Post-graduate scholarship is aimed at students in the schools of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Electrical and Computing Engineering.

A team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has figured out a possible way to observe and record the behavior of matter at the molecular level. That ability could open the door to a wide range of applications in ultrafast electron microscopy used in a large array of scientific, medical and technological fields.

There’s a post on Technology Review’s blog about a paper on arXiv about a theoretical result in magnetic memories.

Current-day magnetic memory is already “nanotechnology” under the loose definition, involving 5-nanometer particles of cobalt (having about 50,000 atoms). The authors have shown that a single molecule consisting of a cobalt dimer sitting on top of a benzene ring would have a high enough magnetic anisotropy to store a bit magnetically.

(surprisingly enough, the cobalts prefer to stack up rather than so lie down flat on the carbon ring.)

Don’t expect this in your computer any time soon; the authors write:

Technological use would require to solve at least three additional
problems: fabrication of large regular arrays; protection against oxidation without reducing
the anisotropy; new read/write technologies. Let us finally discuss a possible method to
solve the latter problem. Conventional write technology makes use of magnetic fields B in
the order of 1 T, Ref. 2. It would fail in the present situation, where a field B = MAE/µs of
several hundred tesla would be needed.

But they then go on to show that the bit could be written (reading is relatively easy) by a scanning-probe like tip which briefly ionized the upper cobalt. The mechanisms to do that would of course still have to be designed and built; but this is exploratory engineering in atomically-precise mechanisms, and we’d like to see more of it.

Using a sophisticated mathematical model that relates a wide variety of biological variables to disease progression, a research team has shown that accounting for the shape and physical characteristics of the tumor margin and invasiveness of the tumor accurately predicts how a particular tumor will develop and metastasize.

Quantum dots (QDs), nanoparticles that shine with extraordinary brightness when excited by light energy, have shown promise as new tools for detecting cancer at its earliest appearance, but concerns about potential toxicities have limited their clinical development. Researchers at the University of Buffalo may have found an answer to this limitation with their development of a new way to create QDs. Their work comes at an opportune time, because a team of investigators from the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) has shown that QDs can function as nanoscale thermometers to guide the numerous nanoparticle-based thermal therapies being developed to treat cancer.

A research team at Northwestern University has developed a tool that can precisely deliver tiny doses of drug-carrying nanomaterials to individual cells. The tool, called the nanofountain probe, functions in two different ways. In one mode, the probe acts like a fountain pen with drug-coated nanodiamonds serving as the ink, allowing researchers to create devices by 'writing' with it. The second mode functions as a single-cell syringe, permitting direct injection of biomolecules or chemicals into individual cells.

Carbon nanotubes, one of the original engineered nanomaterials, also may prove to be among the most versatile, as numerous teams of investigators continue to develop novel nanotube-based therapeutic and diagnostic tools. Over the past month, three new research papers have highlighted the potential of nanotubes as weapons against cancer.

By taking two standard laboratory techniques - capillary electrophoresis and antibody-based protein detection - and shrinking them to the nanoscale, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have created a new method for detecting miniscule changes in the levels of proteins associated with cancer.

A grid of 30 x 30 flow-through nanoscale holes create a highly responsive sensor system that can detect biomolecules of interest without requiring the additional use of an optical label.

Researchers used specially engineered nanoparticles that can inhibit a signaling pathway and deliver a higher concentration of medication to the specific area.