Posts Tagged ‘nanorods’
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May 28th, 2010
Targeting the flu virus
Yet another potential medial application for gold emerged this week when scientists at the University at Buffalo and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published work showing that future pandemics of seasonal flu, H1N1, and other drug resistant viruses could be thwarted by a potent, immune-boosting payload delivered to cells by gold nanorods. Read more here….
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February 10th, 2010
Another nanogold start-up
This news release describing the award by The University of Maryland’s Industrial Partnerships Program of $174,420 (for developing a polymer coating for gold nanorods that enables them to survive biological conditions) has alerted me to the fact that there is a new company supplying gold nanorods; start-up company NanoRods LLC. Great to see new companies entering this market….
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February 1st, 2010
Heart of gold?
The University of South Carolina has just released a fascinating press release detailing three of their researchers work investigating how injections of nano-sized rods of gold might improve the function of faulty heart valves while eliminating the need for corrective surgery. The work, which has been supported by a two-year exploratory grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, focuses on on the structural protein collagen. The amount of collagen within heart valves alters their mechnical properties – for example too much collagen leads to the valves becoming stiff and not functioning correctly. The team believe that the gold nanoparticles can alter the mechanical properties of the collagen in beneficial ways, and we will watch the outcome of their work with interest.
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July 17th, 2009
Gold microrods
I love the way the team at Nanopartz continue to innovate and bring new gold-based products to market.
Their latest innovation is a product call Microgold. These Gold Microrods (GMRs) are hundreds of nanometers in the transverse dimension and up to 1 micron in lengths, making them the largest monodisperse particles available on the market.Microgold can be ordered here.
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May 21st, 2009
Your DVD library on one disc?
A new paper published in Nature and reported here on the BBC has offered the future prospect of storing a complete DVD library on one sngle disc. The research, published by a team at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, says that by adding gold nanomaterials and a “polarisation” dimension to existing technology, storage can be massively boosted without changing the size of a current disc .
W
hen polarized light from a laser is fired onto the gold nanorods it affects only the rods whose orientation matches the direction of polarization, causing them to become spherical. Its through this principle that data can be recorded. At the same time, gold nanorods respond much more efficiently than spherical nanoparticles to low-energy lasers, the so-called ’lightning rod effect’. So the team use a low-energy laser to scan the surface and see which areas have been melted and which haven’t, thereby reading the data.Apparently, the researchers have signed a deal with Samsung Electronics and say that there is the potential to one day store up to 10 terabytes of data on one disc.
Whilst this paper represents another emerging application for gold nanorods, I believe a key challenge for the scientific community is to improve the yields and scale of gold nanorod production such that these are viable commercial materials.
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March 3rd, 2009
Solar Cell Efficiency
Electricity-generating solar cells are one of the most attractive alternatives for creating a long-term sustainable energy system.
Researchers are now looking at how nanotechnology can contribute in bringing down the cost and improve the performance of the system. I’ve just seen this story which looks at the use of quantum dots, but it reminded me that another way to enhance the absorption of the solar harvesting material in a solar cell is to make use of nanoparticles of gold.
Carl Hägglund at Chalmers University in Sweden has looked at how this can be done in the following publication Applied Physics Letters 92, 013113 (2008).
Catherine Murphy has also been rec
eiving funding to explore this potential new application for gold using nanorods.Gold nanorods are not widely available, but if you are working in this field and wish to try gold nanorods they can be purchased from NanoPartz.
Richard Holliday
Trevor Keel
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