X-Message-Number: 19866 From: "Gina Miller" <> References: <> Subject: The Nanogirl News~ Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 20:02:48 -0700 The Nanogirl News August 21, 2002 Nanoscale metal deposition eyed for MRAMs. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory say their new technique for fabricating magnetic tunnel junctions would enable magnetoresistive random-access memories (MRAMs) to be economically manufactured. PNNL chief scientist Scott Chambers was able to form atomically flat crystalline films of metal measuring only a few atoms thick on sapphire. (EET imes 8/20/02) http://www.eetimes.com/at/news/OEG20020819S0046 Nanotech by the Numbers. It's virtual reality, writ small: atom-by-atom simulations of new materials could usher in the nanotech future sooner than anybody imagined. In his cramped cubicle at Nanomix, a nanotechnology company in Emeryville, CA, just across the bay from San Francisco, theoretical physicist Seung-Hoon Jhi peers at a computer model of a hydrogen fuel tank, carefully tracking the movement of individual molecules. As he raises the temperature of a simulated sheet of boron and nitrogen atoms from a frigid 50 Kelvin to a slightly less chilly 80 Kelvin, he watches the reaction of a handful of hydrogen molecules dotting its surface. The boron nitride sheet undulates, yet the hydrogen molecules hold fast. It's an encouraging sign in a virtual experiment that may have just saved weeks or months of painstaking experimental testing in Nanomix's effort to develop more efficient hydrogen storage materials for fuel cell cars. (The September issue of Technology Review) http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/fairley0902.asp Shrinking toward the Ultimate Transistor. Electronic devices go atomic: Is this really the end? In the half-century since the transistor was invented, this workhorse component of almost every electronic device has shrunk from the size of a pencil eraser to smaller than a bacterium. The miniaturization of transistors and their sister circuit components has led to an explosion of machine intelligence in countless types of devices from computers to greeting cards. Just how much smaller transistors can get is a multibillion-dollar question. Theorists have long pondered, When will the shrinkage finally be brought to a screeching halt? If components get too small, the laws of physics seem to preclude reliable transistor action. (Science news online 8/10/02) http://www.sciencenews.org/20020810/bob9.asp Discovery could bring widespread uses for 'nanocrystals'. Researchers at Purdue University have made a surprising discovery that could open up numerous applications for metal "nanocrystals," or tiny crystals that are often harder, stronger and more wear resistant than the same materials in bulk form. The research engineers have discovered that the coveted nanocrystals are contained in common scrap, the chips that are normally collected and melted down for reuse. "Imagine, you have all of these bins full of chips, and they get melted down as scrap," said Srinivasan Chandrasekar, a professor of industrial engineering. "But, in some sense, the scrap could be more valuable pound-for-pound than the material out of which the part is made." (Purdue University 8/16/02) http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/020816.Chandrasekar.nano.html Hoping for very big, yet extremely small, discoveries. Nobody knows what the Incredible Shrinking Man saw when he disappeared from view, but the U.S. Department of Energy wants to find out.The agency is building five nanoscience facilities across the country that will study the science of the very small. Nanoscience investigates interactions, reactions and construction of materials the size of atoms and molecules. And it turns out, the Incredible Shrinking Man - made famous in a 1957 sci-fi film - would have been quite surprised by what that tiny world looks like. "Materials behave very differently on a nano scale," said Don Parkin, associate director of the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, which will be operated by Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico. (KnoxNews 8/19/02) http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/national/article/0,1406,KNS_350_1336387,00.html The next big tiny thing: Nanotechnology runs into new criticism. The great Gray Goo debate is beginning to matter. The controversy involves the potential perils of making molecule-size objects and devices - a field known as nanotechnology. From it's earliest days, nanotechnology has its fear-mongers, warning of novel and terrifying risks. Who could be sure how products so small that they would be invisible to the human eye would behave, particularly when the nanoworld's basic design element - atoms and small molecules - can only be described by the laws of quantum mechanics rather than the more familiar Newtonian physics of large objects? (By New York Times Barnaby J. Feder, on International Herald Tribune 8/20/02) Click the text to keep scrolling down. http://www.iht.com/articles/68166.html Self-assembly technique emulates nature to build designer polymers from modular parts Future designer polymers may be assembled like children's Lego toys using modular polymer scaffolds programmed to attract building blocks of small molecules. Weak and easily reversed chemical interactions would self-assemble those molecules to form complex structures with predictable physical and chemical properties. In the natural world, self-assembly techniques produce thousands of varied life forms -- bacteria to human beings -- based a relatively small set of amino acids and nucleotides combined in different ways. By emulating this natural system, polymer chemists at the Georgia Institute of Technology hope to simplify the synthesis of new materials for light-emitting diodes, optical storage materials, biosensors, drug-delivery materials and other applications. (8/18/02) http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-08/giot-ste081802.php Stamps and glue make circuits. Rubber stamps, ink and glue -- tools of choice for grade school art projects -- are the inspirations for a printing technique that could rapidly and cheaply produce integrated circuits at least as small as those in today's computer chips. Researchers at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories have developed a way of stamping microscopic circuits onto surfaces such as plastic and silicon. The method calls for etching circuit patterns into a stamp and using glue to transfer gold from the stamp to a surface. The circuit patterns can contain features 10 times smaller than a bacterium. The nanotransfer printing process could eventually be used to make circuits and connectors for plastic electronics, an emerging technology used to make electronic paper and flexible displays. (TRN News 8/21/02) http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2002/082102/Stamps_and_glue_make_circuits_0821 02.html From dust to dust ... to a diamond. Process transforms cremated remains into synthetic gem. They say diamonds are forever. And now the dearly departed can be, too. A Chicago company says it has developed a process for turning cremated human remains into diamonds that can be worn as jewelry. "We're building on the simple fact that all living creatures are carbon-based and diamonds are carbon-based," said Greg Herro, head of LifeGem Memorials. http://www.msnbc.com/news/797323.asp?0si=- Duke Chemists Describe Progress At Making 'Buckytubes' Suitable For Nanoelectronic Devices. Duke University chemists are producing increased quantities of single walled carbon nanotubes, sometimes called "buckytubes," in forms suitable for use in futuristic molecular scale electronic devices. A team led by Duke assistant professor of chemistry Jie Liu, http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jliu/labgroup/, is producing nanotubes in larger numbers by altering their recipes for making the molecules. They also are growing the molecules on silicon surfaces to guarantee their purity and favorable electronic properties. (Duke News Service 8/21/02) http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/nanotubes.html Blue light special: Kopin Corp. tweaks tiny diodes to create CyberLite, a nanotech breakthrough. Kopin Corp.'s newest innovation is nothing big. The Taunton-based technology company announced a breakthrough late last month in its development of light-emitting diodes, creating blue LEDs that are smaller than a grain of sand - yet efficient, solid-state sources of illumination. Kopin, which has a major manufacturing plant in Westborough, believes it can mass-produce what it calls the CyberLite for use in compact devices such as wireless phones, video cameras and personal digital assistants. If CyberLite is successful, this third Kopin product line could bring big returns and spark a revolution in energy-efficient lighting. (Metro West Daily news 20/19/02) http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/local_regional/kopin08192002.htm (Nanotech webwatch from NanotechPlanet) NanoMagnetics Turns to Protein to Help Disks Bulk Up. The market for hard disk drives once resembled the market for computer chips. For chips, which kept up with Moore's Law, the sizes got smaller and the speeds got faster. For hard disks, areal densities, the amount of data that can be packed onto a storage medium, increased every year from their introduction in the mid-1950s. "It pretty much matched the Moore's Law story in those early years," NanoMagnetics CEO Brendan Hegarty said of the disk industry. Hegarty spent 20 years in the industry with IBM and Seagate, retiring as Seagate's Chief Operating Officer in 1998. While at IBM in 1967, Hegarty recalled, there was one disk that held 7 Mb and was the size of washing machine. (Boston/Internetnews.com 8/21/02) http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/1449991 Genicon brings its molecular-level methods to the research market. Genicon Sciences and its venture capital investors are hoping that big things really do come in little packages. The privately held San Diego biotechnology company in July launched its first product - a way to analyze genes that Genicon boasts is the first true nanotechnology to make it to the life sciences market. Nanotechnology, the science of engineering at the molecular level, comes from the word nanometer - which is a billionth of a meter, the length of about five atoms. (SignOnSanDiego.com 8/16/02) http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/biotech/20020816-9999_1b16nano.h tml Wildlife park to add mammoth attraction. In an eerie recreation of Steven Spielberg's blockbuster movie "Jurassic Park", scientists are planning to clone an extinct animal to be the central attraction of a wildlife park. The Times of London reports that Japanese scientists are planning to use tissue from the legs and testicles of a dead mammoth to clone the extinct creature and display it at an Ice Age wildlife park in Siberia. (CNN 8/21/02) http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/08/21/clone.mammoth/index.html Successful scholar thinks small. WhILE young people are often urged to "think big" when making career plans, Harvard University research fellow Dr Chan Seng Yoot is walking proof that there is much to be said for thinking small. Her work is in the study and manipulation of materials at molecular level. In nanotechnology, scientists shrink common materials and study the kinds of unusual properties they exhibit. "One nanometer is one billionth of a metre or 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a strand of hair,'' she explains. So, how can nanotechnology change our lives? Dr Chan, 29, cites one commercial possibility in magnetic data storage, namely increas- ing the capacity of floppy and compact discs. (The Star 8/18/02) http://www.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2002/8/18/education/sjharvard &sec=education (Company Profile) NanoInk writes it's own ticket using quills on the nanoscale. NanoInk Inc., a mere seven months old, has released its first product: a software-and-supplies package that turns any atomic force microscope into a Dip-Pen Nanolithography (DPN) machine. DPN-System-1 retails for $30,000 to $40,000 and is targeted to research labs. Now comes the hard part - making a bunch of AFM pen tips work in an array large enough for manufacturing. The company promises an array product by early 2003. (SmallTimes 8/19/02) http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=4448 High-speed network connection ties top universities to ORNL. Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new computer link to Atlanta is 200,000 times faster than the fastest dial-up connections typical of home computers and is expected to spur significant advances in science and economic development in the region and beyond. (Oak Ridge National Laboratory 8/14/02) http://www.ornl.gov/Press_Releases/current/mr20020814-00.html Carbon nanotube networks fall into line. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US, have used carbon nanotubes as a template for growing networks of aligned carbon nanotubes. They reported the two-step chemical-vapour deposition process in Applied Physics Letters. "We wanted to explore the possibility of using nanotubes themselves as pattern masks for growing organized carbon nanotube array patterns of different length scales," Anyuan Cao of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute told nanotechweb.org." (Nanotechweb 8/20/02) http://nanotechweb.org/articles/news/1/8/16/1 Uterus transplant results in live births. The world's first live births from a transplanted uterus have been achieved, say Swedish researchers. The procedure, conducted in mice, would be easier to repeat in humans, they predict. A mouse uterus is V-shaped. The team led by Mats Br nnstr m at G teborg University, Sweden, grafted one arm of the V from a donor mouse into another's abdomen, alongside its existing uterus. In a woman, the procedure would involve removing the existing organ and replacing the whole donor uterus. (NewScientist 8/21/02) http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992694 (Exclusive Feature) Down to the wire -- requirements for nanometer design implementation. By Ping Chao and Lavi Lev. Implementing nanometer-scale ICs begins and ends with wires. Wires are so dominant that little is known about a design's performance or manufacturability without them. In fact, nanometer design strategies that are not clearly focused on rapid wire creation, optimization, and analysis are destined to fail.This paper describes the requirements for an effective, reliable IC implementation platform for the 90 nm process node and beyond. It begins with a description of the central role wires play in nanometer design and why traditional linear design flows are insufficient. It then describes a new continuous convergence methodology, which has proven highly valuable at 0.13 micron and will be absolutely necessary at 90 nm. (EEDesign.com 8/15/02) http://www.eedesign.com/features/exclusive/OEG20020815S0053 (Feature) Nanotubes speed up. Transistors fabricated from carbon nanotubes now have electrical characteristics that can rival silicon devices. The idea of using molecules as electronic components has been around since at least 1974, when Ari Aviram of IBM in New York and Mark Ratner, then at New York University, showed theoretically that a molecule placed between two metal electrodes can act as a rectifier. However, it took more than 20 years before an individual molecule was successfully connected to two nanofabricated electrodes in an experiment. The difficulties lay in the manipulation of single molecules and in the ability to build electrodes separated by only a few nanometres. (Nenotechweb.org 8/16/02) http://nanotechweb.org/articles/feature/1/8/3/1 'Nanoantennas' could bring sensitive detectors, optical circuits. Researchers have shown how tiny wires and metallic spheres might be arranged in various shapes to form "nanoantennas" that dramatically increase the precision of medical diagnostic imaging and devices that detect chemical and biological warfare agents. Engineers from Purdue University have demonstrated through mathematical simulations that nanometer-scale antennas with certain geometric shapes should be able to make possible new sensors capable of detecting a single molecule of a chemical or biological agent. Such an innovation could result in detectors that are, in some cases, millions of times more sensitive than current technology. (Purdue News 8/21/02) http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/020821.Shalaev.nanoantenna.html Gina "Nanogirl" Miller Nanotechnology Industries http://www.nanoindustries.com Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org Extropy member http://www.extropy.org "Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future." Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19866