(NanoRealm) - A researcher at North Carolina State University has developed a computer chip that can store an unprecedented amount of data - enough to hold an entire library's worth of information on a single chip. The new chip stems from a breakthrough in the use of nanodots, or nanoscale magnets, and represents a significant advance in computer-memory technology.

"We have created magnetic nanodots that store one bit of information on each nanodot, allowing us to store over one billion pages of information in a chip that is one square inch," says Dr. Jay Narayan, the John C. Fan Distinguished Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State and author of the research.
The breakthrough is that these nanodots are made of single, defect-free crystals, creating magnetic sensors that are integrated directly into a silicon electronic chip. These nanodots, which can be made uniformly as small as six nanometers in diameter, are all precisely oriented in the same way - allowing programmers to reliably read and write data to the chips.

The chips themselves can be manufactured cost-effectively, but the next step is to develop magnetic packaging that will enable users to take advantage of the chips - using something, such as laser technology, that can effectively interact with the nanodots.

The research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, was presented as an invited talk April 7 at the 2011 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting in San Francisco.


More information: “Self Assembly of epitaxial magnetic nanostructures”, Author: J. Narayan, North Carolina State University, Presented: April 7, 2010, 2011 MRS Spring Meeting, San Francisco.

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Source: http://www.physorg.com/news191668936.html

(NanoRealm) - THE use of nano technology has helped the Government save RM3.44bil worth of subsidised diesel fuel from being smuggled out of the country between 2006 to 2008.

Nano technology ‘helped govt save RM3.44bil’

Domestic Trade, Cooperative and Consumerism Minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob said the Nanotag technology or “mark” to identify subsidised fuel had helped enforcement officers track or identify subsidised diesel and to take legal action against the culprits.

“The Nanotag technology has enabled our officers to check the distribution of subsidised diesel from 36 diesel fuel depots throughout the country, including 15 depots in Sabah and Sarawak,” he said.

“Since the programme was introduced in 2006, a total of 594 legal cases were filed and 6.86mil litres of diesel seized from those who had abused the diesel fuel subsidy programme,” Ismail said in winding up the debate in his ministry at the committee stage.

It was reported that the Gover nment had suffered losses in terms of subsidies, ranging from RM1bil in 2003 to RM3bil in 2006 before the Nanotag technology was introduced.

On the contract of Teras Kimia Sdn Bhd, which was tasked to carry out the tagging of diesel supplies at fuel depots, Ismail said he was informed that the company’s services would end this year.

“The company had asked for an extension and we are still discussing this with the Finance Ministry,” he added.

Ismail also said the Government had to raise the subsidy payment for sugar due to the increase in global sugar prices. “The Government also wants to reduce the sugar subsidy payments of about RM1bil annually.

“The idea of imposing a uniform price for sugar among Asean countries will help reduce smuggling, but it means that we have to increase the sugar price in Malaysia as it is lower than in other Asean countries.”

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Source: http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/4/20/parliament/6087587&sec=parliament

No More Long lines Store Checkout

(NanoRealm) - Long lines at store checkouts could be history if a new technology created in part at Rice University comes to pass.

Rice researchers, in collaboration with a team led by Gyou-jin Cho at Sunchon National University in Korea, have come up with an inexpensive, printable transmitter that can be invisibly embedded in packaging. It would allow a customer to walk a cart full of groceries or other goods past a scanner on the way to the car; the scanner would read all items in the cart at once, total them up and charge the customer's account while adjusting the store's inventory.
More advanced versions could collect all the information about the contents of a store in an instant, letting a retailer know where every package is at any time.

The technology reported in the March issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices is based on a carbon-nanotube-infused ink for ink-jet printers first developed in the Rice lab of James Tour, the T.T. and W.F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science. The ink is used to make thin-film transistors, a key element in radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be printed on paper or plastic.
"We are going to a society where RFID is a key player," said Cho, a professor of printed electronics engineering at Sunchon, who expects the technology to mature in five years. Cho and his team are developing the electronics as well as the roll-to-roll printing process that, he said, will bring the cost of printing the tags down to a penny apiece and make them ubiquitous.
RFID tags are almost everywhere already. The tiny electronic transmitters are used to identify and track products and farm animals. They're in passports, library books and devices that let drivers pass through tollbooths without digging for change.
The technology behind RFID goes back to the 1940s, when Léon Theremin, inventor of the self-named electronic music instrument heard in so many '50s science fiction and horror movies, came up with a spy tool for the Soviet Union that drew power from and retransmitted radio waves.
RFID itself came into being in the 1970s and has been widely adopted by the Department of Defense and industry to track shipping containers as they make their way around the world, among many other uses.
But RFID tags to date are largely silicon-based. Paper or plastic tags printed as part of a package would cut costs dramatically. Cho expects his roll-to-roll technique, which uses a gravure process rather than ink-jet printers, to replace the bar codes now festooned on just about everything you can buy.


Cho, Tour and their teams reported in the journal a three-step process to print one-bit tags, including the antenna, electrodes and dielectric layers, on plastic foil. Cho's lab is working on 16-bit tags that would hold a more practical amount of information and be printable on paper as well.
Cho came across Tour's inks while spending a sabbatical at Rice in 2005. "Professor Tour first recommended we use single-walled carbon nanotubes for printing thin-film transistors," Cho said.
Tour's lab continues to support the project in an advisory role and occasionally hosts Cho's students. Tour said Rice owns half of the patent, still pending, upon which all of the technology is based. "Gyou-jin has carried the brunt of this, and it's his sole project," Tour said. "We are advisers and we still send him the raw materials" -- the single-walled carbon nanotubes produced at Rice.
Printable RFIDs are practical because they're passive. The tags power up when hit by radio waves at the right frequency and return the information they contain. "If there's no power source, there's no lifetime limit. When they receive the RF signal, they emit," Tour said.

There are several hurdles to commercialization. First, the device must be reduced to the size of a bar code, about a third the size of the one reported in the paper, Tour said. Second, its range must increase.
"Right now, the emitter has to be pretty close to the tags, but it's getting farther all the time," he said. "The practical distance to have it ring up all the items in your shopping cart is a meter. But the ultimate would be to signal and get immediate response back from every item in your store - what's on the shelves, their dates, everything.
"At 300 meters, you're set - you have real-time information on every item in a warehouse. If something falls behind a shelf, you know about it. If a product is about to expire, you know to move it to the front - or to the bargain bin."
Tour allayed concerns about the fate of nanotubes in packaging. "The amount of nanotubes in an RFID tag is probably less than a picogram. That means you can produce one trillion of them from a gram of nanotubes - a miniscule amount. Our HiPco reactor produces a gram of nanotubes an hour, and that would be enough to handle every item in every Walmart.
"In fact, more nanotubes occur naturally in the environment, so it's not even fair to say the risk is minimal. It's infinitesimal."

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More information: Read the paper at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5406115
Source: RICE University - http://www.rice.edu/
From PhysOrg.com (http://www.physorg.com/news188129794.html)

(NanoRealm) - A team of scientists has developed a way to control the direction of light on the nanoscale, by developing miniaturized television aerials made from gold nanorods, which can pave the way for quantum computing networks in the future.

At the moment, quantum physicists use cumbersome apparatus to try to keep track of photons, for instance, building large vacuum cavities with mirrored walls to guide light.

"It's funny that to control the small quantum world, you need huge pieces of equipment," said Holger Hofmann, at the Department of Quantum Matter at Hiroshima University in Japan.

Now, according to a report in Nature News, Hofmann and his colleagues have developed a way to control the direction of light on the nanoscale.

Their technique is based on the workings of the 'Yagi-Uda' antenna commonly used to transmit and detect radio waves and often seen on rooftops as television aerials.

Hofmann stumbled on the idea by accident, while teaching his electromagnetism class how antennas work.

"The textbook didn't explain it well, and while trying to come up with my own picture, I realized that the same technique could work on the nanoscale," he said.

A standard Yagi-Uda antenna is made up of a set of parallel metal rods that gradually decrease in length.

An electrical signal is fed into the second longest rod, setting it vibrating and producing a driving electromagnetic wave that spreads out in all directions.

This stimulates the neighbouring rods to oscillate and emit secondary waves.

Both the length and spacing of adjacent rods are carefully set at fractions of the wavelength of the driving wave, so that the secondary waves interfere with the driving wave, amplifying it along the forward direction and reducing it along the sideways and backward directions.

Hofmann and his colleagues realized that gold nanorods should produce the same effect on the nanoscale - but here, the length-to-width ratio of the rods, rather than their length and spacing, is important.

The team etched their mini gold antenna into a glass substrate and drove it directly with red laser light.

The tricky part was to ensure that just one nanorod was driven by the incoming light, just as only one metal rod is in the Yugi-Uda antenna.

To ensure this, the team tilted the chosen nanorod by 45 degrees relative to its neighbours and stimulated it using laser light that was polarized at the same angle.

They then monitored the direction of light transmitted out of the glass substrate.

The result was actually better than their theory predicted, according to Hoffman, with roughly two-thirds of the input light being directed largely forwards. (ANI)

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Provdied by ANI
Souce: Sifynews (http://sify.com/news/nano-antennas-could-pave-way-for-quantum-computing-networks-news-international-kdpn4ddagfc.html)

(NanoRealm) - While scientists have become rather adept at transforming generic skin cells into specialized organ cells, crafting the organs themselves has proven far more difficult. Since the 3-D architecture of most organs is as important to their function as their cellular makeup, 2-D cell cultures are not very useful for building a replacement heart from scratch. To solve that problem, most organ makers create a scaffolding for the cells to grow on.

For a team of researchers at Rice University, even a biodegradable scaffolding wasn't good enough. By injecting cells with a metallic gel, the researchers have succeeded in suspending cultured cells in a three-dimensional magnetic field. With this magnetic scaffolding, organs can be grown in the right shape, and with no foreign material.

The researchers used bacteriophages, special viruses that inject themselves into cells, to insert a polymer iron oxide gel into brain cancer cells. Once the cells absorbed the magnetic gel, the Rice scientists levitated the cells in a weak magnetic field. And since cells naturally live in a 3-D space, not a 2-D culture, the brain cancer cells actually behaved more normally while suspended in the magnetic field then they did when in a cell culture.
The obvious next step involved programming detailed magnetic fields that float stem cells in the exact spots needed for them to grow into a full organ. To that end, the researchers have sold the technology to the company n3D Bioscences. Whether or not this process leaves your replacement organ magnetic, and how that will affect getting through airports, remains to be seen.

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Source: PopSci - http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/metal-nano-particles-suspend-human-cells-magnetic-scaffolding-organ-manufactoring

(NanoRealm) - Could you imagine a laptop battery that lasted for 500 hours? How about an electric car that boasts a range many times that of a gasoline vehicle? For that matter, think about environmental sensors that could be scattered into the air like dust and collect data. While the last thing might not exactly be what you want for Christmas, a breakthrough in energy production made by MIT researchers could make such technology a reality during the next few years.

The process, dubbed “thermopower waves” by its discoverer, MIT’s Dr. Michael Strano, does nothing less than open up “a new area of energy research, which is rare,” says the scientist. MSNBC’s Michelle Bryner describes the phenomenon and its applications in brief, writing:

Researchers have found a way to produce large amounts of electricity from tiny cylinders made from carbon atoms.

The achievement could replace decades-old methods of generating electricity, such as combustion engines and turbines, the researchers say.

The cylinders are known as “carbon nanotubes,” which are, writes The Energy Collective, “submicroscopic hollow tubes made of a ‘chicken-wire-like’ lattice of carbon atoms.”

To describe the process in more detail, the MIT researchers took the nanotubes, applied a layer of fuel, and then ignited them at one end, creating a “fast-moving thermal [heat] wave traveling along the length of the carbon nanotube like a flame speeding along the length of a lit fuse,” explains the Environment News Service (ENS). This process is facilitated by the fact that nanotubes conduct heat far better than metals — up to 100 times faster. Then, getting more technical still, ENS writes, “As the heat feeds back to the fuel coating, a thermal wave is created that is guided along the nanotube. With a temperature of 3,000 kelvins [sic] (2,726 degrees Celsius or 4,940 degrees Fahrenheit) this ring of heat speads [sic] along the tube 10,000 times faster than the normal spread of this chemical reaction.”

This is where Dr. Strano and his team experienced their Ivory Soap moment. While Strano claims to be the first scientist to predict that thermal waves coursing through a nanotube could create electric current, the great amount of it yielded was not predicted by thermoelectric calculations. “Lo and behold,” said the scientist, “we were really surprised by the size of the resulting voltage peak.” Strano and his team have called this unexpected phenomenon “electron entrainment,” “since part of the current appears to scale with wave velocity,” said Strano.

Because this energy source is so new, it’s hard to predict what the practical applications will be. However, the thermopower-wave process produces 100 times the energy per unit of weight of the average lithium-ion battery. Additionally, Strano says that such a power source would be composed of non-toxic substances, eliminating the disposal problems posed by current-generation energy cells.

The technology could also be used to help create sensors the size of a grain of rice that could be injected into the body and used to monitor health (e.g., heart function), administer medical treatment or, well, use your imagination. There are some ominous implications as well.

One obvious use of the technology, however, would be to create practical electric fuel cells for automobiles. One common drawback of electric cars is that they typically have a very limited range relative to combustion engine vehicles, owing to the fact that gasoline contains far more energy per unit of weight than today’s electric fuel cells. But thermopower-wave generation could change that, providing light, long-range batteries and relatively inexpensive electricity. This could finally allow us to break our dependence on foreign oil.

Whatever the particulars, Dr. Strano’s discovery is just the latest frontier in the staggering field of nanotechnology. The science of manipulating matter on the molecular and even atomic levels, it is quickly making science fiction, science fact.

For more on the subject, see Selwyn Duke's “The New Nanotech World” in the March 31, 2008 issue of The New American.

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Provided by MIT
Source: http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/tech-mainmenu-30/energy/3133-nanotech-energy-source-discovered