Archive for the ‘Nanotechnology’ Category
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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 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 5th, 2010
Another great meeting…
Further to my post at the end of last week I’ve been made aware of another great MRS-backed meeting in Denver this October. Organised by Laura Fabris of Rutgers University in NY, Functionalized Nanobiomaterials for Medical Applications will bring together a raft of gold nanoparticle experts including Mike Natan of Oxonica, Vince Rotello of UMass and Cathy Murphy of South Carolina. Registration opens this month, so check the MRS website or drop Laura a line for more information
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July 2nd, 2010
BioNano@Nice2011
There’s a great looking symposium currently being pulled together as part of next year’s e-MRS meeting in Nice by Dr Raphael Levy of the University of Liverpool. The session will focus on bionanomaterials for imaging, sensing and actuating and features a quality line up of speakers including Molly Stevens from Imperial, Catherine Murphy from Illinois and Mathias Brust from Liverpool. Take a look Rapha’s blog for more details
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June 30th, 2010
New memory devices
New flexible non-volatile organic memory devices have been developed on plastic substrates based on organic thin-film transistors embedded with self-assembled gold nanoparticles. The team working on this is led by Jang-Sik Lee, former Samsung researcher and now at Kookmin University in South Korea. This is really cutting-edge stuff and could open up a whole new area for gold in electronics. See Nano Letters for more details
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
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