(PhysOrg.com) — Imagine a hole so small that air can’t go through it, or a hole so small it can trap a single wavelength of light. Nanotech Security Corp., with the help of Simon Fraser University researchers, is using this type of nano-technology – 1,500 times thinner than a human hair and first of its kind in the world – to create unique anti-counterfeiting security features.
PHYSorg.com: Nanomaterials News
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Two years ago deceased Star Trek actor James “Scotty” Doohan was granted one last adventure, courtesy of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation. SpaceX, a privately funded company based in Hawthorne, Calif., had been formed in 2002 with the mission of going where no start-up had gone before: Earth orbit. In August 2008 SpaceX loaded Doohan’s cremated remains onto the third test flight of its Falcon 1, a liquid oxygen- and kerosene-fueled rocket bound for orbit. Yet about two minutes into the flight Doohan’s final voyage ended prematurely when the rocket’s first stage crashed into the second stage during separation. It was SpaceX’s third failure in three attempts. Well, what did you expect? sneered old NASA hands, aerospace executives and the many others who hew to the conventional wisdom that safely ushering payloads and especially people hundreds of kilometers above Earth is a job for no less than armies of engineers, technicians and managers backed by billions in funding and decades-long development cycles. Space, after all, is hard. A small, private operation might be able to send a little stunt ship wobbling up tens of kilometers, as entrepreneur-engineer Burt Rutan did in 2004 to win the X-Prize. But that was a parlor trick compared with the kinds of operations NASA has been running over the years with the space shuttle and International Space Station. When you’re going orbital, 100 kilometers is merely the length of the driveway, at the end of which you’d better be accelerating hard toward the seven kilometers a second needed to keep a payload falling around Earth 300 kilometers up. [More] Andreas Willert and colleagues at Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems develop 0.6-millimeter-thick battery that can power ultrathin video screens built into magazines or books; drawing Touch (or tactile) sensors are gaining renewed interest as the level of sophistication in the application of minimum invasive surgery and humanoid robots increases. The spatial resolution of current large-area (greater than 1 cm2) tactile sensor lags by more than an order of magnitude compared with the human finger. By using metal and semi conducting nanoparticles, a 100-nm-thick, large-area thin-film device is self-assembled such that the change in current density through the film and the electroluminescent light intensity are linearly proportional to the local stress. A stress image is obtained by pressing a copper grid and a United States 1-cent coin on the device and focusing the resulting electroluminescent light directly on the charge-coupled device. Both the lateral and height resolution of texture are comparable to the human finger at similar stress levels of 10 kilopascals. Scientists at Cedars-Sinai’s Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute found that a specific protein called laminin-411 plays a major role in the ability of an aggressive type of brain tumor, glioblastoma multiforme, build new blood vessels to support its growth and spread. Employing nanoparticles as a drug delivery agent, the research team has created a “nanobioconjugate” drug that may be given by intravenous injection and carried in the blood to target the brain tumor. This work, which was led by Julia Ljubimova of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. |
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