Just a quick note to point out a couple of articles (subscription required) that Nature Nanotechnology has recently published on what is currently the trendiest of all carbon nanostructures - graphene.

Published online in advance of print, is a paper from Gordon Wallace and co-workers in Australia and the US, that shows how a simple chemical method can be used to produce stable dispersions of well-separated graphene sheets. This approach relies on maximizing the repulsive electrostatic interactions between the tiny one-atom-thick flakes of carbon - and, therefore, does away with the need for additional chemical stabilizers that can be a problem in applications where pristine samples work best. If you don't have access to Nature Nanotechnology, you can still read the press release.

Also, back in our January 2008 issue, we had a News & Views article written by Rod Ruoff from UT Austin called, "Calling all chemists". Although graphene has been a hot topic in the physics and materials communities, chemists are now beginning to start experimenting with the latest carbon nano-wonder themselves - and Ruoff chronicles the early stages of what he refers to as the 'chemistry part' of the graphene story.

As an aside, have you noticed how the interest in carbon nanomaterials has peaked in order of their dimensionality? First it was 0-D, when Kroto, Curl and Smalley presented us with buckyballs. Then came 1-D structures in the form of carbon nanotubes. Recently, there has been a shift into 2-D, with a focus on graphene. Watch this space, however, it won't be long before 3-D is next... diamondoids are already receiving some attention.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Senior Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 08:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Lost amongst the hoopla of the Nobel Prize announcements last week, were the Feynman prizes for nanotechnology - awarded by the Foresight Nanotech Institute.

The experimental prize went to Sir Fraser Stoddart and, in an academic father-son type of thing, the theory prize went to David Leigh from the University of Edinburgh, who got his PhD in Stoddart's group back in the Sheffield days in the 80s. Communication and student prizes were also awarded - details can be found here.

Another nano-related prize has also been recently announced:

The International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation, and Engineering (ISNSCE) is soliciting nominations for its annual Nanoscience Prize. The Nanoscience prize is given every year to recognize and encourage outstanding research in all areas of nanoscience. Go to www.isnsce.org and click on News for more information.

Not quite as financially rewarding as the new Kavli nanoscience prize, but yet more recognition for good nano-related research can't be a bag thing.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Mentions of nanotechnology in the popular press always interest me, but I wasn't expecting this one: what do the England football team and nanotechnology have in common?

Well, the answer (which, to be fair, is quite contrived) can be found on page 94 of the Times today, in a story written by Martin Samuel.

The story opens with a simple statement:

There are many things that can be done with a spare 201 minutes.

Then follows a list of suggestions, some of them quite appealing (to me at least), such as watching Peter Jackson's 'The Return of the King', and some of them not so, such as travelling from Plymouth station to Birmingham New Street - presumably by train, but that is left for the reader to assume.

My favourite however, is this suggestion:

The more scientifically minded may wish to attend a seminar entitled Computational Nanotechnology: Multiscale Modeling of Nanomaterials, by Kyeongjae Cho, of Stanford University, lasting 3hr 21min precisely.

So, what does this have to do with the England football team? Well, 201 minutes is, for all you Americans out there who love these sports statistics, the average length of time between goals scored by Michael Owen for England, when partnered with Wayne Rooney. Who knew!?

Contrived, yes, but where else will you find a story about Owen and Rooney that uses that kind of analogy - priceless!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just came across this quiz on nanotechnology...

I'll admit to scoring 16/20, which isn't too bad - not telling you which ones I got wrong, however.

[UPDATE: it was actually 17/20 (honestly, it was), even if you put the correct answer in for the grey goo question, you don't get the point...]

Have a go - some of the answers may surprise you!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Although it could be argued that the most controversial summer signing is that of a certain Argentine footballer - who moved north from a smallish team in east London to the greatest football club on the planet – it may not be the most significant.

Northwestern University, recently dubbed ‘Nano U’, has also been dabbling in the transfer market this summer (not for footballers, however) and has recruited Fraser Stoddart, currently a professor of chemistry at UCLA and the director of the California NanoSystems Institute.

Obviously, Chicago is his kind of town...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I was privileged to find myself having dinner with chemistry's newest Knight Bachelor (Sir Fraser Stoddart) at the Ritz Hotel last night, where we chatted about his visit to Buckingham Palace the day before - the bit where Her Majesty the Queen taps him on the shoulders with a sword. He recalled the sequence of events and the brief conversation he had with Her Majesty and has kindly agreed to share them with the readers of the Sceptical Chymist:

It all begins with Fraser being presented to Her Majesty by the Lord Chamberlain:

Lord Chamberlain: "May I present to Your Majesty, Professor Sir Fraser Stoddart, for services to chemistry and nanotology" (No, that last word is not misspelled!)

THE CEREMONY (the kneeling and sword bit)

Her Majesty: "He got that wrong, didn't he?"

Sir Fraser: "He certainly did, Your Majesty."

Her Majesty: "What should it be then, nanotechnology?"

Sir Fraser: "You've got it right, Ma'am"

Her Majesty: "It's about very small things, isn't it?

Sir Fraser: "Indeed, it's about tiny things that are 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, Ma'am"

Her Majesty: "That's exceedingly small. You work in America now, I'm told."

Sir Fraser: "That's so, Ma'am"

After approximately 18 seconds, apparently the average amount of time each person receiving an honour spends with Her Majesty, Fraser recalled that, "At this point, she extends her right hand, and I mine for she leaves me with no choice. A strong handshake is followed by a big approving smile from Her Majesty, and I am on my merry way."

I normally try to end these posts with a witty comment, but this one speaks for itself..!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There's a lot of cool things you can do with DNA - much better than the stuff I see in CSI on an almost nightly basis...

The last week or so has brought us a few more examples, including a self-assembled DNA bipyramid in yesterday's JACS ASAP from Turberfield's group at Oxford. This follows hot on the heels of a review article he wrote with Jonathan Bath that appears in our current issue of Nature Nanotechnology - free access here.

In addition, Ned Seeman from NYU - who was featured in our Reactions series last week - has a paper in yesterday's Nano Lett. ASAP on DNA nanotubes. Finally, there's a DNA catenane paper from last week's JACS ASAP, that uses everyone's favourite - click chemistry.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I don't often plug Nature Nanotechnology papers here on the blog, but I couldn't resist this one... (mostly because of the title I get to use!)

A couple of days ago we published a paper on our website by Naoki Komatsu and co-workers, entitled, "Optically active single-walled carbon nanotubes". As we all know, however you go about cooking up a batch of nanotubes, you get a mixture - different diameters, different lengths and different chiralities. Now, what is meant by 'different chiralities' in this context, is different degrees of twist when you roll up your graphene sheet - not really 'chirality' as the chemist knows it. Methods have been developed to sort carbon nanotubes by length and diameter (and also by degree of twist to some extent - see this free paper here and associated News & Views article here).

What is largely ignored/forgotten, is that chiral nanotubes are, wait for it..., chiral! They come as left- and right-handed forms, depending on which may you roll your graphene sheet, i.e., you can either curl the edges up and over to form a tube, or down and under. (If you want to try this at home, take a couple of overhead transparencies - for those of you under 25 years of age, you may want to look up what one of those is - and draw a hexagonal lattice on each one and roll them up in opposite directions - hey presto, enantiomeric nanotubes!).

Now, Pasteur, all those years ago, separated the enantiomers of tartaric acid by painstakingly sorting through mirror-image crystals, presumably with a microscope and a pair of tweezers. What Komatsu and colleagues have done is to make what they call 'nano-tweezers' - chiral gable-type diporphyrins that can discriminate between left- and right-handed nanotubes. One enantiomer of the nano-tweezers forms a stronger complex with either the left- or right-handed nanotubes and these diastereoisomers have different solubility properties, which means that they can be separated by centrifugation. You can then wash away the tweezers and record a CD spectrum of your resolved nanotubes!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 05:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Being an associate editor of Nature Nanotechnology, I now know a lot more about carbon nanotubes that I ever thought I would. There's a lot I don't know, however, and I was surprised by what I learned today...

Every now and then I need to look up some interesting (or otherwise) little fact about nanotubes and just get an idea of what the popular terminology is, i.e., is it a 'chirality vector' or a 'chiral vector'? I won't spoil that one for you. Anyway, first port of call, as with a lot of people, is the web, and, in particular, Wikipedia. Now, I know that any information garnered from Wikipedia might not necessarily be 100% accurate, but it's a good place to start for casual references.

So, as I was scanning through the entry on carbon nanotubes, I was interested to see how their cost is normalized to the price of a more widely known chemical product in society:

Single-walled nanotubes are still very expensive to produce, around $1500 per gram as of 2000 (compared to marijuana, which generally costs between $10 and $30 per gram, depending on who you know and how sweet the nug is), and the development of more affordable synthesis techniques is vital to the future of carbon nanotechnology.

I don't know if this is Wkipedia vandalism or not... anyway, maybe this new standard will give the Big Mac index a run for its money...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Just a quick post about a couple of papers I saw while surfing through Angewandte Chemie earlier today.

The best porphyrin structure I've seen for a while is right there in Early View - Harry Anderson and cohorts in Oxford have used a porphyrin to template the formation of a conjugated octaporphyrin ring (thought I'd mention this before carbon-based curiosities get a hold of it... I'll see about getting our blogroll updated as ChemBark needs a direct link as well...).

Other than that, there's an essay about Mendeleev that will keep me occupied on the train this evening, 100 years since he died apparently...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Looking for something to read while you're waiting for the rotovap to free up or the PAGE gel to finish running? You might want to take a look at yesterday's issue of Nature, which has a number of chemistry/chemical papers. In addition to the paper by Serreli et al. that Katharine and Stuart mentioned, there's a News & Views piece from Steven Nolan on Craig Forsyth's recent ACIE paper and a paper from Stern et al. that describes miniature, ultra-sensitive sensors that can detect unlabeled antibodies at concentrations below 100 femtomolar (and can monitor the cellular immune response in 'real-time').

There's also a cool paper involving the TRPA1 channel - TRP channels respond to "temperature, touch, pain, osmolarity, pheromones, taste, and other stimuli," and the TRPA1 channel specifically responds to a range of structurally-diverse compounds, including mustard oil, acrolein, and icilin.

In Macpherson et al., the authors used 'click chemistry' to show that derivatives of mustard oil and cinnamaldehyde covalently bound to the TRPA1 channel. They used mass spectrometry to identify fourteen TRPA1 cysteine residues that reacted with iodoacetamide, three of which were required for normal channel function. From a chemical standpoint, this might not seem all that surprising, but this is apparently the first ion channel known to be activated by this mechanism, and I think it's interesting to see how "tuning TRPA1 to respond to covalent modification by reactive compounds ... [enables the nervous system to] directly assess the noxious environment of sensory neurons." For those of you teaching biological/bio-organic chemistry courses, this might make a good test question - it's a nice 'real world' example of how understanding basic organic chemistry can be used to explore how an enzyme works...

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

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CNN is now covering David Leigh's molecular 'information ratchet' that was inspired by Maxwell's demon (which Katharine wrote about here yesterday)...

I do despair about the communication of science to the public when the story contains statements like this:

"His mechanism traps molecular-sized particles as they move. As Maxwell had predicted long ago, it does not need energy because it is powered by light."

Is there any hope!?

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I was asked if Dave Leigh's latest paper in this week's Nature was all that special after all - Leigh claimed to have recreated James Clerk Maxwell's famous thought experiment about the second law of thermodynamics and a demon (read the news story I wrote here). But in reality, Leigh didn't actually recreate the demon, he made a molecular machine that can force a system to go against chemical equilibrium after being inspired by Maxwell. Is that so special?

Some would say yes, very much so. And not just by battling against equilibrium. The complexity demonstrated in Leigh's system is unprecedented. His machine cleverly traps the ring of his rotaxane at one binding site on the axle when light is shone on the system, skewing the ratio of molecules with the ring on one site or the other away from equilibrium. Easy to say, but the synthesis I was told by one eminent person in the field, "outstrips anything that a traditional synthetic chemist can achieve."
Are complex systems like Leigh's the future for chemistry? If chemistry begins to re-create natural processes with mechanical machines, rather than just mimicing natural molecules, what will this mean for the field as a whole? Exciting times beckon.

Katharine Sanderson, (physical sciences reporter, Nature)
ps this is my first post, and while my credentials are being checked I am going undercover as Stuart Cantrill

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

(That's the English English 'pants' not the US English version...)

How could I possibly not click through to the following story with a title like this:

Self-Cleaning Underwear Goes Weeks Without Washing

I would imagine that combining the words 'nanoparticles' and 'underwear' in the same sentence may scare a lot of people - but I could be wrong. I especially like the bit in the story about how the underwear was tested on soldiers and it 'helped to clear up some skin complaints'... There are so many jokes that could be inserted here, but I like my job and want to keep it.

The original article can be found in The Telegraph.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Seeing as my last post of 2006 was about awards, it's not such a bad idea to start 2007 with something along the same lines.

Chemistry (and nanotechnology) has a new knight - not sure if that comes with shining armour or not though! In the New Year's Honours List, Fraser Stoddart, professor at UCLA, receives a knighthood for his services to chemistry and molecular nanotechnology. I wonder if Sir Fraser will be rubbing shoulders with 'Sir' Bono, who received an honourary knighthood this year...?!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The first issue of Nature Nanotechnology finally hits the newsstands (well, the web at least) today. What small wonders can you find inside? Well, here is brief guide to issue 1:

The editorial, 'Small is different', points to some of the opportunities, challenges and problems associated with science and technology performed on the nanoscale.

Thought by some to be the moment at which 'nanotechnology' began in earnest, Christoph Gerber and Hans Peter Lang from the University of Basel reflect upon the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope in their commentary, 'How the doors to the nanoworld were opened'.

In Thesis, a monthly column that will focus on some of the broader aspects and implications of all things nano, Chris Toumey from the USC NanoCenter at the University of South Carolina argues that, for the sake of its future, the nanotechnology community needs to listen to public opinion.

Exactly what is nanotechnology? One of my favourite articles in this first issue is a feature that addresses this question. How? Well, we asked a range of researchers, industrialists and others from across the globe what nanotechnology means to them - what some of them have to say may surprise you...

Nature Nanotechnology will also feature reviews of nano-books (and perhaps nano-plays and nano-films in the fullness of time), and this month, Ray Baughman from the University of Texas at Dallas considers the merits of the Nanomaterials Handbook by Yury Gogotsi.

The Research Highlights section covers important nano-related papers recently published in the literature. This month's selection covers a wide range of topics, including molecular electronics, electroactive dendrimers, indium nitride nanoflowers, neuron-nanowire interfaces, single-molecule protein switches, carbon nanotube resonators and nanotoxicology.

This section will also feature a regular column called Top Down, Bottom Up - which will focus each month on a multidisciplinary research project where the successful collaboration of scientists and engineers from different fields has been required to solve a nano-related problem.

The News & Views section features six articles about significant nano papers (three of them linked to papers in this issue and three linked to others published elsewhere) and covers a range of topics including bionanoelectronic devices, separating carbon nanotubes, toxicology, imaging, friction and SQUIDs - yes, SQUIDs.

The subject of the Review article in the first issue, written by Ben Feringa and Wesley Browne from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, is that of molecular machines and how they are now being put to work as nanovalves, nanocars, nanoelevators and other such nanomachines.

The issue is rounded out with papers concerning primary research and here is a selection of the sort of questions that are being addressed:

- how do you make a nanoSQUID and what does it do?
- what happens to the electronic properties of a carbon nanotube when you twist it?
- how do you build a nanoelectronic device from a virus?
- how can DNA be used to measure really small distances?
- how do you separate metallic carbon nanotubes from semiconducting ones on a large scale?
- is there a general method to pattern different nanostructures on to different surfaces?
- why do suspended silicon nanowires show giant piezoresistance effects?

Now, I must get back to working on issue 2, apparently these things come around each month...

Happy reading!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

David Schwartz gave a great talk this afternoon - he's the director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, which recently created the 'Genes and Environment Initiative,' a five-year research effort that hopes to identify the genetic and environmental causes of asthma, arthritis, and other common diseases.

The initiative has two components: the first involves "efficiently analyzing genetic variation in groups of patients with specific illnesses," and the second involves the development of new devices that can monitor "personal environmental exposures that interact with genetic variations and result in human diseases."

Why - you might ask - is the NIH spending approximately 192 million dollars on this new initiative? Well, we know that "[g]enetic and environmental factors, including diet and life-style, both contribute to cardiovascular disease, cancers, and other major causes of mortality," and there's a growing body of evidence that suggests that environmental factors are responsible for a large percentage of these diseases.

The NIEHS will use a portion of this money to fund grants that involve "innovative new technologies to measure environmental toxins, dietary intake and physical activity, and to determine an individual's biological response to those influences, using new tools of genomics, proteomics and metabolomics," so this looks like an excellent opportunity for chemists interested in complex diseases and human health.

For more information on the NIEHS 2006–2011 Strategic Plan, see "New Frontiers in Environmental Sciences and Human Health."

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

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In the September issue of Nature Chemical Biology, John Silvius wrote about McGill University's interdepartmental graduate program in chemical biology, which was established in 2002 and now has "roughly 30 graduate students, 10 postdoctoral fellows and 30 faculty mentors."

The program involves scientists from the Department of Biochemistry, the Department of Chemistry, and the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and a "key objective of the program is to maximize opportunities for students with chemistry and life science backgrounds to share and appreciate their sometimes distinct perspectives on the field of chemical biology." Silvius wrote that this is accomplished via seminar discussion meetings, workshops, and an "annual research symposium at which students present their work to other students and faculty mentors."

There are other interdepartmental and multi-institutional graduate programs in chemical biology: for example, there is the Cornell/Rockefeller/Sloan-Kettering Tri-Institutional Training Program in Chemical Biology in New York City (which involves Cornell University, The Rockefeller University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Weill Medical College of Cornell). Graduate students in the Tri-Institutional Training Program can rotate in (and join) laboratories at any of the institutions and they do not have to teach classes, "enabling them to take an accelerated course schedule (four courses per semester during the first year)." (Although I understand that the program was designed so the students could take a large number of classes, I really enjoyed teaching during graduate school and think it's an important experience for all graduate students. But I'll save that topic for another blog post...)

There's obviously more than one way to train the next generation of chemical biologists, but Silvius believes that

An effective training program in chemical biology must produce graduates who have a distinct sense of intellectual identity yet can work effectively with researchers that are more conventionally trained either in chemistry or in the life sciences alone... Moreover, by promoting constant intermixing of individuals trained in the cultures of chemistry and biology, such a program allows students to be participants in the very type of stimulating, creative ferment that drives the field of chemical biology itself.

If you are a graduate student in (or a recent graduate of) an interdepartmental or multi-institutional graduate program in chemical biology, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about your program/your experiences. Why did you choose an interdepartmental or multi-institutional graduate program, instead of a Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology? (And for those of you who did their graduate work in a Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology, why didn't you choose an interdepartmental or multi-institutional graduate program?) For those of you working on the interface of other disciplines (for example, biophysics, chemical physics, bionanotechnology, etc.) did your graduate program meet your (scientific) needs/expectations? If not, what could they have done to make it easier for you to pursue interdisciplinary research?

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Channel 5 in the UK has been running a series of documentaries with a ‘Stranger than Fiction’ theme. Based upon the promos, which generally made me turn away from the TV and go ‘eew’ (especially the one about head transplants), I’ve steered clear of them... until last night.

“Death in the deep freeze” was about cryonic preservation – freezing bodies (or just the head if you prefer) post mortem* in the hope that future technology can (1) thaw you out, (2) re-animate you, and (3) cure whatever it was that shuffled you off this mortal coil in the first place. Most of the debate was about point 1 and whether you can freeze complex biological systems and then thaw them out so that they still work. As for point 2, I saw many bad science-fiction films about that when I was a teenager. Point 3 seems reasonable; advances in medicine will almost certainly enable us to cure diseases in the future that are not treatable at the moment. The problem is, 3 only becomes relevant in the context of cryonics if 1 and 2 can be sorted out.

(*Apparently, the definition of death comes in to play here – a cryonics ‘patient’ is legally dead, but the proponents of this technology claim that they remain ‘biologically alive’. The programme last night showed the vitrification process in full, including the chest being cracked open and a pretty big drill making its way into the skull – if they do manage to bring anyone back they’re bound to have quite a headache. For more information, go to Alcor's website).

According to the programme, the freezing and successful thawing of organs has been demonstrated with rabbit kidneys - the goal of this research, however, is to increase the amount of time an organ can be stored before being transplanted. It’s still quite a stretch from there to being able to freeze Thumper whole and then expecting him to munch away on carrots when you warm him up again.

Anyway, why do I bring this up? Well, this was my first public sighting of nanotechnology for some time. According to Ralph Merkle, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, nanotech theorist and Alcor director, future medicine based on molecular nanotechnology may be the answer. The programme contained wonderful animations of nanobots with Merkle telling us that trillions of them could be used to manipulate the molecules in frozen tissue to restore them back to health. Whether you think the whole process may be plausible or not, Merkle has a great ‘payoff matrix’ on his website which reduces the debate to its most simple form.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The collection, preparation, and analysis of chemical compounds using miniaturized devices are appealing for many reasons: the use of smaller reagent volumes can reduce the time needed to synthesize and analyze a product, the amount of chemical waste produced and the overall costs can be reduced by performing chemical reactions in these 'lab-on-a-chip' devices, and compact devices also allow samples to be analyzed at the point of need rather than at a centralized laboratory. For these reasons, chemists are now using these devices to create new molecules and materials, and biologists are employing these devices to study complex biological problems. Furthermore, labs on chips offer ‘point-of-care’ diagnostic abilities that could revolutionize medicine.

To highlight our interest in this exciting field, the July 27th issue of Nature contains an Insight (a collection of topical articles and reviews) which discuss the history, design, current applications, and the promising future of these 'lab-on-a-chip' devices:

The origins and the future of microfluidics (Whitesides)
Scaling and the design of miniaturized chemical-analysis systems (Janasek et al.)
Developing optofluidic technology through the fusion of microfluidics and optics (Psaltis et al.)
Future lab-on-a-chip technologies for interrogating individual molecules (Craighead)
Control and detection of chemical reactions in microfluidic systems (deMello)
Cells on chips (El-Ali et al.)
Microfluidic diagnostic technologies for global public health (Yager et al.)

There’s also a news story from Jenny Hogan on microreactors. (And you may want to check out 'Clicks and chips’ and Haswell’s recent News & Views article on Belder et al.)

For a complete list of Insights, click here - we hope you enjoy these reviews!

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by Joshua Finkelstein at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Want to know what's happening in the nano-world but just can't keep up?

Well, here's one way to keep on top of what's happening at the bottom.

In preparation for the launch of Nature Nanotechnology in October later this year, each week our website will include a selection of 'Research Highlights'. The editorial team scours the recent literature and distills the most exciting and important research into short summaries that are posted every Friday.

This week's selection covers a wide range of topics including nanocrystal LEDs, nanomechanical oscillators, virus/polymer composite nanofibres and magnetism in cobalt nanostructures. All of the highlights are collected in the archive and are divided into categories for easy browsing.

Check back tomorrow for the next batch of nano highlights.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 05:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember 'Magic Nano', the German cleaning product that has a lot of people worried about nanoparticles. Well, apparently it doesn't contain any.

Small Times reports that following an analysis of the product by the Verband der Chemischen Industrie (VCI) - the German chemical industry association - a recent meeting of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) has concluded that there is no 'Nano' in 'Magic Nano'.

It turns out, that there's not all that much 'Magic' either - the analysis also revealed that the product did not contain the active ingredients that it was supposed to!!

Rene Zimmer of the BfR had this to say - ...at the meeting, the manufacturers said that had there not been a recall because of the breathing problems, there would have been complaints because "the stuff didn't do what it was supposed to do."

The many components of the product were manufactured by different companies and now the question of what happened to the active ingredients is being raised.

Nevertheless, Bernd Zimmermann, sales manager of Kleinmann, the company that distributed the product, does not seem to be all that concerned by the saga: "German consumers have a very short memory," he said. "Many haven't even heard about this."

Splendid. That makes it alright then.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Following hot on the heels of the h-index, we now have ‘m’, (I would have called it the ‘m-factor’), a measure of just how ‘hot’ a given research topic is. In this week’s issue of Nature, Jim Giles reports on how this analysis has been applied to selected scientific topics and compounds in order to determine what’s hot and what’s not. (The blog entry at Nature News can be found here)

Burning brightly at the top spot are carbon nanotubes, closely followed by nanowires, quantum dots, fullerenes and giant magnetoresistance. So, it’s official, nanotechnology is hot – perhaps Nature should launch a journal devoted to this exciting and vibrant topic..!

The h-index has received a lot of attention and there is no reason why ‘m’ won’t follow suit. If someone has a week or so to spare and applies this kind of analysis to get the top five in chemistry, let me know...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 11:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As the world prepares to go football crazy later this summer (come on England!), Christopher Ewels from the Institute of Materials in Nantes, France, has been contemplating (in Nano Letters) the world's smallest football: buckminsterfullerene - C60.

Buckminsterfullerene, subject of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is a spherical cage of 60 carbon atoms - an Archimedean solid comprised of 12 pentagonal and 20 hexagonal faces which are stitched together to form a truncated icosahedron. C60 is unique in that it is the smallest fullerene that obeys the Isolated Pentagon Rule - i.e., each pentagon is completely surrounded by hexagons such that no two pentagons share an edge. Neighbouring pentagons in carbon networks are energetically unfavourable as they strain the system and disrupt the C=C bonding pattern. If you take a 4 panel section of C60 - two hexagons that share a common edge and the two pentagons that are linked by it - and rotate this grouping 90 degrees (the same effect as a Stone-Wales rotation), a less symmetric fullerene structure is obtained, which now has two pairs of edge-sharing pentagons. Calculations have shown that this isomer is a whopping 1.6 eV (~37 kcal/mol) less stable than Buckminsterfullerene!

Substitute one of the carbon atoms on each of the shared pentagon edges for nitrogen (i.e., C58N2), however, and it's a whole new ball game. In this case, the isomer with paired pentagons is 0.54 eV (~12.5 kcal/mol) more stable than the icosahedral structure. This result suggests that there may be a whole new family of stable azafullerenes that contain a lot fewer than 60 atoms and that nitrogen substitution into nanotube and thin-film structures may have dramatic structural consequences.

It appears that azafullerenes are in a league of their own and it may just a matter of time before such structures are made and isolated - at which point this exercise in fantasy football will become a reality.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 08:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jim Tour has a new set of wheels – well, his nanocar does. It seems as though fullerene wheels are a thing of the past and carboranes are the way forward (just as Tour anticipated at the end of a JACS paper earlier this year, see: Planes, trains and nanomobiles). In a recent article, “En Route to a Motorized Nanocar”, published in Organic Letters, Tour reports a new nanocar that not only has wheels, but now has an engine too!

The latest model to roll off the nano-production line incorporates one of Ben Feringa’s unidirectional molecular motors (see this 2005 article in Nature) and is demonstrated to operate in solution. Surfaces, however, are a different matter, and as the authors themselves admit, this motor may not be powerful enough to drive the nanocar across a surface. The eventual goal of driving a nanocar across a surface in a controlled manner is still a distant prospect and the authors have a long (and perhaps winding) road ahead of them. Whether this concept car will ever be anything more than just that, remains to be seen.

So, the nanocar has new wheels and an engine, but more importantly, when will the nanocar be fitted out with a CD changer and furry dice? And just how many cup-holders will there be? – I’m sure that Nanoputians can get quite thirsty on long road trips...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 05:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Chemical & Engineering News reports that a German cleaning product called 'Magic Nano' has performed a disappearing act. (Also see the Washington Post and MIT Technology Review articles). After reports that the aerosol formulation of this product has resulted in coughing fits and breathing difficulties for some consumers, the German Federal Institute of Risk Assessment issued an alert and the manufacturer, Kleinmann GmbH, recalled the product.

There seems to be some debate spreading across the internet (see: Slashdot; SciGuy; Cientifica; Nanodot; Nanotechwire) about just what is in this product and what may be to blame for the health problems. No adverse effects have been reported for other products in the 'Magic Nano' range, such as the pump-spray, so what is to blame - is it the nano or not? Kleinmann suggests that the anti-corrosion liquid inside the aerosol may be responsible, but it is inevitable that others will question whether nanoparticles are the culprit.

Let's hope this incident sparks some more healthy (rather than hysterical) debate about the environmental impact of nanotechnology. The rage probably won't last a 1,000 years and let's hope it will soon be done.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 05:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (1)

The environmental impact of nanotechnology is the cause of much debate – some of it quite heated. Are nanoparticles dangerous – will nanobots prey on our bodies as well as our minds, and how long before the Earth is overrun with grey goo? Well, we simply don’t know. The extreme visions of a famed novelist and a future king may not be the best indicators, but a lot more research needs to be done before we can even start answering such questions.

I was intrigued (and a little amazed), therefore, to read a recent article by Bethany Halford in Chemical and Engineering News about the use of buckminsterfullerene (C-60) in cosmetics. As she points out, there is some evidence that C-60 might not be the benign little soccer ball we all know and love.

I decided to visit the website of one C-60-containing product, Zelens Day Cream, and see what they had to say for themselves:

Zelens creams uniquely contain Fullerene C60, an extremely powerful anti-oxidant, for which its three discoverers received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1997.

Hum... it was actually 1996, but who’s counting?

In the pharmaceutical industry, Fullerene C60 is expected to play a major part in the fight against Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Aids and many other diseases in which oxidation plays an important role.

A universal cure-all? Is there anything “Fullerene C60” can’t do? Seriously now, just how much of an impact is C60 making in the pharmaceutical industry? Has the early hype turned into future hope? I didn’t think it had, but please, let me know if I’m wrong about this...

The creams arise out of Dr Lens’ extensive research in the field of skin cancer, reflected in the many papers by him published in leading medical journals.

A search on Thomsons’ ISI Web of Science for Dr Marko B Lens indicates that he has published 16 papers.

Anyway, I’m not likely to become acquainted with this product, because at more than 130 GBP for a 30 mL jar, I couldn’t face it. How about you?

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 09:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

At the Wednesday morning session of the Polymers for Enabling Nanoscale Patterning symposium, C Grant Willson came to bury 157 nm lithography, not to praise it... and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography got the adjacent plot. Although there are technological challenges to face, Willson argued that physics and chemistry would not be the problem – it’s the economics, stupid.

He used a comparison with commercial aviation to highlight his point. Making faster airplanes isn’t all that difficult; making money from them is – where’s Concorde now? Just as commercial aviation has reached a speed plateau and seeks to expand by changing other variables such as capacity (see the humongous Airbus A380), so the drive to use smaller and smaller wavelengths for photolithography is no longer the focus of the semiconductor industry. Techniques to improve the resolution of established 193 nm lithography - such as immersion lithography – may be the way forward.

Willson then went on to discuss imprint lithography techniques, such as his step-and-flash nanoimprint lithography, which set the scene for the rest of the session. Although it is quite clear that optical lithography is the current standard, nanoimprint lithography seems set to make a big impression.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There may be big money in small science, but not as much as you might think. Mike Holman from Lux Research – a leading nanotech research and advisory firm – gave an interesting presentation this afternoon about the barriers to nanotechnology commercialization. He talked of a ‘nanotechnology value chain’ rather than a specific market, and of the discipline being a ‘broad enabling technology’ that allows for incremental improvements to existing products, rather than generating completely new ones.

The total amount of nanotech funding is increasing, but it was interesting to note that whereas corporate cash is more often focused on electronics and information technology, that from the government is targetted towards healthcare and the life sciences. It seems, therefore, that the barriers to commercialization are not necessarily technological or economic ones, but also cultural and organizational – the latter two obstacles highlighted with amusing quotes about nanotechnology 'just being a fad'.

As the session continued, however, it became clear (at least to this member of the audience), that there is another problem. When the worlds of science and business collide the words of science and business do not. What is a ‘dollar investment gap’? I think an ‘IP conduit’ featured in a few Star Trek episodes. I understand ‘cash flow’, but what do ‘development platform’ and ‘integration services’ really mean? As for ‘roadmapping’, I checked the OED, so don’t try and tell me it’s a real word. Come to think of it though, as chemists, we’re just as bad. If we start mumbling about 'nucleophiles' or 'electrophiles', non-chemists wouldn’t have a clue. Worse still, polite conversations rapidly become uncomfortable should we happen to mention 'cleavage reactions' or 'backside attack'!

Nonetheless, nanotechnology is beginning to have a commercial impact and so it doesn’t really matter if we’re not all speaking the same language. After all, the money will do the talking.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Arsenic really isn’t very good for you, in fact, it’s a perennial favourite of your amateur – or indeed, professional – poisoner. Even if your loved ones are not surreptitiously sprinkling it on your cornflakes, you may still be ingesting a little bit too much of the stuff. Vicki Colvin from Rice University gave a talk this afternoon addressing the problem of arsenic contamination in drinking water – not only is this a problem in poorer third-world nations, but a map of the North Eastern USA was covered with an alarming number of large red dots. Red dots are never a good thing.

Arsenic finds its way into the water supply from both natural (it’s in the soil) and anthropogenic sources – and has been linked with bladder cancer. Although some ferns naturally sequester arsenic, it’s a slow process and not everyone grows them in their back garden. It turns out, however, that iron oxide is good at binding arsenic – an alloy structure forms on the surface, which continues to irreversibly adsorb arsenic in a multilayer fashion. Colvin exploits this phenomenon for the removal of arsenic compounds from water by using iron oxide nanoparticles.

Why go nano? Well, there are two reasons: (i) smaller particles have a higher surface area-to-volume ratio, i.e., you can bind more arsenic, and (ii) the magnetic properties of these nanoparticles are quite handy – you suck up the arsenic and then drag the whole nasty mess out of solution with a magnet. There is, however, a Goldilocks effect: if the nanoparticles are too small you need a fancy bad-science-fiction-movie super magnet to get the job done, if the nanoparticles are too large, they become magnetized and can’t be pulled away from the magnet even after it is turned off. 12 nm is just right.

The most intriguing part came near the end of the presentation, when Colvin suggested that there could be an alternative and renewable route for making the iron oxide nanoparticles. Bugs! Certain bacteria produce iron oxide nanoparticles with a very narrow size distribution and could, in theory, be used in a biosynthetic process. Ultimately, this research could result in an inexpensive point-of-use product for the removal of arsenic from water – I’ll drink to that!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Nanotechnology is one of three featured themes here at the ACS meeting and there are over 1,000 talks under this broad umbrella. It is no mere coincidence, therefore, that I am here to promote Nature Nanotechnology, a new journal from Nature Publishing Group. And this week is an important one: we are now open for business. Our Call for Papers has been announced, and if you don’t manage to pick up one of the glossy leaflets scattered throughout the Georgia World Congress Center, please go and investigate our website, or come and talk to me at the exposition tomorrow at 10 am. (NPG booth #414). Our first issue will appear in October of 2006, so don’t delay, submit your best nano-related work as soon as you return home from Atlanta.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Associate Editor, Nature Nanotechnology)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:26 AM |