From: Gina Miller (nanogirl@halcyon.com)
Date: Fri Oct 18 2002 - 23:22:39 MDT
The Nanogirl News
October 18, 2002
House Gets Own Nanotech Legislation to Consider. One month after the Senate
Commerce Committee passed legislation promoting nanotechnology funding and
development, Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., introduced the Nanoscience and
Nanotechnology Advisory Board Act on Thursday. The bill, H.R. 5669, would
establish an independent advisory board comprised of leaders from industry
and academia to advise the President and Congress on research investment
strategy, policy, objectives and oversight related to the government's
National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). (DC Internet 10/18/02)
http://dc.internet.com/news/article.php/1484461
Nano-Machines Get Some Fresh Air. For nanometer-sized machines, air is so
thick it saps their energy. That means most contraptions must be confined to
vacuum chambers. But now physicists report that a little laser light can
help nanomachines operate in open air. The advance could open the way for
ultrasensitive biodetectors. (inSight 10/2/02)
http://www.academicpress.com/inscight/10012002/graphb.htm
Study reveals nanoscale structure in amorphous material. The common view
that amorphous materials are simply jumbled collections of atoms may give
way to a more ordered theory of the materials' formation, according to
experiments conducted at the University of North Carolina. Studies of an
amorphous form of zinc chloride have revealed an unexpected order at
nanoscale distances that may lead to new engineered materials in a wide
number of industries, said project head James Martin. "What I'm calling
'amorphous-materials engineering' will allow us to design nanostructures and
then go in there and make them, [just as] we do with crystalline engineering
today," (EETimes 10/18/02)
http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20021017S0040
MIT model predicts birthplace of defect in a material. Applications include
nanotechnology, more. Defects such as cracks in a material are responsible
for everything from malfunctioning microchips to earthquakes. Now MIT
engineers have developed a model to predict a defect's birthplace, its
initial features and how it begins to advance through the material.
The model could be especially useful in nanotechnology. "As devices get
smaller and smaller, understanding the phenomena of defect nucleation and
growth becomes more and more important," said Subra Suresh, head of the
Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). A seemingly
minuscule dislocation--a local disorder in the arrangement of atoms inside a
material--or a crack can drastically compromise the performance of a device.
(Eurekalert 10/1/02)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-10/miot-mmp100102.php
(Profile) Even though Lucent Technologies' recent bad news could spell
trouble for its famous R&D facility, Bell Labs' Nanotechnology Research
Director John A. Rogers is hopeful his people and projects will escape the
budget axe. On Friday, the company announced an additional 10,000
company-wide job cuts, reduced earnings expectations and $4 billion of
additional charges against its third quarter revenues and equity. Not good
news, certainly, and coming on the heels of Bell Labs' recent announcement
it fired ethically-challenged researcher Hendrik Schön for falsifying data
and results, the timing could have been better. (Nanotech Planet 10/15/02)
http://www.nanoelectronicsplanet.com/nanochannels/profiles/article/0,4028,10
500_1481591,00.html
Chemists Synthesize Key Component in Drive Toward Molecular Electronic
Devices. University of Chicago chemists have successfully synthesized an
electronic component the size of a single molecule that could prove crucial
in the continuing push to miniaturize electronic devices. The component,
called a molecular diode, restricts current flow to one direction between
electronic devices. In the semiconductor industry these components, called
p-n junctions, form half of a transistor. Man-Kit Ng, a 2002 Ph.D. in
Chemistry, and Luping Yu, Professor in Chemistry, describe their diode in
the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie and online Sept. 12 in the
Journal of the American Chemical Society. (aScribe 10/1/02)
http://www.ascribe.org/cgi-bin/spew4th.pl?ascribeid=20021001.133336&time=21
2004%20PDT&year=2002&public=1
Advances in materials science excite professor. Arthur J. Freeman, an
oft-quoted expert in quantum modeling, sees the most exciting days ahead in
the field to which he has dedicated more than 40 years of work. The reason?
An opportune convergence of affordable supercomputing, breakthroughs in
nanotechnology, and a new field of study called computational materials
science. (The Sun Times 10/16/02)
http://www.suntimes.com/output/zinescene/cst-fin-ecol16.html
Bugs trained to build circuit. Bacteria lay bricks on nano scale building
site. Bacteria have found a new vocation - as nanoscale construction
workers. Such bugs might form microbial machines that could repair wounds or
build microscopic electrical circuits. Tetsuo Kondo of the Forestry and
Forest Products Research Institute in Ibaraki, and his colleagues, used a
grooved film to train the bacterium Acetobacter xylinum to exude neat
ribbons of a biological building material - cellulose1. The bug laid down
strips at a rate of 4,000ths of a millimetre per minute. (Nature Science
Update 10/8/02)
http://www.nature.com/nsu/021007/021007-1.html
Nanoscale electronics. Bustling research is producing sophisticated
laboratory demonstrations, but commercialization of nanometer-sized devices
remains a ways off. At first there were only a few of them, but recently,
their numbers have multiplied wildly. Newspaper headlines, magazine
articles, journal papers, even television commercials now are loaded with
those big "nano" words: nanometer, nanoscale, nanosecond, and
nanotechnology, to name a few. And it seems that every week some
organization is announcing yet another "nanoconference." -2 pages-(C&E cover
story 9/30/02)
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/8039/8039nanoelectronics.html
IBM grows nanotube patterns on silicon wafers. IBM Corp. has grown
catalyst-free nanotube networks on silicon carbide substrates, the company
said last week. With atomic-force microscopy verifying the results,
researchers at the T.J. Watson Research Center set up grids of nanotubes (in
rows and columns), bringing the promise of nanotube transistors arrayed
across silicon chips one step closer to reality, IBM said. (EETimes 9/30/02)
http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20020930S0013
Altair Nanotechnologies Receives Order From F.W. Gartner Thermal Spraying
Co.; Shipment of Nano-Structured Thermal Spray Product Produces $60,000 in
Revenues. Altair Nanotechnologies (Nasdaq:ALTI) today announced that it has
received another order from Houston-based F.W. Gartner Thermal Spraying Co.
to provide more than 1,000 pounds of one of its patented, nano-structured
titanium dioxide-based thermal spray products. (Stockhouse 10/17/02)
http://www.stockhouse.com/news/news.asp?tick=ALTI&newsid=1358937
Nanocylinders Open Way To Polymer Electronics. International team of
scientists succeeds in synthesizing new supramolecular materials for
optoelectronics from organic crystals and polymers. A team of German and
American scientists have succeeded in combining conventional organic
molecules and conductive polymers to form highly symmetric, structured
materials with new electronic properties. After the attachment of specific
functional groups, the disc-like or ring-shaped organic molecules organize
into highly symmetric cylinders, three nanometers in thickness and 50-100
nanometers in length, just like a roll of coins. (MaxPlanck Society-Press
Release- 10/2/02)
http://www.mpg.de/news02/news0223.htm
Intel Tuesday unveiled its strategy to cram some of its chips with 1 billion
transistors by 2007. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip making giant said
it is using a combination of nanotechnology (define) and design changes to
its semiconductors to help extend Moore's Law (define) by a few more years.
The plan is to use its upcoming mobile Banias processors Itanium, Xeon and,
along with its Hyper-Threading technology as the testing ground for its
initiative. "We are looking at a lot of different ideas about what specific
apps would be the drivers for the 1 billion transistor chips," Intel fellow
John Crawford said at the Microprocessor Forum 2002 here. "I'm not
speculating, but I think that some of the advances will help extend memory
chip designs further and further." (Siliconvalley 10/16/02)
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/1482341
The Amazing Vanishing Transistor Act. Radical changes are in the offing for
transistors as their dimensions shrink to a few tens of nanometers. A decade
from now you won't recognize a transistor even if it's walking toward you up
the street, assuming you could see it, of course. The gate length-the marker
for gauging how small that CMOS transistor is-will be roughly one-fifth the
size of the smallest in production today, only 10 nm instead of today's 50
nm. To get to that size and ensure that the transistor still operates will
require many changes:....(IEEE Spectrum Online 10/18/02)
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/oct02/nano.html
Diffraction gradient lithography aids nanofluidics. Small fluidic structures
are important tools in the emerging field of bionanotechnology, but it can
be difficult to stretch out long molecules such as DNA so that they can
enter the nano-sized channels. Now, researchers from Princeton University,
US, have developed a relatively cheap technique for making devices that
gradually uncoil the molecules before guiding them into the channels.
(nanotechweb.org 10/11/02)
http://nanotechweb.org/articles/news/1/10/9/1
It would send and receive faxes and video and have the processing power of a
personal computer. The cell phone of the future would be on the market today
but for one hitch: the battery...So Martin and his team are making progress
on a new approach: Batteries inspired by the emerging field of
nanotechnology. The research could both improve the small batteries used in
portable electronics and lead to truly miniscule power packs for so called
"microelectromechanical" machines, or MEMS, devices. In the first year of a
five-year collaborative effort with three other institutions funded by a $5
million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the research is
showing progress toward its goal of creating a three-dimensional,
millimeter-sized battery...(Eurekalert 10/10/02)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-10/uof-ab101002.php
Brain on a chip. Researchers in California have found a way to keep slices
of living brain alive for weeks, which could soon become a powerful tool for
testing new drugs. The mini-brain consists of a glass chip containing tens
of thousands of interconnected living brain cells, taken from rats or mice.
(Eurekalert 10/16/02)
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-10/ns-boa101602.php
Phlesch Bubble awarded the IMM Computational Nanotechnology Prize. Phlesch
Bubble has been awarded the IMM Computational Nanotechnology Prize
(Simulation category) for their animation of a working respirocyte (a
hypothetical artificial red blood cell). David Forrest, President of the
Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, commented about the animation: "The
judges were very impressed with the quality of (the) work, the level of
detail, and the fidelity to the physics of fluid motion in the bloodstream
and the biological environment of the respirocyte. The operation of the
respirocyte was communicated with clarity, attention to detail, scientific
accuracy, and high visual impact." (Nanotech-now.com 10/17/02)
http://nanotech-now.com/phleschbubble-release-10172002.htm
Polymers self-assemble to form 2.5-nm diode. diode measuring just 2.5
nanometers was recently demonstrated by University of Chicago professor
Luping Yu, who called it the world's smallest. The operation of the
polymer-based p-n junction diode, synthesized using organic chemistry by
postdoctoral assistant Man-Kit Ng, was verified with a scanning tunneling
microscope. (EETimes 10/16/02)
http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20021015S0040
'Nanotechnology' opens windows into medicine. Microscopic capsules at least
a million times smaller than the average pill may soon advance medicine on
Earth and open new frontiers for long-term space habitation. These miniature
wonders known as "nanoparticles" would be injected into the bloodstream of
human beings and they would travel on a permanent high alert mode looking
for damaged cells as they cruised through the body.
(Galveston County Daily News 10/16/02)
http://galvestondailynews.com/report.lasso?wcd=5161
DOE picks head for chemical division. Research in catalysis, nanoscience,
bioscience, and computational chemistry targeted for growth. Stevens singled
out four areas in the division where he would like to see growth in the near
and long term: research in catalysis, theory and modeling in nanoscale
science, bioscience research, and computational chemistry
(C&E 10/1/02) http://pubs.acs.org/cen/today/oct1.html
Microsoft Windows is now compatible with one of the best-selling computer
modeling (CM) suites, which are among the most important nanotechnology R&D
lab tools. But some nanotech experts are less than impressed. CM software is
used to create models of structures down to the molecular level and produce
simulations, graphics and analyses. One of the leading CM suites, Materials
Studio (MS) from Accelrys Inc., added the ability to run under Windows
recently. (Small Times 10/15/02)
http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=4822
The Birmingham Post: Nano-technology is next big thing. BA battle is
developing over the UK's planned nano-technology centre. The West Midlands,
which has considerable expertise in the science, is bidding strongly to
bring it to the region. But Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt has
told The Birmingham Post that no decision has yet been taken on the
multimillion pound project. (Hoover's online 10/11/02)
http://hoovnews.hoovers.com/fp.asp?layout=displaynews&doc_id=NR20021011670.4
_4a70000bc7f10aa5
P.S. I had a great time chatting with some of you at the Foresight
Conference!
Gina "Nanogirl" Miller
Nanotechnology Industries
http://www.nanoindustries.com
Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com
Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org
Extropy member http://www.extropy.org
"Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:17:39 MST