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Next
Event
Friday, August 22, 2008, 07:00 PM: Simulations of Society with Loren Cobb
Loren Cobb will present his peculiar 15-year journey into sociological model-making for various military entities, including US Southern Command, the Swedish Ministry of Defence, the British Ministry of Defence, the United Nations, and a miscellany of Latin American countries (Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, ...).
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Nanotechnology
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Researchers reported on a way to design circuits that should work even when many of the nanotubes in them are twisted and misaligned.
Nanotubes tend to grow with unpredictable kinks and bends that can cause bad wiring connections. The resarchers came to the conclusion that engineers will have to design circuits that will work regardless of where and how the tubes lie.
They came up with a single circuit element—a NAND gate—that was immune from the vagaries of its underlying nanotube layout. From that single element, they abstracted and generalized the math to come up with an algorithm that they say can guarantee a working design for any circuit element, despite the presence of misaligned tubes.
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A special technique that uses laser light to sample a person's breath can detect molecules that may be markers for a number of diseases.
This approach, called cavity-enhanced direct optical frequency comb spectroscopy, may one day help doctors screen patients for diseases such as asthma, cancer, kidney failure and diabetes, according to the team of scientists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"This technique can give a broad picture of many different molecules in the breath all at once," lead researcher Jun Ye said in a prepared statement.
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Scientists at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology have harnessed the power of DNA to create a self-assembling nanoscale transistor, the building block of electronics. The research is a crucial step in the development of nanoscale devices.
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This year, as every year, we present our list of the 10 technologies we find most exciting—and most likely to alter industries, fields of research, and even the way we live. The list comprises projects in a broad range of fields.
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According to the meeting, China has poured about 1.5 billion yuan (about $197 million) into the research and development of nanoscience and nanotechnology over the past 15 years, achieving encouraging advances in this regard. For instance, the number of research papers published by Chinese scientists at the international journals in 2006 were on a par with those contributed by their US or Japanese colleagues. The number of patents they have filed for has increased from less than 1,000 in 2001 to more than 4,600 in March 2005.
Under the guidance of the national framework for nanoscience and technology development during the 10th five-year planning period (2001-2005), China made an overall deployment in the fields concerning nanoscience and nanotechnology, such as materials, information, energy sources, medicine and manufacturing. A flagship nanoscience research program has also been launched.
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AMD and IBM this week announced they had produced a working test chip utilizing Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to produce the first layer of metal connections across the entire chip.
EUV allows for using a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers much shorter than today’s 193nm lithography techniques.
EUV lithography will be fully qualified for production by 2016, when it makes the move to 22nm manufacturing.
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Exciting news from IBM and partners about a prototype technology that could make memory chips 500 times faster in the future.
It uses a technique where a material named GS can be swapped from an amorphous state to a crystalline one through being heating. In this case, via an electric current.
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Wouldn't it be great if we could get computer chips to grow on trees? Or at least use the specific bonds of DNA molecules to get nanostructures to grow themselves right in the test tube? This technology could be used to build everything from tiny electronics components to machines that sequence DNA.
"The method we have developed for self-assembling blocks of DNA and gold particles can be used, for instance, to produce tiny nano carriers for drugs that can be emptied directly in cells on a given chemical signal."
They have also taken a close look at a method for building nanostructures with the help of DNA that was invented by a a US researcher in the spring of 2006. The method is called 'DNA origami' and involves, in brief, folding or splicing together a long string of DNA with the aid of a large number of short strings (''staple DNA').
"This technology could be used to construct a facility for extremely rapid DNA sequencing, which is a biotechnologist's dream."
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Experiments designed to test discrepancies in theoretical computational chemistry have turned up a barely two-angstrom difference that may lead to a new approach to locate and remove dangerous toxins such as perchlorate and nitrates from the environment.
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Quantum dots can be made to emit single photons more efficiently and reliably by using a new method to suppress quantum dot "blinking".
A US research team has found a way to reduce quantum dot (QD) "blinking" by a factor of 100, and in doing so has also increased the photon emission rate by four to five times. This could make QDs more sensitive as fluorescent tags in biomedical tests and single-molecule studies.
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Investigators have developed calcium phosphate nanoparticles to function as stable gene carriers.
While other research teams have explored the use of calcium phosphate-based materials for gene delivery – calcium phosphate is the major mineral component and is biocompatible – these efforts have largely failed because the physical characteristics of these materials did not protect DNA from degradation and did not promote efficient uptake by cells. This group of investigators appears to have overcome these limitations by developing a new chemical method that allows them to carefully adjust the relative amounts of calcium and phosphorous in the nanoparticles.
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A newly designed porous membrane, so thin it’s invisible edge-on, may revolutionize the way doctors and scientists manipulate objects as small as a molecule. The 50-atom-thick filter can withstand surprisingly high pressures and could be a key to better separation of blood proteins for dialysis patients, speeding ion exchange in fuel cells, creating a new environment for growing neurological stem cells, and purifying air and water in hospitals and clean rooms at the nanoscopic level.
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Scientists have again broken their own speed record for the world's fastest transistor. With a frequency of 845 gigahertz, their latest device is approximately 300 gigahertz faster than transistors built by other research groups, and approaches the goal of a terahertz device.
Made from indium phosphide and indium gallium arsenide, "the new transistor utilizes a pseudomorphic grading of the base and collector regions."
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In the first experiment of its kind, investigators have shown that single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) wrapped in poly(ethylene glycol), or PEG, can successfully target tumors in living animals. The CCNE-TR team began by coating commercially available SWCNTs with PEG, a biocompatible polymer used frequently in drug delivery applications to increase circulation lifetimes and water solubility.
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Researchers have tested its first 65nm multi-gate finFET architecture. The name finFET comes from the fin-looking source/drain regions on the field-effect transistor. The 65nm circuitry tested by researchers contains more than 3,000 active transistors fabricated in three-dimensional multi-gate technology.
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Placing a film of silicon nanoparticles onto a silicon solar cell can boost power, reduce heat and prolong the cell’s life, researchers now report.
"Integrating a high-quality film of silicon nanoparticles 1 nanometer in size directly onto silicon solar cells improves power performance by 60 percent in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum."
A 10 percent improvement in the visible range of the spectrum can be achieved by using nanoparticles 2.85 nanometers in size.
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Researchers have discovered a way to permanently alter the color of most metals using lasers, a concept that would let a manufacturer build cars whose paint wouldn’t fade or enable artists to etch a full-color photograph of a family into the refrigerator door.
Using a femtosecond tabletop laser, optical scientists have turned pure aluminum, gold, blue, gray and many other colors.
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What do you get when you superimpose a rotating pattern of intersecting laser beams on a spinning cloud of ultracold atoms in a thin gas? Pretty pictures, for one thing—but also a new method that could be used to simulate why and how defects arise in superconductors, important materials that are difficult to study directly.
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Worldwide, we build 10^18 transistors per year; if each transistor were an atom, we would be building about 20 micrograms of stuff — worldwide — in factories that cost many billions of dollars. And in another 40 years, if the semiconductor trends continue, those billions of dollars would still be producing only 20 grams of stuff per year. By contrast, a one-gram nanofactory might produce 20 grams of stuff per day. So when nanoscale technologies are developed to the point that they can build a nanofactory at all, it appears worthwhile to use them to do so, even at great cost; the investment will pay back quite quickly.
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Multi-gate field-effect transistor technology appears to be an answer to many challenges down the road toward ever-smaller integrated circuits that retain high functionality while consuming considerably less energy than the planar single-gate technologies available today. In a demonstration of this new technology, researchers at Infineon have tested the world’s first complex circuit fabricated using a new 65nm multi-gate transistor architecture.
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These pearls in various colors are produced by researchers from the Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University. The researchers use nanotechnology, which is the control of matter on the atomic and molecular scale, normally 1 to 100 nanometers to make pearl in other colors.
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 The 20th century was the century of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in the arena of science. It unfolded the mysteries of atomic depths and led to new understanding of material reality. It also led to new logic, new language, and new domains of time and space to describe the events and phenomenon of nature that occur at atomic and molecular levels. The 20thcentury ended remarkably, with Prof Ahmad Zewail of California Institute of Technology, USA, being awarded the 1999 Noble Prize for his pioneering work in the exciting field of Femtochemistry. The direct observation of the making and breaking of a chemical bond in molecular transition states with the objective of studying the fundamental dynamics of the chemical processes had represented the ultimate challenge for spectroscopic resolution. The elementary step of any chemical transformation involves the bond breaking and bond making which occurs in the time span of about 10 femtoseconds. One femtosecond is 10-15 seconds, which is to a second as a second is to 32 million years.
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Russia's annual nanotechnology production must reach at least 1 trillion rubles ($41 billion) by 2015, Russia's science and education minister said on Thursday.
Following a government session on nanotechnology development in Russia, Andrei Fursenko said the figure was attainable, if ambitious.
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Microscopic metal wires marked with barcodes like so many boxes of grocery-store spaghetti maight someday help identify biological weapons much more quickly than today's methods. The technology would allow soldiers to use the right kind of anti-pathogen protection at just the right time.
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Stem cell therapy, primarily bone marrow transplantation, plays a key role in treating leukemia and other types of cancer. To better track the fate of stem cells injected into patients, researchers have turned to a combination of fluorine-based magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and nanoparticles made of liquid perfluorocarbons. The team described its use of two distinct perfluorocarbon nanoparticles to track different stem cells injected into tumor-bearing mice. These particular nanoparticles are taken up readily by stem cells over the course of a 12-hour incubation, and the stem cells showed no ill effects from the nanoparticles.
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An atomic clock that uses an aluminum atom to apply the logic of computers to the peculiarities of the quantum world now rivals the world's most accurate clock, based on a single mercury atom. Both clocks are at least 10 times more accurate than the current U.S. time standard.
The measurements were made in a yearlong comparison of the two next-generation clocks.
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