Saudi Arabia’s King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) and computer company International Business Machines (IBM) recently held a workshop to address their jointly-founded Nanotechnology Center of Excellence for water desalination, solar energy, and petrochemicals research, specifically discussing the use of nanotechnology to improve the performance of the Saudi Solar Village.

The Russian Federation has established Nanocertifica, the country’s first certification system for industrial nanotechnology production.

The University of Connecticut (UConn) in the U.S. has opened a new facility for nanobionics research, including the development of nanoscale devices for use in defense, healthcare, and other industries.

A practical nanotech method for integrating single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNT) with existing silicon microtechnology could lead to uses in microelectronics, field emission displays, electronic memory devices and solar cells. From “3D nanotube assembly technique for nanoscale electronics” at PhysOrg.com, written by Lisa Zyga:

For the past several years, researchers have been trying to take advantage of carbon nanotubes’ good electrical properties for future nanoscale electronics applications. One of the biggest challenges in this area is finding ways to arrange and assemble the nanotubes into 3D configurations for carrying current in nanoscale devices.

Most recently, a team of physicists and engineers from the Electronic Materials Research Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, has demonstrated a technique for assembling nanotubes using an applied electric field. Using this method, the researchers could assemble single-walled carbon nanotubes into 3D structures by coaxing the nanotubes into deep nanoholes in a porous alumina template. An average of one nanotube per hole was vertically assembled, and, by sweeping the 0.32cm² area, more than one million holes were filled with nanotubes.

“The greatest significance of this technique is that it provides the potential to manufacture, at a high rate and on a large scale, three-dimensional single-wall carbon nanotube electrical interconnects, without the need for high-temperature synthesis,” Srinivas Sridhar, Director of the Electronic Materials Research Institute, told PhysOrg.com.

…”The next step in nanoscale electronics is to integrate the 3D carbon nanotubes architectures with current CMOS technology and create hybrid systems,” Sridhar said. “The holy grail of nanoscale electronics is to completely replace CMOS technology by monolithic carbon nanotubes devices.

For those who would like an overview of the application of networks and arrays of SWNT to electronic devices, the fourth issue of the journal Nano Research, which is open access through 2008 and 2009, contains an excellent and accessible review article “Random networks and aligned arrays of single-walled carbon nanotubes for electronic device applications” that can be downloaded as a PDF (2.5 MB).
—Jim

World

A nanotech material that consists of about 50% carbon nanotubes may soon find wide commercial applications in aerospace and other industries. The Associated Press reports that researchers at Florida State University plan to soon introduce commercial products make from buckypaper, perhaps as soon as the next 12 months. From “Future planes, cars may be made of ‘buckypaper’“:

It’s called “buckypaper” and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don’t be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made.

Buckypaper is 10 times lighter but potentially 500 times stronger than steel when sheets of it are stacked and pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity like copper or silicon and disperses heat like steel or brass.

“All those things are what a lot of people in nanotechnology have been working toward as sort of Holy Grails,” said Wade Adams, a scientist at Rice University.

That idea — that there is great future promise for buckypaper and other derivatives of the ultra-tiny cylinders known as carbon nanotubes — has been floated for years now. However, researchers at Florida State University say they have made important progress that may soon turn hype into reality.

—Jim

Nanotech applications based upon modules of RNA that bind small molecules to control the catalytic activity of other RNA modules may form the basis for a wide variety of synthetic molecular machines to perform calculations and control chemical reactions inside living cells. From a CalTech news release found via ScienceDaily “Caltech Engineers Build First-Ever Multi-Input “Plug-and-Play” Synthetic RNA Device“:

Engineers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a “plug-and-play” synthetic RNA device—a sort of eminently customizable biological computer—that is capable of taking in and responding to more than one biological or environmental signal at a time.

In the future, such devices could have a multitude of potential medical applications, including being used as sensors to sniff out tumor cells or determine when to turn modified genes on or off during cancer therapy.

A synthetic RNA device is a biological device that uses engineered modular components made of RNA nucleotides to perform a specific function–for instance, to detect and respond to biochemical signals inside a cell or in its immediate environment.

Created by Caltech’s Christina Smolke, assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Maung Nyan Win, postdoctoral scholar in chemical engineering, the device is made up of modules comprising the RNA-based biological equivalents of engineering’s sensors, actuators, and information transmitters. These individual components can be combined in a variety of different ways to create a device that can both detect and respond to what could conceivably be an almost infinite number of environmental and cellular signals.

This modular device processes these inputs in a manner almost identical to the logic gates used in computing; it can perform AND, NOR, NAND, and OR computations, and can perform signal filtering and signal gain operations. Smolke and Win’s creation is the first RNA device that can handle more than one incoming piece of biological information. “There’s been a lot of work done in single-input devices,” notes Smolke. “But this is the first demonstration that a multi-input RNA device is possible.”

Their work was published in the October 17 issue of the journal Science [abstract].

The modular—or plug-and-play—nature of the device’s design also means that it can be easily modified to suit almost any need. “Scientists won’t have to redesign their system every time they want the RNA device to take on a new function,” Smolke explains. “This modular framework allows you to quickly put a device together, then just as easily swap out the components for other ones and get a completely different kind of computation. We could generate huge libraries of well-defined sensors and assemble many different tailored devices from such component libraries.”

Although the work in the Science paper was done in yeast cells, Smolke says they have already shown that they can translate to mammalian cells as well. This makes it possible to consider using these devices in a wide variety of medical applications.

In a “Perspectives” piece in the same issue of Science Ehud Shapiro and Binyamin Gil place this work in the context of previous efforts at biomolecular computing devices and point out that this work advances “the state of the art by demonstrating programmable in vivo computation that is independent of the cell’s own machinery and yet can respond to both endogenous and exogenous molecular signals.” It will be fascinating to watch how sophisticated scientists succeed in making these very simple molecular machines, which may eventually lead to medical nanobots.
—Jim