(NanoRealm) - In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity — whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source — runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.





Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said.

'Just the beginning'

Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require a highly basic (non-benign) environment that has little to do with the conditions under which photosynthesis operates.

More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the new scientific discovery into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is confident that such systems will become a reality.

"This is just the beginning," said Nocera, principal investigator for the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. "The scientific community is really going to run with this."

Nocera hopes that within 10 years, homeowners will be able to power their homes in daylight through photovoltaic cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen to power their own household fuel cell. Electricity-by-wire from a central source could be a thing of the past.

The project is part of the MIT Energy Initiative, a program designed to help transform the global energy system to meet the needs of the future and to help build a bridge to that future by improving today's energy systems. MITEI Director Ernest Moniz, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems, noted that "this discovery in the Nocera lab demonstrates that moving up the transformation of our energy supply system to one based on renewables will depend heavily on frontier basic science."

The success of the Nocera lab shows the impact of a mixture of funding sources — governments, philanthropy, and industry. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years.

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Source: MIT News - http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/oxygen-0731.html

(NanoRealm) - The Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese construction firm, has recently proposed a plan to harness solar energy on a larger scale than almost any previously proposed concept. Their ambitious plan involves building a belt of solar cells around the Moon’s 6,800-mile (11,000-kilometer) equator, converting the electricity to powerful microwaves and lasers to be beamed at Earth, and finally converting the beams back to electricity at terrestrial power stations. The Luna Ring concept, the company says, could meet the entire world's energy needs.

Shimizu envisions that robots would play a vital role in building the Luna Ring. Teleoperated 24 hours a day from the Earth, the robots would perform tasks such as ground leveling and assembling machines and equipment, which would be done in space before landing them on the Moon. A team of astronauts would support the robots on-site.



Due to the massive amount of solar panels and other materials needed for the project, Shimizu proposes that lunar resources should be used to the fullest extent possible. The company’s plans call for producing water by reducing lunar soil with hydrogen imported from Earth. Lunar resources could also be used to make cementing material and concrete, while solar-heat treatments could help produce bricks, glass fibers, and other structural materials needed for the project.

The Luna Ring itself would initially have a width of a few kilometers, but could be extended up to 400 kilometers wide. The electric power generated by the solar cells would be transmitted by electric cables to transmission facilities on the near side of the Moon, which is constantly facing Earth. After the electricity is converted into microwave beams and laser beams, 20-kilometer-diameter antennas would beam the power to receivers on Earth. A guidance radio beacon would ensure accurate transmission to the receivers. The energy would then be converted back to electricity and supplied to grids, or possibly converted to hydrogen for fuel or storage.



Shimizu points out that one of the biggest advantages of the Luna Ring is that, since the Moon has virtually no atmosphere, there is no bad weather or clouds that could inhibit the efficiency of the solar panels. As such, the Luna Ring achieves 24/7 continuous clean energy generation, potentially ending our reliance on limited natural resources.

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Source: Shimuzu Corperation

(NanoRealm) - Banknotes could become as beautiful as butterfly wings one day using technology borrowed from nature.

British scientists have found a way to mimic the iridescent colours of tropical butterflies, created by light bouncing off microscopic wing structures.

The research could be used to make banknotes and credit cards that are visually striking and harder to forge.

“These artificial structures could be used to encrypt information in optical signatures on banknotes to protect them against forgery,” said Mathias Kolle, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge.

“In future we could see structures based on butterflies’ wings shining from a £10 note or even our passports.”

The Cambridge team studied the Indonesian peacock, or swallowtail, butterfly — Papilio blumei — whose vivid green-and-blue wings have an intricate surface pattern.

They made identical copies of the structures using nanotechnology.

Recreating the colours of beetles, butterflies and moths has previously proved elusive because of the technical challenge of precisely shaping materials on such a small scale.


“We have unlocked one of nature’s secrets and combined this knowledge with state-of-the-art nanofabrication to mimic the intricate optical designs found in nature,” Mr Kolle said.

“Although nature is better at self-assembly than we are, we have the advantage that we can use a wider variety of artificial, custom-made materials to optimise our optical structures.”

The research is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The Indonesian peacock may use the security potential of its wing structure to encrypt itself, the scientists believe.

“The shiny green patches on this tropical butterfly’s wing scales are a stunning example of nature’s ingenuity in optical design,” Mr Kolle said.

“Seen with the right optical equipment these patches appear bright blue but with the naked eye they appear green.

“This could explain why the butterfly has evolved this way of producing colour. If its eyes see fellow butterflies as bright blue, while predators only see green patches in a green tropical environment, then it can hide from predators at the same time as remaining visible to members of its own species.”

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TimesOnline UK: (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7140807.ece)

(NanoRealm) - A study published in the American Chemical Society's journal Nano Letters reveals that thermocells based on carbon nanotube electrodes might eventually be used for generating electrical energy from heat discarded by chemical plants, automobiles and solar cell farms.

The research was a joint collaboration between Baratunde Cola, assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, and an international team of researchers from the U.S., Australia, China, India and the Philippines.
Cola, director of Georgia Tech’s NanoEngineered Systems and Transport Research Group (NEST), described the study as a breakthrough in efficiently harvesting electrical energy from various sources of exhaust or wasted heat.

"Our NEST Lab was fortunate to team with Dr. Ray Baughman's NanoTech Institute at UT Dallas and Dr. Gordon Wallace's Intelligent Polymer Research Institute in Wollongong, Australia, in the final year of a long collaboration that solved key technical problems,” he said. “We brought fresh eyes, as well as our knowledge and experience with heat transfer engineering from the nanoscale to the scale of practical devices to the problem, which provided a key missing link. The team will together work to enable additional breakthroughs that are required for this technology to reach its full commercial potential."

Efficiently harvesting the thermal energy currently wasted in industrial plants or along pipelines could also create local sources of clean energy that in turn could be used to lower costs and shrink an organization’s energy footprint.

The new thermocells use nanotube electrodes that provide a threefold increase in energy conversion efficiency over conventional electrodes.

One of the demonstrated thermocells looks just like the button cell batteries used in watches, calculators and other small electronics. One key difference, however, is that these new thermocells can continuously generate electricity, instead of running down like a battery. The research netted other thermocells, as well, including electrolyte-filled, textile-separated nanotube sheets that can be wrapped around pipes carrying hot waste streams from manufacturing or electrical power plants. The temperature difference between the pipe and its surroundings produces an electrochemical potential difference between the carbon nanotube sheets, which thermocells utilize to generate electricity.

The research team estimates that multi-walled carbon nanotubes in large thermocells could eventually produce power at a cost of about $2.76 per watt from freely available waste energy, compared with a cost of $4.31 per watt for solar cells, which can only be used when the sun is shining. On a smaller scale, button cell-sized thermocells could be used to power sensors or electronic circuits.

The new thermocells take advantage of the exceptional electronic, mechanical, thermal and chemical properties of carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes’ giant surface area and unique electronic structure afforded by their small diameter and nearly one-dimensional structure offer high current densities, which enhance the output of electrical power and the efficiency of energy harvesting.

"Georgians have worked with state support, and in partnership with initiatives such as the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech, to realize significant gains in renewable energy production,” Cola said. “But to become a leading energy state, we must increasingly explore new ways to extract and utilize all forms of energy. Harvesting waste heat as electricity is one direction our NEST Lab takes with international partners to help provide increased renewable energy options for Georgia and the world."

This research was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, The Welch Foundation and the Australian Research Council.

Cola recently received the 2009 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award for his work on solar energy conversion. As director of the NEST Lab, his research focuses on realizing the benefits of nanoscience in applications related to waste thermal energy harvesting, solar energy conversion, and thermal management of electronics and energy systems.

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Provided by Georgia Institute of Technology
Source: http://www.physorg.com/news186769267.html

(NanoRealm) - Scientists in Manchester have found a clean and green way of making tiny magnets for high tech gadgets - using natural bacteria that have been around for millions of years.

The work by a team of geomicrobiologists from the University of Manchester paves the way for nanometer-size magnets - used in mobile phones and recording devices - to be made without the usual nasty chemicals and energy intensive methods.

Researchers studied iron-reducing bacteria that occur naturally in soils and sediments and found they can be used to create iron oxide nanoparticles with magnetic properties similar to those created through complex chemical processes.

Working with colleagues in Birmingham and Cardiff, the Manchester researchers also found a way of exercisising precise control over the size and magnetic strength of nanomagnets produced.
The high-tech particle accelerators at the Advanced Light Source at the famous Berkeley Labs near San Francisco, and the UK’s Diamond Light Source in Oxford at Harwell were used to verify findings.

Researchers added cobalt, manganese or nickel to the basic iron-based energy source used by bacteria, which resulted in the production of tiny magnets containing these elements. This greatly enhanced their useful magnetic properties.

Aside from being used in the latest gadgets, nanomagnets also have the potential to be used in drug delivery systems and cancer therapies to carefully focus and target the release of chemicals into the body.

Metal-reducing bacteria live in environments deficient in oxygen and react with oxidised metals to produce natural magnets in the ground beneath our feet.
And now the research team has developed a way of harnessing pure strains of these bacteria - which are in plentiful supply and reproduce quickly - to produce large quantities of nanomagnets at an ambient temperature.

This compares favourably to the extreme temperatures - as high as 1000 degrees Celsius - needed to create nanomagnets using current methods.
Prof Richard Patrick, Professor of Earth Science, said: “This is exciting work that raises the exciting prospect of a biologically friendly, energy-efficient method of producing nanomagnets tailored for different uses.”

A paper - ‘Harnessing the extracellular bacterial production of nanoscale cobalt ferrite with exploitable magnetic properties’ - outlining the research was published recently in the journal ACS Nano.

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(NanoRealm) - Iranian Engineers suggested a new method for lining internal surfaces of pipes, steel and aluminum tubes and bars to fight against common erosions and corrosions.

"First, the surface of aluminum metal was coated by nickel through mechanical alloying (MA) method. To do so, nickel powder together with aluminum samples of cubic form were ball-milled in a planetary ball-mill for various durations and different amounts of the powder.

Such different operational conditions led triggered chemical/diffusional interactions, alloying and formation of new intermetallic phases," Rasoul Pouriamanesh, a member of the research team at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM) said to the Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council, elaborating on the steps of the research.

Noting that intermetallic phases like Ni-Al, Al3Ni and Ni3Al were formed inside the coating layer, Pouriamanesh reiterated that it was revealed that the reactions involved (all of which are exothermic) caused local temperature increases and promoted a better cling of layer to target at the spots where the reactions occurred.

"The coating layers were consisted of nanoparticles with different size distributions. After annealing, the microstructures and sizes of the particles were investigated to find the optimal conditions for obtaining perfect coated metal surfaces," he added.

Pouriamanesh referred to "achieving a homogeneous, poreless and uniform nanostructure inside the coating layer (which facilitates metal diffusions and formation of intermetallic phases of Al-Ni" as the outcome of the research.

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Source: FarNews - http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8812030880

(NanoRealm) - When nanoparticles from consumer products leach into the ocean, they may harm oysters and mussels.

Nanoparticles May Harm Ocean Living Creatures

Manufactured nanomaterials can be found in such diverse applications as electronics, cosmetics, paints, and even medicines, but their effects on the environment remain largely unknown. In a new laboratory study, scientists have found that saltwater oysters and mussels take up and retain significant amounts of manufactured nanoparticles from seawater in clumps of so-called “marine snow.”

“Nanomaterials are being used in increasing amounts, and it’s likely they’re being released in increasing amounts into the environment, including the ocean,” says Evan Ward, professor of marine sciences at UConn’s Avery Point campus. “As we develop these technologies, we need to be cautious, we need to know where the particles are going, and we need to know how they affect marine organisms.”

Nanoparticles are tiny versions of common materials that have a diameter of less than 100 nanometers, or about four millionths of an inch. Their tininess gives them properties that normal-sized particles don’t have: for example, their large surface area for their size makes them stronger, lighter, and more reflective, making them ideal for reinforcing metals, increasing the SPF in your sunscreen, and producing paint that improves your home’s energy efficiency.
Some scientists, however, are concerned that these very properties could also make manufactured nanoparticles dangerous. When products break down in landfills, nanoparticles can wash away into soils, waterways, and the ocean, potentially creating hazards to animals and plants.
“Some materials that one would assume are safe can in fact cause damage to cells in their ‘nano’ form,” Ward says.

Ward studies the environmental physiology of oysters, mussels, and their relatives, which use their gills as specialized filters to take up food from ocean water. Although nanoparticles themselves are too small to be captured in large amounts, Ward’s study focused on how the bivalves’ feeding ecology affected their rate of uptake.

“In our study, we took into account how nanoparticles are likely to be delivered to the animals in the natural environment,” he says. “We asked, ‘What’s the setting in which they will be exposed to these particles?’”

Materials rarely exist as individual particles in the ocean, says Ward; instead, ocean currents bind up particles and sticky organic matter into aggregates that scientists call “marine snow.” These aggregates then sink to the bottom, where filter feeders like bivalves ingest them.

In their paper, published in Marine Environmental Research, Ward and coauthor Dustin Kach, a former UConn graduate student, used natural seawater to produce marine snow that contained fluorescently labeled polystyrene nanoparticles. They then exposed oysters and mussels collected from the Long Island Sound to this snow-filled seawater.

The researchers found that nanoparticles were taken up in much higher amounts when the bivalves were exposed to marine snow. But they also found that when filtered from marine snow, nanoparticles remained in the bivalves’ bodies for a much longer time than would be expected for non-nutritive materials: up to three days.

Ward suspects that the particles are being treated as food by the animals, and are being taken up into their digestive cells. This could be particularly dangerous, he says, since small nanoparticles can circumvent living cells’ natural defenses.

“Because of their high surface area, manufactured nanoparticles can strip off electrons from other compounds and create free radicals,” he says. “Particles like these can cause havoc in cells.”
Ward sees his work as a first step in understanding the potential issues associated with manufactured nanoparticles. He emphasizes that further work is needed to determine the amounts of manufactured nanoparticles in seawater and their levels of toxicity to living things.

“Right now there are few techniques to identify manufactured nanomaterials in the natural environment because they’re so darn small,” he says. “With these studies, we hope to demonstrate potential problems to keep in step with the use of nanomaterials. Then when techniques are available to sample them in the wild, we’ll be prepared to say whether or not we should be worried.”

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More information: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405865/description#description
Provided by University of Connecticut (web)

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news186058984.html

(NanoRealm) - Researchers move one step closer to nature with the development of polymers and directional adhesion that follow the workings of a gecko's foot

Nanotechnology has not only brought nature and engineering closer together; it has encouraged collaboration among researchers of different disciplines. In one such collaboration, two researchers drew on the extraordinary stickiness of a gecko's foot to develop a synthetic adhesive to help robots scale walls.

NSF-funded researchers Mark Cutkosky, an engineer at Stanford University, and Kellar Autumn, a biologist at Lewis and Clark College, have collaborated to develop a gecko-like synthetic adhesive that functions like real gecko bristles for climbing applications. The team discovered the fundamental physics principles underlying gecko adhesion, which enabled the invention of an adhesive nanostructure.

The Tokay gecko, one of the largest and heaviest geckos, served as inspiration.

"The challenge was simply to get robots to go where robots have never been able to go before, like up walls of buildings," said Cutkosky. "If robots can climb vertical surfaces, then they can do inspection of buildings and bridges and other hard- to-reach places."

Cutkosky received a four-year, $1 million National Science Foundation research grant that funded the development of the first gecko-like synthetic adhesive (GSA) that works like real gecko bristles. Autumn received two NSF grants for continued research on gecko adhesion. Cutkosky's team collaborated with Kellar Autumn and his gecko lab to determine whether a synthetic adhesive could be applied to robots.

"The collaboration with Mark's group has been incredibly productive. Based on micro-force measurements, we hypothesized that a coupling of shear force and adhesion was responsible for control of the geckos' attachment system," said Autumn.

A gecko's foot possesses a sophisticated adhesion system that uses van der Waals forces, which are the basic molecular attraction that exists between molecules. Van der Waals forces allow geckos to climb and hang on a smooth and vertical surfaces using one toe.

Cutkosky and his team have been designing bio-inspired robots which use van der Waals forces. Their most recent design is stickybot, a robot that has gecko-like pads, which allows it to scale walls and buildings.

Bio-inspired design on a nano scale

The intricate work of nature occurs on a tiny scale, below the limits of our vision. Beneath the surface of a gecko's foot is a three-level hierarchy of structures. The first level is made up of lamellae, which are a series of structures that look like flaps under a microscope. Then, the lamellae are divided into smaller structures called seate which are thinner than a human hair. Finally, the seate branch into tiny little ends called spatulae, which are only a couple of hundred nanometers in size.

"So what happens is that the gecko is able to conform to surfaces ranging from tens or hundreds of nanometers all the way up to centimeters," said Cutkosky. "It is very cool; it is sort of the poster child for complex hierarchical geometry, almost fractal in its nature."

The structures that compose the different levels in the hierarchy have a similar behavior at multiple length scales.

The gecko's toe structures are only adhesive when loaded in a particular direction and the gecko can control adhesion by aligning its microstructures and making intimate contact with the surface. Stickybot follows the same principles as a gecko, but needs to adjust the orientation of its feet as it climbs. This is to ensure that the toes are always loaded in the proper direction for adhesion.

Cutkosky and Autumn have built similar synthetic structures that follow the design of a gecko's foot. At present, they have created a two layer hierarchy of polymers with directional adhesion. This is good enough for stickybot to use to scale walls; however there is always room for improvement.

"It comes down to how much adhesion you are getting per unit area. The gecko can easily support its weight on one toe. In fact, it has lots to spare. Without the latest and greatest adhesives, I think stickybot can barely support its weight on one toe. We are nowhere near the gecko. Basically, it comes down to the weight of the robot and how many pascals of adhesion you can get from your material," said Cutkosky.



The pascal is a measurement of force per unit area which allows researchers, like Cutkosky, to determine how much stress the synthetic adhesion can tolerate. This helps gauge how the adhesive is developed and how it can be changed in the future.

The future of stickybot

Stickybot employs three main principles to climb smooth surfaces: hierarchical compliance to conform to levels from micrometers to centimeters, directional adhesion to smoothly engage and disengage from a surface, and force control to control frictional forces in the feet. Though stickybot can climb on vertical and smooth surfaces, Cutkosky hopes to develop a robot capable of climbing a wide variety of surfaces.

"We are continuing to try and improve the dry adhesive itself, but independent from that; we are working on a new stickybot. Making the ankles of the robot rotate is probably number one, but we also want to do more sensing and control. Right now stickybot doesn't have many sensors, so if it's climbing and starting to get into trouble, it doesn't know that and may fall," said Cutkosky.


Cutkosky and Autumn's research and collaboration have shown how materials science is attempting to follow nature.

"Nature has a huge advantage it can grow and differentiate cell by cell. Whereas, when we manufacture things we're always using processes that work top-down and so every layer is difficult and expensive for us," said Cutkosky.

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Sources:

• National Science Foundation
  
• Stanford
  
• Gecko Lab Lewis and Clark
  

Material scientists at the Nano/Bio Interface Center of theUniversity of Pennsylvania have demonstrated the transduction of optical radiation to electrical current in a molecular circuit. The system, an array of nano-sized molecules of gold, respond to electromagnetic waves by creating surface plasmons that induce and project electrical current across molecules, similar to that of photovoltaic solar cells.

The results may provide a technological approach for higher efficiency energy harvesting with a nano-sized circuit that can power itself, potentially through sunlight. Recently, surface plasmons have been engineered into a variety of light-activated devices such as biosensors.

It is also possible that the system could be used for computer data storage. While the traditional computer processor represents data in binary form, either on or off, a computer that used such photovoltaic circuits could store data corresponding to wavelengths of light.

Because molecular compounds exhibit a wide range of optical and electrical properties, the strategies for fabrication, testing and analysis elucidated in this study can form the basis of a new set of devices in which plasmon-controlled electrical properties of single molecules could be designed with wide implications to plasmonic circuits and optoelectronic and energy-harvesting devices.

Dawn Bonnell, a professor of materials science and the director of the Nano/Bio Interface Center at Penn, and colleagues fabricated an array of light sensitive, gold nanoparticles, linking them on a glass substrate. Minimizing the space between the nanoparticles to an optimal distance, researchers used optical radiation to excite conductive electrons, called plasmons, to ride the surface of the gold nanoparticles and focus light to the junction where the molecules are connected. The plasmon effect increases the efficiency of current production in the molecule by a factor of 400 to 2000 percent, which can then be transported through the network to the outside world.


In the case where the optical radiation excites a surface plasmon and the nanoparticles are optimally coupled, a large electromagnetic field is established between the particles and captured by gold nanoparticles. The particles then couple to one another, forming a percolative path across opposing electrodes. The size, shape and separation can be tailored to engineer the region of focused light. When the size, shape and separation of the particles are optimized to produce a “resonant” optical antennae, enhancement factors of thousands
might result.

Furthermore, the team demonstrated that the magnitude of the photoconductivity of the plasmon-coupled nanoparticles can be tuned independently of the optical characteristics of the molecule, a result that has significant implications for future nanoscale optoelectronic devices.

“If the efficiency of the system could be scaled up without any additional, unforeseen limitations, we could conceivably manufacture a one-amp, one-volt sample the diameter of a human hair and an inch long," Bonnell said.

The study, published in the current issue of the journal ACS Nano, was conducted by Bonnell, David Conklin and Sanjini Nanayakkara of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Penn; Tae-Hong Park of the Department of Chemistry in the School of Arts and Sceicnes at Penn; Parag Banerjee of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Maryland; and Michael J. Therien of the Department of Chemistry at Duke University.

This work was supported by the Nano/Bio Interface Center, National Science Foundation, the John and Maureen Hendricks Energy Fellowship and the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Source: University of Pennsylvania(web)

World Gold Council Research Paper Demonstrates Important Applications in Development Using Gold Nanoparticles

World Gold Council (WGC) has today published 'Gold for Good: Gold and nanotechnology in the age of innovation', a research paper detailing new scientific and technological innovations using gold. The report, which was produced in conjunction with Cientifica Ltd, the world's leading source of global business and investor intelligence about nanotechnologies, demonstrates how gold nanoparticles offer the potential to overcome many of the serious issues facing mankind over the coming decades.

Gold nanoparticles exhibit a variety of unique properties which, when harnessed and manipulated effectively, lead to materials whose uses are both far-ranging in their potential and cost effective. This report explores the many different applications that are being developed across the fields of health, environment and technology.

Trevor Keel, Nanotechnology Project Manager at World Gold Council said:
"The opportunities and possibilities identified in this report are just a subset of the amazing scope to use gold in the era of nanotechnology. As a readily available and well understood material, gold nanoparticles are ideal for use in a vast array of applications that improve our lives. WGC is looking to promote and invest in the development of gold-based innovations through Innovations Partnerships, so that the full benefits of gold nanotechnology can be realized."


Tim Harper, founder of Cientifica Ltd, said:
"Over the last decade, almost $50 billion of government funding has been invested into nanotechnologies, and this investment is now starting to bear fruit with a steady stream of commercially viable nanotechnologies which are positively impacting human health, the environment and technology. This paper demonstrates the many varied applications in which gold nanotechnology can improve society's standard of living."

Health: 
Gold has a long history in the biomedical field stretching back almost five thousand years. However the dawn of the 'nano-age' has really broadened the potential of gold in biomedical applications and today, gold nanoparticles are being employed in entirely novel ways to achieve therapeutic effects.

Tumor targeting technologies which exploit gold's inherent bio-compatibility are being developed to deliver drugs directly into cancerous tumours. Additionally, simple, cost effective and sensitive diagnostic tests are being developed for the early detection of prostate and other cancers.

Environment: 
Environmental concerns have never been more prominent - energy and clean water scarcity, global warming and pollution are all major issues that need to be addressed. Gold nano-particle based technologies are showing great promise in providing solutions to a number of environmentally important issues from greener production methods of the chemical feedstocks, to pollution control and water purification.

Gold-based catalysts are being developed that can effectively prevent the release of highly toxic forms of mercury into the atmosphere, the reduction of chemicals from green feedstock, and also for water purification and contaminant detection. In addition, gold is being used in meeting the challenge of constructing cost effective and efficient fuel cells, a key 'clean-energy' technology of the future.


Advanced technology: 
Gold is already a well established material in the electronics industry and the use of gold can only increase as the worlds of electronics and nanotechnology interact further in the future. Gold is being developed for conductive nanoparticle inks for plastic electronics because of its material compatibility, inherent durability and proven track record of reliability. Gold nanotechnologies have also been shown to offer functional benefits for visual display technologies like touch sensitive screens and potentially for use in advanced data storage technologies including advanced flash memory devices.

The full paper can be downloaded from:
http://www.gold.org/assets/file/rs_archive/gold_and_nanotechnology_in_the_age_of_innovation.pdf
(Due to the length of this URL, it may be necessary to copy and paste this hyperlink into your Internet browser's URL address field. Remove the space if one exists.)

http://cientifica.eu/blog/white-papers/gold/

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Innovation Partnerships
World Gold Council works directly with partner companies via Innovation Partnerships. These support research and development of new practical applications for the metal, drawing on a genuine commercial market requirement for innovation. Partner organisations include (but are not limited to) precious metal, chemical, electronics, materials and biomedical companies, ranging from small enterprises through to established international businesses. Interested companies are invited to contact World Gold Council for further details.

During 2009-2010 World Gold Council is particularly interested in receiving proposals relating to the following areas:

• Industrial catalysts (including catalysts for pollution control and chemical processing)
  
• Biomedical applications (including medical diagnostics, therapeutics and materials)
  
• Advanced electronics (including any technology or component likely to be used in next-generation devices)
  
• Fuel cell systems (including applications both within the fuel cell structure and hydrogen processing infrastructure)
  
• Optical materials (including nanotechnology, chemicals and coatings)

Companies interested in collaborating with World Gold Council are invited to make contact.

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Notes to Editors:
World Gold Council
World Gold Council's mission is to stimulate and sustain the demand for gold and to create enduring value for its stakeholders. It is funded by the world's leading gold mining companies. For further information please visit http://www.gold.org.

Cientifica
Cientifica Ltd, based in London, is one of the world's best-respected consultancy companies in the field of emerging technologies and technology commercialization. It provides global business intelligence and strategic consulting services to industry, governments and investors worldwide.
http://www.cientifica.eu