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Archive for the ‘nanotechnology’ category: Page 289

Oct 11, 2015

Key to longevity? Blocking over 200 genes boosts lifespan

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, health, life extension, nanotechnology

Aging is 100% genetic, the reason you go from infant to child to adult to old age.

We need to be scrutinizing Progeria, and the case of the girl who died at 20 and was stuck at the age of a toddler, for the key to the genes that will pause aging. While nanotechnology advances parallel with the cure for all diseases.


Once a bucket of genes linked to aging is removed, the lifespan of cells increases significantly, American scientists discovered during ten years of meticulous research, stressing that the results could be applied to humans.

Continue reading “Key to longevity? Blocking over 200 genes boosts lifespan” »

Oct 6, 2015

Nanobots could turn us into GODS

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, nanotechnology, neuroscience, Ray Kurzweil, singularity

Computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, founder of the California-based Singularity University, claims that by 2030s humans could be using nanobots to connect our brains to the cloud.

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Sep 23, 2015

Permanent data storage with light

Posted by in categories: computing, materials, nanotechnology

The first all-optical permanent on-chip memory has been developed by scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the universities of Münster, Oxford, and Exeter. This is an important step on the way towards optical computers. Phase change materials that change their optical properties depending on the arrangement of the atoms allow for the storage of several bits in a single cell. The researchers present their development in the journal Nature Photonics (10.1038/nphoton.2015.182).

Light determines the future of information and communication technology: With optical elements, computers can work more rapidly and more efficiently. Optical fibers have long since been used for the transmission of data with light. But on a computer, data are still processed and stored electronically. Electronic exchange of data between processors and the memory limits the speed of modern computers. To overcome this so-called von Neumann bottleneck, it is not sufficient to optically connect memory and processor, as the optical signals have to be converted into electric signals again. Scientists, hence, look for methods to carry out calculations and data storage in a purely optical manner.

Scientists of KIT, the University of Münster, Oxford University, and Exeter University have now developed the first all-optical, non-volatile on-chip memory. “Optical bits can be written at frequencies of up to a gigahertz. This allows for extremely quick data storage by our all-photonic memory,” Professor Wolfram Pernice explains. Pernice headed a working group of the KIT Institute of Nanotechnology (INT) and recently moved to the University of Münster. “The memory is compatible not only with conventional optical fiber data transmission, but also with latest processors,” Professor Harish Bhaskaran of Oxford University adds.

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Sep 22, 2015

Calculations with nanoscale smart particles

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, computing, nanotechnology, particle physics

Researchers from the Institute of General Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and MIPT have made an important step towards creating medical nanorobots. They discovered a way of enabling nano- and microparticles to produce logical calculations using a variety of biochemical reactions.

Details of their are given in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. It is the first experimental publication by an exclusively Russian team in one of the most cited scientific magazines in many years.

The paper draws on the idea of computing using biomolecules. In electronic circuits, for instance, logical connectives use current or voltage (if there is voltage, the result is 1, if there is none, it’s 0). In biochemical systems, the result can a given substance.

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Sep 22, 2015

New painless nano-patch can detect diseases in the blood

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology

Researchers in Australia have developed a patch lined with microscopic needles that can quickly and painlessly detect disease-carrying proteins in the blood, potentially replacing the need for needle-based blood samples, and time spent waiting for lab analysis.

Based on a similar patch that could one day deliver injection-free vaccines through the skin, the diagnostic nanopatch has been designed to identify diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, which are prevalent in remote areas and developing regions where people might not have the resources to routinely draw blood and analyse it.

“The concept here is that we could just put a patch on the skin and this could give a result based on what it can find in your blood,” one of the researchers, Simon Corrie from the University of Queensland, told Fairfax Media. “The microneedle arrays can capture proteins that circulate around the body that are normally tested for in blood samples.”

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Sep 21, 2015

Crystallizing the DNA nanotechnology dream: Scientists have designed the first large DNA crystals

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, computing, engineering, materials, nanotechnology

DNA has garnered attention for its potential as a programmable material platform that could spawn entire new and revolutionary nanodevices in computer science, microscopy, biology, and more. Researchers have been working to master the ability to coax DNA molecules to self assemble into the precise shapes and sizes needed in order to fully realize these nanotechnology dreams.

For the last 20 years, scientists have tried to design large DNA crystals with precisely prescribed depth and complex features – a design quest just fulfilled by a team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The team built 32 DNA crystals with precisely-defined depth and an assortment of sophisticated three-dimensional (3D) features, an advance reported in Nature Chemistry.

The team used their “DNA-brick self-assembly” method, which was first unveiled in a 2012 Science publication when they created more than 100 3D complex nanostructures about the size of viruses. The newly-achieved periodic crystal structures are more than 1000 times larger than those discrete DNA brick structures, sizing up closer to a speck of dust, which is actually quite large in the world of DNA nanotechnology.

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Sep 21, 2015

How Nanotechnology Could Re-engineer Us

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, electronics, materials, nanotechnology

Nanotechnology promises significant advances in electronics, materials, biotechnology, alternative energy sources, and much more.

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Sep 21, 2015

Nanogel Speeds Healing Process for Burn Victims

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology

Got a nasty burn? Nanogel has you covered. Using the power of nanotechnology, this cutting-edge simply sprays burns away, and speeds the healing process.

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Sep 20, 2015

5D optical memory in glass could record the last evidence of civilization

Posted by in category: nanotechnology

Using nanostructured glass, scientists at the University of Southampton have, for the first time, experimentally demonstrated the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional digital data by femtosecond laser writing. The storage allows unprecedented parameters including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000°C and practically unlimited lifetime.

Coined as the ‘Superman’ memory crystal, as the memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz, which is able to store vast quantities of data for over a million years. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.

A 300 kb digital copy of a text file was successfully recorded in 5D using ultrafast laser, producing extremely short and of light. The file is written in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by five micrometres.

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Sep 17, 2015

Making 3-D objects disappear: Researchers create ultrathin invisibility cloak

Posted by in categories: engineering, materials, nanotechnology

Invisibility cloaks are a staple of science fiction and fantasy, from Star Trek to Harry Potter, but don’t exist in real life, or do they? Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have devised an ultra-thin invisibility “skin” cloak that can conform to the shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light. Although this cloak is only microscopic in size, the principles behind the technology should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items as well.

Working with brick-like blocks of gold nanoantennas, the Berkeley researchers fashioned a “skin cloak” barely 80 nanometers in thickness, that was wrapped around a three-dimensional object about the size of a few biological cells and arbitrarily shaped with multiple bumps and dents. The surface of the skin cloak was meta-engineered to reroute reflected waves so that the object was rendered invisible to optical detection when the cloak is activated.

“This is the first time a 3D object of arbitrary shape has been cloaked from ,” said Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a world authority on metamaterials — artificial nanostructures engineered with electromagnetic properties not found in nature. “Our ultra-thin cloak now looks like a coat. It is easy to design and implement, and is potentially scalable for hiding macroscopic objects.”

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