Nanoscienceinfo

Washington, D.C. – January 28, 2008
Source: US EPA
http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/
7acfb14b11808efb852573de006b3f4b?OpenDocument

Americans are famous for building big: the tallest sky scraper, the biggest jet, the widest plasma TV screen. But now U.S. entrepreneurs are considering thinking small. Nanotechnology uses particles 80,000 times smaller than a human hair; yet the new technology has the potential to quickly clean up pollution, cure serious illnesses, and make the computer silicon chip obsolete. While EPA looks forward to new environmental breakthroughs, the Agency’s first commitment is to protect human health and the environment. Therefore EPA has awarded 21 grants totaling $7.34 million to universities to investigate potential adverse health and environmental effects of manufactured nanomaterials.
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San Diego, CA, February 4th, 2008
Source: NanoTechnologyNow.com
http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=27868

Nacalai USA, the San Diego, California-based life science reagent and chemical company, announced today that it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Westwood, Massachusetts-based Nano-C, Inc, a leading manufacturer of nanostructured carbon materials, to co-develop industrial scale use of HPLC technology for production of fullerenes and their chemical derivatives. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.  As part of the agreement, Nacalai USA will provide Nano-C with its expertise in liquid chromatographic purification of fullerenes and other nanostructured carbon materials.
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By Julie Steenhuysen /Editing by Maggie Fox and Mohammad Zargham
Chicago, Jan 28, 2008
Source: Reuters.com
http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN2848581520080128

Transistor radios tinier than a grain of sand, made using nanotechnology, can not only tune in to the traffic report, but may end up outperforming current silicon-based electronics, U.S. researchers said on Monday.  The researchers made the microscopic radios out of carbon nanotubes — tiny strands of carbon atoms — and say in theory they could lead to faster devices.  They overcame a series of obstacles that have defeated efforts to make nano-radios, including getting amplification, by making their devices on quartz wafers. (more…)

Somenath Mitra and Cheng Li
Source: SPIE.org  /Feb 15, 2008
http://spie.org/x19641.xml?highlight=x2358

Single-wall carbon nanotubes improve the performance of organic photovoltaics and could bring them closer to practical implementation.  Harvesting energy directly from the abundant resource of solar radiation through the use of solar cells is increasingly becoming a major component of future global energy production. Other renewable energy sources, like wind and hydroelectric power, can require large scale infrastructure. Solar energy, on the other hand, only needs solar cells and sunshine. Technologically feasible solutions are available today for solar electricity generation. They are predominantly based on the use of silicon conversion cells. The most efficient cells, however, use relatively expensive high-quality single-crystal or amorphous silicon wafers. Unless there are major breakthroughs, current silicon-based thin-film technologies may be reaching their limit in terms of their ratio of cost to efficiency.
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* The Nanotube Site
http://www.pa.msu.edu/cmp/csc/nanotube.html

* A carbon nanotube page
http://www.personal.rdg.ac.uk/~scsharip/tubes.htm

* Carbon Nanotubes
http://www.research.ibm.com/nanoscience/nanotubes.html

* Carbon nanotubes (an artilce from Physicsweb of Inst. of Physics)
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/11/1/9

*  Nanotechnology-now.com
http://www.nanotech-now.com/nanotube-buckyball-sites.htm

* Basic Properties of Carbon Nanotubes
http://www.applied-nanotech.com/cntproperties.htm

* Carbon Nanotubes image gallery
http://eoeml-web.gtri.gatech.edu/jready/main.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are an allotrope of carbon. They take the form of cylindrical carbon molecules and have novel properties that make them potentially useful in a wide variety of applications in nanotechnology, electronics, optics and other fields of materials science. They exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, and are efficient conductors of heat. Inorganic nanotubes have also been synthesized.

Nanotubes are members of the fullerene structural family, which also includes buckyballs. Whereas buckyballs are spherical in shape, a nanotube is cylindrical, with at least one end typically capped with a hemisphere of the buckyball structure. Their name is derived from their size, since the diameter of a nanotube is on the order of a few nanometers (approximately 50,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair), while they can be up to several millimeters in length. There are two main types of nanotubes: single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) and multi-walled nanotubes (MWNTs).

Chris Cox, an Architectural entrepreneur, recently adopted the nanotube as a structural element in an award winning design by recently acclaimed architect, Emerson Prosser. (2006)

Manufacturing a nanotube is dependent on applied quantum chemistry, specifically, orbital hybridization. Nanotubes are composed entirely of sp2 bonds, similar to those of graphite. This bonding structure, which is stronger than the sp3 bonds found in diamond, provides the molecules with their unique strength. Nanotubes naturally align themselves into “ropes” held together by Van der Waals forces. Under high pressure, nanotubes can merge together, trading some sp2 bonds for sp3 bonds, giving great possibility for producing strong, unlimited-length wires through high-pressure nanotube linking.