Posts Tagged ‘Nanotechnology’
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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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April 19th, 2010
35 atoms…
There are a couple of great articles in this month’s nature nanotechnology which are well worth casting your eye over. They aren’t about gold directly, but certainly did much to shape and publicise the field of nanotechnology. The title of this blog refers to the 35 atoms of xenon which Don Eigler used to spell out the name of his employers 20 years ago using a Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM).
This was a remarkable piece of science, and to this day still catches the imagination. In fact, if you were to ask your non-scientific family and friends many will have seen this iconic image. Dr Eigler’s colleagues at IBM, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, had won the Nobel Prize for Physics 4 years earlier for their invention of the STM. It must have been quite a buzz to see it being used in this way!
The anniversary of this groundbreaking work got plenty of press coverage, but I would really recommend reading the nature papers. This one has a copy of Dr Eigler’s labbook write up of the experiment, and you can really feel his excitement just by reading the page.
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April 12th, 2010
Best of the web
Some of the gold-science related stories on the web this morning:
Eavesdropping On Cells With Non Destructive Nanoscale Probes
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April 3rd, 2010
Nature Chemistry
There are a couple of nice gold related papers in the latest issue of Nature Chemistry. The first, from the lab of Hanadi Sleiman in Canada, describes the controlled release of gold nanoparticles from DNA nanotubes in response to specific external stimuli. Such technology holds considerable promise for gene-triggered selective delivery of drugs and biological sensing. The second paper is from a team of Finnish researchers, and covers some theoretical and practical work carried out on the gold catalysed oxidation of CO.
Nature Chemistry, along with other leading chemistry journals such as Angewandte Chemie and JACS, are currently publishing plenty of gold-related papers. We cover as many as we can here on the blog, and many of these are subsequently expanded upon in the highlights section of Gold Bulletin – take a look!
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March 29th, 2010
‘Cold welding’ of ultrathin gold nanowires
The latest issue of nature nanotechnology carries an interesting article detailing observations from US researchers on the occurrence of ‘cold welding’ in gold and silver nanowires. This is potentially a significant development, as the connections made during the welding process (which itself is facile and reproducible) are of a notably high quality. The authors suggest that when combined with other nano- and microfabrication technologies, nanoscale cold welding has considerable potential in providing a route to bottom-up assembly of metallic nanostructures
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March 15th, 2010
Nanotechnology highlighted in Obama’s 2011 budget
The National Nanotechnology Initiative (“NNI”) has just published its Supplement to the President’s FY 2011 Budget that was submitted to Congress on February 1, 2010. This document describes ongoing NNI activities for 2010, and plans that a variety of government agencies in NNI have in the pipeline for 2011 based upon the proposed budget. Major areas of focus include nanomedicine, solar energy technologies, nanoelectronics and manufacturing issues.As you can see above, the cover of the document has a generous splash of gold. The images were provided by the prominent Northwestern researchers Teri Odom and Yonggang Huang, and illustrate golden nanopyramids and twistable electronics.
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March 5th, 2010
Video perspectives
The American Chemical Society’s journal Physical Chemistry Letters has a nice series of video perspectives on papers it has recently published. This one, for example, features reseachers from Jin Zhong Zhang’s lab at CalTech speaking about their article Biomedical Applications of Shape-Controlled Plasmonic Nanostructures: A Case Study of Hollow Gold Nanospheres for Photothermal Ablation Therapy of Cancer.
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January 20th, 2010
Self-assembling electronic devices
A fascinating, and potentially very important, paper has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the prestigious US journal. The article details a simple and cheap way to create self-assembling electronic devices utilising the interfaces naturally created between silicone oil, water and a substrate. By manipulating these hydrophobic/hydrophilic interfaces (and the materials they come into contact with) the team have been able build a series of devices, culminating in a flexible monocrystalline silicon solar cell.This is a really exciting step forward, and we congratulate the authors on the paper. The real promise is in the technology’s applicability across a wide range of materials, ranging from metal to plastic.
The paper has received considerable media coverage, including an article on the BBC website.
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January 11th, 2010
Patenting nanotechnologies
I’m a big fan of the nano patents and innovations blog, and they have kicked off the year with an eye-opening post regarding the sheer volume of patent activity in the field of nanotechnology. In the first week of 2010, approximately 102 nano-related patents were identified, many filed by some of the world’s leading names including Sony, Samsung, Roche and Pfizer.
The blog author determined that the majority of these patents are devoted to nanomaterials and nanofabrication processes for the semiconductor industry. However, biomedical applications were also well represented. Gold is a prominent material in both of these areas, more details of which can be found on our scientific website
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January 6th, 2010
Nature Nanotechnology feature article
Nature Nanotechnology, the leading journal which covers all aspects of nanotech-based research, has just published an excellent article on the ever-growing field of gold-based catalysis. The piece, entitled ‘A Golden Opportunity’, is particularly interesting as it focuses on the drive to commercialise gold-based catalysts, and features commentary and opinion from a number of eminent academic and industrial scientists including Chris Hardacre of Queens University Belfast, Graham Hutchings of Cardiff University, Jason McPherson of Mintek and David Barton of Dow Chemical Company amongst others.Here at the World Gold Council we are particularly excited to see the publication of this article in such an eminent journal. The tone of the piece certainly fits in with our aim of aiding the acceleration of gold-based technologies to market by providing marketing expertise and offering various funding strategies. For more information on our funding programmes, see here.
Trevor Keel
Richard Holliday
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