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The moving parts of micromechanical machines tend to seize up under the forces of sticking and friction that engineers call stiction. The problem yields to solid lubricants, notably graphite (sheets of carbon atoms called graphene stacked in layers), although for a long time no one understood exactly why this happens. Now nanotechnology researchers, led by Professor Robert Carpick at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor James Hone at Columbia University, in New York City, have shown that how effective the lubrication is depends on the number of layers of graphene in the graphite. In particular, more layers means better lubrication. Because the same relationship between layers and lubrication occurs in thin sheets of molybdenum disulfide, niobium diselenide, and boron nitride—materials of widely differing properties—the workers conclude that this behavior is a fundamental aspect of friction. They expect that the discovery will lead to better lubrication of tiny moving parts. The researchers published details of their experiments in a recent issue of Science.

The question of the relative roles of nanotechnology and AI in forging the shape of the future has been argued in techno-futurist circles for decades. Eric Drexler mentioned AI as a potentially disruptive technology in his seminal 1986 book Engines of Creation, and it was discussed at the very first Foresight conference 20 years ago

South Korean researchers have recently made a flexible nonvolatile memory based on memristors—fundamental electronic circuit elements discovered in 2008—using thin graphene oxide films. Memristors promise a new type of dense, cheap, and low-power memory and have typically been made using metal oxide thin films. The new graphene oxide devices should be cheaper and simpler to fabricate—they could be printed on rolls of plastic sheets and used in plastic RFID tags or in the wearable electronics of the future. "We think graphene oxide can be a good candidate for next-generation memory," says Sung-Yool Choi, who leads flexible devices research at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejeon, South Korea. Choi and his colleagues reported their device last week in Nano Letters.

"An industrial assembly line includes a factory, workers, and a conveyor system," said NYU Chemistry Professor Nadrian Seeman, the study's senior author. "We have emulated each of those features using DNA components." The assembly line relies on three DNA-based components. The first is DNA origami, a composition that uses a few hundred short DNA strands to direct a very long DNA strand to form structures to any desired shape. These shapes are approximately 100 x 100 nanometers in area, and about 2 nm thick (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter). DNA origami serves as the assembly line's framework and also houses its track. The second are three DNA machines, or cassettes, that serve as programmable cargo-donating devices. The cargo species the researchers used are gold nanoparticles, which measure 5 to 10 nanometers in diameter. Changing the cassette's control sequences allows the researchers to enable or prevent the donation of the cargoes to the growing construct. The third is a DNA "walker," which is analogous to the chassis of a car being assembled. It moves along the assembly line's track, stopping at the DNA machines to collect and carry the DNA "cargo." As the walker moves along the pathway prescribed by the origami tile track, it encounters sequentially the three DNA devices. These devices can be switched between an "on" state, allowing its cargo to be transferred to the walker, and an "off" state, in which no transfer occurs. In this way, the DNA product at the end of the assembly line may include cargo picked up from one, two, or three of the DNA machines. "A key feature of the assembly line is the programmability of the cargo-donating DNA machines, which allows the generation of eight different products," explained Seeman.

Clearly the most attractive super hero power for nanotechnology at the moment is invisibility. Last month we had a nano-enabled coating that managed to make aircraft invisible to radar. Now we have a metamaterial consisting of fishnet-like film containing holes about 100 nanometers in diameter that could serve as an invisibility cloak. While I personally might be persuaded to choose Spider-like climbing abilities for my nano-enabled super hero power, invisibility does pose an attractive option. However, invisibility is far from the point of this research conducted at the Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University and appears in the August 5th edition of the journal Nature.

No, we're not talking about a Wonder Woman-type of invisible plane, but rather one that becomes very difficult to detect with radar. The Israel-based Ynetnews is reporting that an Israeli company called Nanoflight has successfully run a test on dummy missiles that were painted with the nano-enabled coating and have shown that radar could not pick them up as missiles.

(Nanowerk News) Scientists at the University of Glasgow have devised a molecular 'LEGO toolkit' which can be used to assemble a vast number of new and functional chemical compounds. Using molecules as building blocks they have been able to construct a molecular scaffold based on tiny (nano-scale) storage cubes. This new ‘designer route’ opens the door to many new compounds that, potentially, are able to act as the ion sensors, storage devices, and catalysts of the future. Researchers within the Department of Chemistry created hollow cube-based frameworks from polyoxometalates (POMs) – complex compounds made from metal and oxygen atoms – which stick together like LEGO bricks meaning a whole range of well-defined architectures can be developed with great ease ("Face-directed self-assembly of an electronically active Archimedean polyoxometalate architecture").

Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT)-based thin film transistors (TFTs) could be at the core of next-generation flexible electronics – displays, electronic circuits, sensors, memory chips, and other applications that are transitioning from rigid substrates, such as silicon and glass, to flexible substrates. What's holding back commercial applications is that industrial-type manufacturing of large scale SWCNT-based nanoelectronic devices isn't practical yet because controlling the morphology of single-walled carbon nanotubes is still causing headaches for materials engineers.

“The ability to harness and control the power of bacterial motion is an important requirement for further development of hybrid biomechanical systems driven by microorganisms," said Argonne physicist and principal investigator Igor Aronson. “In this system, the gears are a million times more massive than the bacteria."

The goal of the MultiPlat project is to develop biomimetic proton conductive membranes with nanometer thickness (nanomembranes) through convergence of the number of fields. The primary application of this multipurpose nanotechnological platform is the next generation of fuel cells where it will replace the prevailing evolutionary modifications of the state of the art solutions.

Nothing is ever simple in IT, and nanotechnology is no different. For a start, the term nanotechnology can mean different things to different people. For purists, it refers to a microscopic structure equal to or less than one nanometre (nm) in size – about a billionth of a metre. But many vendors and regulators (see How EC rules affect nanotechnology, page 2) believe the term nanotechnology can be applied to any structure between 1nm and 100nm in size, which means various nanoscale silicon components and microchips already inhabit many of the computers and other electrical and electronic devices we use today.

Everyone knows holograms from their everyday life, for instance the ones applied to credit cards as security indicators. Unlike a photography of an object which only records the amplitude of the light wave coming from the object, the hologram also includes local information about the light wave's phase. In appropriate lighting, the initial wave front is reconstructed in proper phase and the spectator has a three dimensional sensation of the object. But it is not this characteristic of holography that is central when it comes to the imaging of small structures, but the fact that for the recording of a hologram no lenses are required at all. In order to conduct research on nanometer scaled objects, light of an equally small wave length is needed (soft X-rays). The only lenses working in this wave spectrum (so-called Fresnel zone plates) are very sophisticated in design and still yield a quality of imaging one scale inferior then lenses for visible light. The modus operandi of recording holograms without the use of lenses is to superimpose the light wave having radiated the object at the time of recording with a reference wave having a known and stable (coherent) phase.

) Die gezielte Manipulation von Strukturen im Nanometerbereich ist eine Grundlage der modernen Biotechnologie. Zu den vielseitigsten Bausteinen im Bereich von Millionstel Millimetern gehört die DNA, der Träger der Erbinformation. Im Organismus kommt das Molekül in linearen und zirkulären Formen vor, aus denen dann technologisch höhere Strukturen erzeugt werden können. Deren spezifische Form ist die Folge eines Wechselspiels mehrerer physikalischer Kräfte. LMU-Forscher um den Biophysiker Professor Erwin Frey konnten in Zusammenarbeit mit Schweizer Wissenschaftlern nun klären, welches Gewicht diese Kräfte jeweils haben und welche effektive Form der Bausteine daraus resultiert ("Excluded Volume Effects on Semiflexible Ring Polymers").

Die gezielte Manipulation von Strukturen im Nanometerbereich ist eine Grundlage der modernen Biotechnologie. Zu den vielseitigsten Bausteinen im Bereich von Millionstel Millimetern gehört die DNA, der Träger der Erbinformation. Im Organismus kommt das Molekül in linearen und zirkulären Formen vor, aus denen dann technologisch höhere Strukturen erzeugt werden können. Deren spezifische Form ist die Folge eines Wechselspiels mehrerer physikalischer Kräfte. LMU-Forscher um den Biophysiker Professor Erwin Frey konnten in Zusammenarbeit mit Schweizer Wissenschaftlern nun klären, welches Gewicht diese Kräfte jeweils haben und welche effektive Form der Bausteine daraus resultiert ("Excluded Volume Effects on Semiflexible Ring Polymers").

Researchers at the NanoRobotics Laboratory of the École Polytechnique de Montréal, in Canada, are putting swarms of bacteria to work, using them to perform micro-manipulations and even propel microrobots. Led by Professor Sylvain Martel, the researchers want to use flagellated bacteria to carry drugs into tumors, act as sensing agents for detecting pathogens, and operate micro-factories that could perform pharmacological and genetic tests. They also want to use the bacteria as micro-workers for building things. Things like a tiny step pyramid. The video below shows some 5000 bacteria moving like a swarm of little fish, working together to transport tiny epoxy bricks and assemble a pyramidal structure -- all in 15 minutes. The video was presented at IROS last year, along with a wonderfully titled paper, "A Robotic Micro-Assembly Process Inspired By the Construction of the Ancient Pyramids and Relying on Several Thousands of Flagellated Bacteria Acting as Workers."

There is a long history of attempts at replicating neural systems either in software or in conventional semiconductors, such as the FACETS project (not to mention the creation of conventional logic gates from lab-grown biological neurons!) According to a USC Viterbi news release, researchers at the BioRC project, whose goal is research on an artificial cortex, have succeeded in creating a functioning synapse from carbon nanotubes. The new research was presented by Alice C. Parker in the paper "A biomimetic fabricated carbon nanotube synapse for prosthetic applications" at the Life Science Systems and Applications Workshop in April 2011. (unfortunately the actual paper is behind a paywall but the abstract is readable). An earlier paper, "A Biomimetic Carbon Nanotube Synapse Circuit", describes the proposed design of synapse including schematics and comparison with biological neural