Groonk's Newsmine 2.0

The plastic, known as Synthetic Gecko, has been developed by researchers at aerospace and defence firm BAE Systems. Like the reptile’s foot, the polymer is covered in millions of tiny mushroom-like hairs that provide grip.

Future applications could include an adhesive to repair aircraft, skin grafts or even a Spiderman-style suit.

“It would mean that your local window cleaner could dispense with his ladders and climb up the side of your house,” says Dr Sajad Haq a principle research scientist at the company’s Advanced Technology Centre in Filton, Bristol. “There’s a whole host of applications. It’s just a question of your imagination…”

Nano-sized fluorescent probes that can slip inside living cells and elucidate life’s most fundamental processes, or track the effectiveness of cancer-fighting drugs, are barely noticed by the cells they enter, according to a team of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Using a high-throughput gene expression test, the team determined that the probes, which are specially coated quantum dots, only affect 0.2 percent of the human genome. This finding should quell concerns that the mere presence of these promising but potentially toxic sentinels disrupts a cell’s function, confounding quantum dots’ ability to accurately track cellular processes or monitor the effectiveness of pharmaceuticals…

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The number of potential applications is staggering. They can be used for flow-control valves, pumps, positioning drives, motors, switches, relays and biosensors.

The system could be used to develop molecular circuits, or even molecular scale mechanical devices. The potential applications are difficult to predict, but are only limited by the imagination of researchers, such is the versatility of an actuator on this scale.

"It could be used as a communicator between the biological and silicon worlds. I could see it providing an interface between muscle and external devices, through its use of ATP, in human implants. Such an application is still 20 or 30 years away," says Firman "It's very exciting and right now we're applying for a patent for the basic concepts."

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Application opportunities, Baughman said, are diverse, and range from robots and morphing air vehicles to dynamic Braille displays and muscles powered by the fuel/air mixture delivered to an engine that are able to regulate this mixture. The more than 30 times higher energy density obtainable for fuels like methanol, compared to that for the most advanced batteries, can translate into long operational lifetimes without refueling for autonomous robots. This refueling requires negligible time compared with that needed for recharging batteries. Since all muscles will not be used at the same time, temporarily inactive muscles of the first muscle type can be used as ordinary fuel cells and as supercapacitors to provide for the electrical needs of, for example, autonomous robots and prosthetic limbs. The properties of the two types of fuel-powered muscles can be merged to provide the benefits of both, Baughman said.

The fuel-powered muscles can be easily downsized to the micro- and nano-scales, and arrays of such micro-muscles could be used in "smart skins" that improve the performance of marine and aerospace vehicles. By replacing metal catalyst with tethered enzymes, it might eventually be possible to use artificial muscles powered by food-derived fuels for actuation in the human body – perhaps even for artificial hearts.

The "nano-skin" polymer was created by scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York, US. Nanotubes are excellent electrical conductors and group member Swastik Kar says the material may well be used to build highly efficient electronic parts for highly flexible electronic displays.

The first task for the center will be to design a class of devices for generating electric power — bio-batteries — for a wide array of implantable devices, starting with an artificial retina that has already been developed at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California. The artificial retina and accompanying nanobattery will be used to correct certain types of macular degeneration.

ApNano has tested armor said to be five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as any impact-resistant material used in protective gear.

Last year, a sample of the ApNano material was subjected to tests in which a steel projectile traveling at a speed of up to 1.5 kilometers per second slammed into the material.

Executives said the impact was the equivalent to dropping four diesel locomotives onto an area the size of a human fingernail.

They said the nano-based armor, which stemmed from a new carbon form called Inorganic Fullerenes, withstood the impact.

The company's chief executive officer, Menachem Genut, said the company would launch initial production within the next six months. Genut said this would mean the production of between 100 and 200 kilograms of the nano-material per day.

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Buckyballs, or buckminsterfullerenes (C60), are hollow spheres made from 60 carbon atoms. Because of their unique physical properties they are being considered for many applications, from drug delivery to fuel cells.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, both in the US, decided to investigate how buckyballs would react if they came into contact with DNA. They used standard biomolecular simulation software to model two strands of DNA, with 12 base pairs each, interacting with two buckyballs over about 20 nanoseconds.

They found that the buckyballs bind strongly to DNA, with about the same energy that drugs bind to receptors on the surface of cells. When the buckyballs bound, they distorted the strands of DNA. Peter Cummings, a Vanderbilt chemical engineer, says it seems likely the interaction would interfere with the DNA's function, disrupting replication and repair and increasing mutation rates.

Ka-BOOM!

This scenario -- from a National Cancer Institute video -- is just one possibility offered by the burgeoning field of cancer nanotechnology, where miniscule molecules are designed with literally atomic precision to combat a disease that kills half a million Americans every year.

"It's 21st-century medicine," said Vicki Colvin of Rice University's Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology. "It sits at the intersection of some of the greatest achievements in many different areas of science, from material science to cell biology to physics and advances in imaging."

Indeed, the National Cancer Institute, which recently announced two waves of funding for nanotech training and research, sees nanotechnology as vital to its stated goal of "eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015."

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The team envisages this technology moving biological samples around a diagnostic chip to detect disease.

The researchers can also see their work leading to smart materials that change their shape at the flick of a switch.

Taking this idea to its logical endpoint is when nanotechnology enters the scene, Darling said.

When nanotechnology is mature, an automated assembly unit could be sent to a destination. On arrival, it would build the required robot explorer from the molecular level up.

"Bona fide quantum teleportation, as applied to space travel, would mean sending a supply of entangled particles to the target world, then use what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’ to make these particles assume the exact state of another collection of entangled particles back on Earth," Darling speculated.

Doing so opens the prospect for genuinely teleporting a robot vehicle — or even an entire human crew — across interplanetary or, in the long run, across interstellar distances, Darling said.

"Certainly, if it becomes possible to teleport humans," Darling said, "you can envisage people hopping to the moon or to other parts of the solar system, as quickly and as easily as we move data around the Internet today."