Random Accesses

Gaze into the electron microscope display in Frances Ross’s laboratory here and it is possible to persuade yourself that Dr. Ross, a 21st-century materials scientist, is actually a farmer in some Lilliputian silicon world.

Dr. Ross, an I.B.M. researcher, is growing a crop of mushroom-shaped silicon nanowires that may one day become a basic building block for a new kind of electronics. Nanowires are just one example, although one of the most promising, of a transformation now taking place in the material sciences as researchers push to create the next generation of switching devices smaller, faster and more powerful than today’s transistors.

The reason that many computer scientists are pursuing this goal is that the shrinking of the transistor has approached fundamental physical limits.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/science/01trans.html?_r=2&8dpc

A hybrid of silicon nanocircuits and biological components that mimics some of the processes that control the passage of molecules into and out of cells has been created by a team of scientists from UC Davis, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Berkeley.

The lipid-coated nanocircuits could lead to the development of new classes of bio-sensing tools and biological applications, such as comprehensive blood-chemistry tests that fit on the point of a needle or screening tools for the development of new drugs.

“This is an example of a marriage between integrated circuit technology and biotechnology,” said Pieter Stroeve, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at UC Davis and one of three lead scientists on the project. “The technology of both can be mass produced, so in theory, their integration can also be mass produced.”

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news170619218.html

The potential of micro- and especially nanotechnology applications in neuroscience is widely accepted. Different biomedical devices implanted in the central nervous system, so-called neural interfaces, already have been developed to control motor disorders or to translate willful brain processes into specific actions by the control of external devices. These implants could help increase the independence of people with disabilities by allowing them to control various devices with their thoughts.

A recent example of this emerging brain technology is an electrode for a peripheral nerve interface developed at AIST and Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan.

Neural interfaces used for such purposes as electroencephalography are noninvasive, but suffer from relatively poor spatial and temporal resolution of signals. The type of neural interface that uses electrodes inserted in the brain and measures neuronal activities is more effective, but might leave behind irreversible lesions in the cerebrum because of the need to implant electrodes in brain tissue. Other problems with this type of neural interface include the difficulty of obtaining information about individual organs.

Source: http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=11565.php

There’s always been an inverse relationship between density and durability when it comes to data storage. Today’s silicon memory chips contain a lot of density, but with a lifespan of just a few decades, they lack durability. Yet primitive forms of storage such as information carved in stone are highly durable, however, they are not dense. Now this long-standing negative correlation between density and durability has been blow to bits with the development of a new memory device that can pack a trillion bits of data into one square inch of medium and retain that data for a billion years.

Led by physicist Alex Zettl, researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley, have created a digital electromechanical memory device that consists of a crystalline iron nanoparticle shuttle approximately 1/50,000th the width of a human hair enclosed within the hollow of a multiwalled carbon nanotube. The shuttle can be moved reversibly via a low-voltage electrical write signal and can be positioned with nanoscale precision, forming the basis of a binary sequence.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1571

Researchers at the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Cornell University have capitalized on a process for manufacturing integrated circuits at the nanometer (billionth of a meter) level and used it to develop a method for engineering the first-ever nanoscale fluidic (nanofluidic) device with complex three-dimensional surfaces.

As described in a paper published online recently in the journal Nanotechnology, the Lilliputian chamber is a prototype for future tools with custom-designed surfaces to manipulate and measure different types of nanoparticles in solution.

Among the potential applications for this technology: the processing of nanomaterials for manufacturing; the separation and measuring of complex nanoparticle mixtures for drug delivery, gene therapy and nanoparticle toxicology; and the isolation and confinement of individual DNA strands for scientific study as they are forced to unwind and elongate (DNA typically coils into a ball-like shape in solution) within the shallowest passages of the device.

Source: http://www.physorg.com/news157729849.html