News for Africa Doc

(University of Manchester) Scientists at the University of Manchester have developed a new and fast method for making biological "chips" -- technology that could lead to quick testing for serious diseases, fast detection of MRSA infections and rapid discovery of new drugs.

(DOE/Sandia National Laboratories) Sandia researchers identified that the form of bacillus anthracis mailed in the fall of 2001 to several news media offices and to two US senators was a non-weaponized form of the spores. Five people were killed. Sandia's information was crucial in ruling out state-sponsored terrorism.

(Queensland University of Technology) Stained glass windows that are painted with gold purify the air when they are lit up by sunlight, a team of Queensland University of Technology experts have discovered.

(Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies) The inability of the Consumer Product Safety Commission to carry out its mandate with respect to simple, low-tech products such as children's jewelry and toy trains bodes poorly for its ability to oversee the safety of complex, high-tech products made using nanotechnology, according to a new report released by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.

(Ohio State University) Plastic coatings could someday help neural implants treat conditions as diverse as Parkinson's disease and macular degeneration. The coatings encourage neurons in the body to grow and connect with the electrodes that provide treatment.

(U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) Today, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced the award of a $2 million grant to the University of Kentucky to investigate how the sizes and shapes of nanoparticles affect their ability to enter the brain. This is the largest EPA Science to Achieve Results grant ever awarded to the University of Kentucky as well as the largest single grant ever awarded by EPA STAR for nanotechnology research.

(Purdue University) Engineers have created a tiny motorized positioning device that has twice the dexterity of similar devices being developed for applications that include biological sensors and more compact, powerful computer hard drives.The device, called a monolithic comb drive, might be used as a "nanoscale manipulator" that precisely moves or senses movement and forces.

(University College London) The semiconductor silicon and the ferromagnet iron are the basis for much of mankind's technology, used in everything from computers to electric motors. In this week's issue of the journal Nature, an international group of researchers from the UK, US and Lesotho, report that they have combined these elements with a small amount of another common metal, manganese, to create a new material which is neither a magnet nor an ordinary semiconductor.

(National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) Researchers from NIST and the Joint Quantum Institute have reported a new way to fine-tune the light coming from quantum dots by manipulating them with pairs of lasers. Their technique could significantly improve quantum dots as a source of pairs of entangled photons for applications in quantum information technologies.

(University of Pennsylvania) Scientists at Penn have theorized a way to increase the speed of pulses of light that bound across chains of tiny metal particles to past the speed of light by altering the particle shape. Application of this theory would use nanosized metal chains as building blocks for novel optoelectronic and optical devices.

(Queen's University Belfast) A Queen's University Belfast scientist, whose research is now used worldwide in blood analyzing equipment, has made another important discovery.Recently announced as the winner of the Royal Society of Chemistry's Sensors Award for 2008, Professor A. Prasanna de Silva, has created "intelligent" molecules.

(DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory) Melissa Patterson, a W. Burghardt Turner Fellow at Stony Brook University, will give a talk at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in Philadelphia on controlling the size of nanoclusters, research she performed using a new instrument at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Built by Brookhaven Lab and SBU scientists, the instrument enables researchers to make nanoclusters of 10 to 100 atoms with atomic precision.

(University of Utah) University of Utah physicists successfully controlled an electrical current using the "spin" within electrons -- a step toward building an organic "spin transistor": A plastic semiconductor switch for future ultrafast computers and electronics. The study also suggests it will be more difficult than thought to make highly efficient light-emitting diodes using organic materials. The findings hint such LEDs would convert no more than 25 percent of electricity into light rather than heat.

(Northwestern University) Carbon nanotubes' atomic structure should, in theory, give them mechanical and electrical properties far superior to most common materials. Unfortunately, theory and experiments have failed to converge on the true mechanical properties of carbon nanotubes. Northwestern University researchers recently made the first experimental measurements of the mechanical properties of carbon nanotubes that directly correspond to the theoretical predictions. They used a nanoscale material testing system based on MEMS technology.

(Stanford University) A big challenge in treating cancer with chemotherapy is how to get the most medication into the cells of a tumor without "spillover" of the medication adversely affecting the healthy cells in a patient's body.Now researchers at Stanford University have addressed that problem using single-walled carbon nanotubes as delivery vehicles. This method gets a higher proportion of a given dose of medication into the tumor cells than is possible with the "free" drug.

(Northwestern University) Northwestern University nanoscientists have mass-produced the 2008 Summer Olympics logo -- 15,000 times. All the logos take up one square centimeter of space. The researchers printed the logos as well as an integrated gold circuit using a new printing technique, called Polymer Pen Lithography, that can write on three different length scales using only one device. It is fast, inexpensive and simple and could find use in computational tools, medical diagnostics and the pharmaceutical industry.

(University of Wisconsin-Madison) A new manufacturing approach holds the potential to overcome the technological limitations currently facing the microelectronics and data-storage industries, paving the way to smaller electronic devices and higher-capacity hard drives.

(DOE/Ames Laboratory) Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University have developed a method for converting crop residue, wood pulp, animal waste and garbage into ethanol. The process first turns the waste material into synthesis gas, or syngas, and nanoscale catalysts then convert the syngas into ethanol.

(Clemson University) Electronic devices get smaller and more complex every year. It turns out that fragility is the price for miniaturization, especially when it comes to small devices, such as cell phones, hitting the floor. Wouldn't it be great if they bounced instead of cracked when dropped?

(Virginia Tech) The Powe award to Michael Philen of Virginia Tech will support research in adaptive structures, smart materials, bio-inspired systems and materials, and structural dynamics and control.