing this task with Dr Trevor Keel (who also works at WGC and who you may know from this blog). He will be joining me as Associate Editor, with a particular focus on the nanotechnology coverage in the journal. For those of you that do not know Trevor, he has extensive experience in pharmaceutical research having spent a number of years working for GlaxoSmithKline, the leading healthcare company. As such he has particular interest in the use of gold in the fields of medicine, diagnostics and nanotechnology.
Under the new arrangements for Gold Bulletin, Springer will be largely responsible for the technical production and editing of the publication and so, with sadness I confirm that Dr Patricia Harris will not be continuing in her role as Technical Editor at the end of 2010. I know that many of you have had considerable dealings with Dr Harris and will wish to thank her for a great contribution to the running of the journal over many years.
Further details on the launch of the new look for Gold Bulletin will be announced in due course.
If you have any comments on this announcement we will be pleased to receive them.
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July 21st, 2010
Kavli lectureship article published
Last year Chad Mirkin of Northwestern was awarded the 2009 Kavli prize for his work in the field of nanoscience. He delivered his award lecture at the 2009 Fall MRS meeting in Boston, and has now published an article based on the lecture in this month’s MRS Bulletin. It’s well worth a look as it covers much of his group’s work using gold nanoparticles, and how this research is moving on to deliver novel applications in all areas of materials science.
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July 19th, 2010
Not quite turning lead into gold, but…
Researchers in Iran and Canada have identified a neat way of detecting lead (II) compounds using functionalised gold nanoparticles. The work, which has just been published in the journal nanotechnology (and is available for a short time for free here with an easily set up account), hinges on the synthesis and attachment of azacrown ether-terminated alkanethiolates to GNPs. These entities then cross-link in the presense of lead, leading to a brown to purple colour change.
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July 15th, 2010
Gold Nanoparticles covered by the Huffington Post
A nice article has appeared on The Huffington Post, the popular US news website. The author, DK Matai, talks at length about the potential of new gold nanoparticle technologies and refers to our recently published white paper.
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July 12th, 2010
Faraday discussions: Gold
We are delighted to see that the highly regarded series of ‘Faraday Discussion’ events, organised by the Royal Society of Chemistry, will be running a meeting next year focussing on the ever expanding field of gold catalysis. The event will be held in Cardiff in early July 2011, so make a note in your diaries. We will post updates and more details on this exciting meeting as they are published.
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
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