Nanotech Update

Today I do a round-up of the last several weeks/months in cool nanotech news.

There has been all kinds of neat developments in nanotech recently.

In the medical field, the Boston Globe had an article about nanoparticles that heat up when exposed to magnetic fields being used to destroy animal cancer cells.  Another story, this one from Fox News, describes how carbon nanotubes might be used to build the scaffolding for joint and bone reconstruction.  Now, I thought that similar technologies already existed and at a fraction of the cost of nanotubes, but this fact isn’t discussed in the Fox story, unfortunately.  And finally, the UCSF student newspaper the Synapse has this article about how specially designed nanoparticles were able to deliver chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells almost exclusively, allowing for a far greater effective dosage to be applied with fewer side effects, at least in mice.

In the world of electronics, Nanotechnology Now has a story about how carbon nanotubes are being used as wires to make organic LEDs truly flexible (imagine wrapping a screen around your finger).  But as cool as that is, it pales in comparison to the idea that it might be possible to make displays that emit light out of both sides using carbon nanotube wires and electrodes, simply because the nanotubes are so smal as to be effectively transparent.

There’s also a new field of carbon research popping up that is related to carbon nanotubes - graphene.  Graphenes are places of carbon atoms one atom thick - effectively a single thickness of graphite.  Well, as with carbon nanotubes, this stuff has some neat and very useful properties when it’s a single atom thick.  Check out these links for more information:  Graphene - The Magic Carpet Made of Carbon, Nanotubes Unfolded, Forget the Nanotubes, and Carbon-Based Electronics: Researchers Develop Foundation for Circuitry and Devices Based on Graphite.

Finally, last week was one of the annual nanotechnology industry and academic conferences, Nanotech 2006.  While you can’t get a lot more than brief synopses of the papers that were presented, the list of sponsors, companies, universities, and the sheer number of presentations being made is very impressive.  Check the site out if for no other reason than to see how many people are taking nanotech seriously.