If you’re going to build a swarm of nanobots to take over the world, you’ll need a lot of very tiny batteries. You could build microscopic AAs with exceedingly diminutive tools, or turn to the best nano-scale builder known: Nature. Scientists at Yale were studying how some cells turn chemical energy into electrical energy (brain cells, the cells that give electric eels their zap) when they inadvertently created synthetic cell batteries.

The simple cells are essentially lipid sacks filled with salt water and a modified protein. When two of the synthetic cells touch, they stick together. The proteins create pores between the two cells. If the two cells have different salt concentrations, positive or negative ions will pass through the pores shared wall until salt concentrations in both cells reach an equilibrium. Stick the cells with electrodes to siphon off the ions and you’ve got a microscopic battery.

Two 200-nanoliter drops of the cells in solution can deliver electricity for about 10 minutes. An 11-microleter volume can put out a charge for more than four hours.

Researchers say the cells turn chemical energy into electrical energy at about 10 percent efficiency, which is frankly pretty terrible for a battery. But it’s pretty good when compared to tiny solar cells or piezoelectric devices that generate electricity from mechanical stress.

Link to Gizmag article

Batteries seem to be stuck in the days of Edison—heavy, toxic bricks that hold measly amounts of energy and wear out far too quickly. Even hallowed lithium-ion batteries are expensive and unstable. Thankfully the next generation of batteries are on the horizon, and they’re hellishly awesome.

Engineers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have revived lithium-sulphur batteries. They promise to pack three times as much power as lithium-ion batteries, and weigh much less than current power cells.

Lithium-sulphur batteries aren’t anything new. They were developed ages ago, but abandoned due to high cost, poor efficiency, and short lifespan. Charging and discharging a lithium-sulphur battery involves moving lithium ions between two electrodes within the battery. Theoretically, sulphur should be able to hold twice as many lithium ions. But sulphur is an insulator, making it difficult for electrons and ions to move freely into and out of the sulphur electrode.

The scientists at Waterloo have overcome the technical issues using a nanostructure of carbon rods. Sulphur is melted into the carbon nanostructure, giving ions much better access to the sulphur. Essentially, ions and electrons can travel down the carbon rods to reach the sulphur melted between them.

The battery is in testing phases right now, which means we’ll likely not see lithium-sulphur batteries in laptops, iPods, or electric cars for a few years.

Link to Gizmodo article

Link to Technology Review article

Québécois researchers have created solar-powered cyborg nanobots that use bacterial swarms to navigate Petri dishes.

Sylvain Martel and his team at the NanoRobotics Laboratory at the École Polytechnique de Montréal built a tiny solar-powered machine approximately 300 microns square that indirectly manipulates a swarm of bacteria that’s naturally sensitive to magnetic fields. The nanobot contains a pH sensor and a simple transmitter that sends electromagnetic pulses to an external computer. The computer reads the signals and adjusts a magnetic field to direct the bacteria. The machine is swept along in the swarm, moving from low to high pH areas in the dish.

It isn’t the researchers’ first foray into cyborg nanobot construction. They initially attached bacteria directly to the robots. But bacteria only have a lifespan of a few hours, making the symbiosis impractical. With the new method, fresh bacteria can be injected into the dish to revive the propulsion system.

The researchers say the method of propulsion could be used to guide tiny medical devices in the future.

Link to Technology Review article

Two teams of U.S. scientists have pushed Moor’s Law into overdrive, crafting transistors and memory storage material on the nano scale. 

Jeremy Levy and his team at the University of Pittsburgh have created two-nanometer transistors out of lanthanum aluminate and strontium titanate. Levy used an atomic force microscope to etch a miniscule wire between the two insulators, creating the world’s smallest transistor. Even more intriguing, the team was able to use the microscope to “erase” the wire. Using this technique, the team could conceivably reconfigure the transistor to make memory modules. 

Levy says he got the idea for the transistor from an Etch A Sketch, which uses a stylus to scrape aluminum powder off a glass plate.

The new transistor is several times smaller than the smallest silicon transistor (currently 45 nanometers).

Even better, Levy says that atomic force microscopes could be miniaturized down to the size of a wristwatch. Not that you’d ever want to set up a nano transistor factory on your wrist, but still.

Meanwhile, engineers/scientists/all-around-good-guys-and-gals at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Berkeley have created a method of reliably making thin-film polymer memory material. Others have tried to make polymer thin-film memory material, but it usually falls apart when spread over large surfaces.

The teams at Amherst and Berkeley used a lattice of sapphire crystals to make a grid to lay the thin-film sheet on. This makes nearly perfect arrays of film that’s 15 times denser than anything that’s ever been made before. And we’re talking dense, about 250 DVDs worth of data on a surface the size of a quarter.

Behold your Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Or at least the bits and pieces that could make one.

Link to University of Pittsburgh press release

Link to Wired article

Researchers at the University of San Diego have created hunter-killer nanoparticles that seek out and destroy cancer cells. The particles stick to the fast-growing blood vessels that feed cancerous growths and release chemotherapy drugs at the site, killing the vessels and starving the cancer cells of oxygen. 

Biologist David Cheresh and his team developed the particles, essentially nanocapsules coated in a protein that sticks to the quickly multiplying blood vessels. Each capsule contains a dose of the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin (Dox), which was developed in the ’50s based on a toxin in soil fungus. Dox is still used to treat cancer, but in very low doses. Fighting cancer with Dox is similar to carpet bombing a village to get a single enemy soldier. The drug is potent, but it tends to wreak havoc on the entire body. Side effects of the drug include nausea and heart failure.

Cheresh and his team injected the nanoparticles into mice with pancreatic and renal tumors that had spread throughout the rodents’ systems. The nanoassassins reduced the size of original tumors by 35 percent and the secondary tumors by 91 percent. Cheresh hopes to refine the particles and eventually use them to treat cancer in humans.

Link to NewScientist article.

All computer data boils down to ones and zeros. Until now, that is. A team of computer engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have figured out how to throw a “two” into the mix using copper nanowires, adding a third dimension to computing. They call the data triumvirates “trits,” and they could vastly increase the capacity of memory storage devices.

It works like this: Each nanowire is made up of two materials, a central core and a casing. Flashing a current through the wire causes either the core or the casing to phase change from crystalized (neat and orderly) to amorphous (jumbled and messy). The whole wire can either be crystalized or amorphous, representing a one or a zero, a traditional bit. Zapping the core crystalized and the casing amorphous or vice versa, adds the “two,” giving birth to the “trit.” 

Team member Ritesh Agarwal spoke to PhysOrg.com about the discovery:

“The use of nanowires to create electronic memory is advantageous for several reasons, but a non-binary form of nanowire memory like we have created could allow for a huge increase in the memory density of potential future devices.”

That means more memory in smaller packages and, eventually, digital wristwatches that are smarter than I am.

Link to PhysOrg.com article.

Before swarms of nanites can organize to eradicate the human race, they’ll need a leader. Engineers in Japan have made the first steps in creating such a microscopic overlord, building a nanomachine that imitates human brain cells. The tiny machine can receive information from the macro world and transmit it to a small cadre of its companions. Working in concert, teams of the molecular contraptions could do everything from terminate tumors to crunch vast amounts of data in the blink of an eye.

Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, in Tsukuba, Japan, led the team that developed the nanobrain. It’s made from 17 molecules of an compound called duroquinone, 16 arranged in orbit around one. The whole thing is held together by weak hydrogen bonds. Using a scanning electron microscope, Bandyopadhyay was able to send electrical impulses to the central molecule to change its configuration or state. The lead molecule then transfers its state to the other 16, like dominoes falling one after another.

It’s basically parallel processing on a micro scale, the same kind of number crunching that our brains are capable of. In fact, Bandyopadhyay modeled the microbrain on human glial cells, which pass info between neurons in the brain. They call it “one-to-many computation” and it’s key to parallel processing.

So what can it do? Bandyopadhyay estimates that the simple assembly is capable of generating more than 4 billion different outcomes from one input instruction. There’s no comparing true parallel processing to current processors, which crunch computations linearly. Parallel processors can take on millions of lines of instruction at once. That’s the kind of computing power that can keep Moore’s Law of exponential computing growth chugging away into stratospheric heights. 

And it’s not just powerful—the nanocomputer would represent a completely new way of computing. It’s purely visual, using patterns to replace the differential equations that are at the heart of current computing.

There’s also a potential to manufacture billions of molecules of a custom drug with just one instruction. Imagine a single drop of water hitting a placid pool. Waves radiate out from the site of impact, quickly covering the entire surface. A single instruction dropped into a field of similar nanomachines would spread in the same manner.

Bandyopadhyay is currently working to create more complex versions of his nanobrain and hopes to have a functional computer within a few years. The trick is finding something other than a massive tunneling electron microscope to interact with the machines. Bandyopadhyay hopes other control methods will be developed, including optical readers for the nanocomputers, or chemical triggers for the medical nanofactories.

Link to MSNBC article.

Link to BBC article.

Photo Credit: Rensselaer/Koratkar

Cover the insides of your boiler with copper nanorods and you’ll increase its steam output by a factor of 30, granting your fire-breathing steam-turbine velocipede the supersonic speeds befitting its polished-brass fittings. Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute made the discovery by accident, not while tinkering in their anachronistic steampunk workshops, but while conducting routine experiments with nanoparticles. The team sprayed an invisible forest of the miniscule copper rods on the bottom of a vessel. They soon realized that water boiled in the special pot turned to steam much faster than water boiled in a plain old tea kettle. 

The trick? If you want steam, you need water and air. Boiling water turns to steam only where it comes into contact with air. In a regular pot, all of the water can be hot enough to boil, but only a fraction of it is in contact with air. The forest of copper nanorods traps air molecules, which means far more water in contact with air. It’s effective: Nanorod-coated pots produce 3,000 percent more bubbles and a ton more steam than run-of-the-mill pots.

At first glance the discovery seems only relevant to steam engine buffs. But most of our electricity generated by steam turbines: coal or natural gas heats water to produce steam that turns turbines that spins generators that produce electricity. The copper nanorods could mean more efficient steam production, which means burning less coal or natural gas. It makes most power sources get cheaper. 

Nikhil A. Koratkar, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer:

“If the time taken to boil a given quantity of water is reduced by an order of magnitude, that should translate into significant cost savings” 

Link to Rensselaer release.

In celebration of the birth of my first son, I have decided to increase my coverage of all things small. Enter Nanorama, an onslaught of new articles about nanotechnology and a new “Nanotech” category! So ready your scanning electron microscopes and study up on your quantum theory, we’re getting small.

A newly designed nanomotor could be used to craft custom molecules one atom at a time, like a molecular ink jet printer. The motor, designed by Colin Lambert and his team at Lancaster University in the UK, would be constructed using three carbon nanotubes—one suspended between two others. A stream of electrons would spin the central tube, like a waterwheel in a river. 

Researchers claim they could pump atoms through the central tube, controlling chemical reactions to form exotic molecules with unfathomable properties. The motors could also be tiny, tiny computer components—using the positions of individual atoms within the central tube to represent ones and zeroes. The components would be incredibly dense, about 10 times as small as current processors and memory chips.

Researchers say that the motors should be pretty easy to build.

No news on whether they could be used to build indestructible colonies of nanites that would eventually devour the human race, however.

Link to NewScientist article.