nanotechnology

Our hearts leapt when we heard that scientists are working on a way to power your iPod using your own heartbeat. Researchers have developed nanotechnology that draws enough juice from even tiny human movements to power electronic devices--so you really can listen to your heart.

Scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology showed off their nanogenerator at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, Calif. We hear the afterparty at that little get-together was off the chain.

Read more of "iPod powered by the human heart hertz with every heartbeat" at Crave UK. … Read more

Academics working with carbon nanotubes have developed a low-power memory technology with application for smartphones, cameras, and other consumer gadgets.

The "mechanical arm" storage technology, developed by scientists at Edinburgh University, Seoul National University, and Konkuk University in South Korea, uses a tiny cantilevered arm to deliver charge to gate electrodes in storage devices.

"We've come up with a new way to do the [electrode] charging that consumes very little power," researcher Eleanor Campbell, who worked on the technology in Edinburgh's chemistry department, told ZDNet UK today. "We have a very little cantilevered … Read more

Researchers are using nanoparticles to create a material sensitive enough to analyze a person's breath in real time and detect indicators of cancer, diabetes, and other illnesses.

Scientists at Purdue University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology said today that even though diagnostic breath-analysis tools have been around for several decades, this is the first time a material has been developed that's sensitive enough to deliver on-the-spot results.

"We are talking about creating an inexpensive, rapid way of collecting diagnostic information about a patient," Carlos Martinez, an assistant professor of materials engineering at Purdue, … Read more

The California Institute of Technology is joining forces with France's CEA-Leti on a new initiative geared toward speeding delivery of nanotechnology systems and equipment from the lab to the business world.

The partnership will focus on several areas of nanotechnology systems, including high-sensitivity gas-phase chemical-sensing systems; highly multiplexed, microfluidic-interfaced mass spectrometry; and liquid-phase biochemical sensors for pharmaceutical research and point-of-care diagnostics.

Nanosystems are used to design microscopic, atomically precise structures and objects and are employed for a variety of applications and industries, from wireless devices to biology to health care.

CEA contributes to the nanotechnolgy field in four main … Read more

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Scientists at IBM Research say they have figured out for the first time how to record rapid changes at the level of individual atoms.

Until now, it has usually taken hours to get a picture of what is happening to a single atom. But according to IBM Research, scientists at Big Blue's $6 billion R&D unit have figured out how to use a scanning tunneling microscope to record and study very fast changes at the atomic level. It is thought that the scientists will now be able to record atoms' behavior at speeds of … Read more

An emerging technology called Lab-on-Bead could cut years off drug development time, according to new research to be published in the September/October issue of the Journal of Molecular Recognition.

Lab-on-Bead is a diagnostics tool that essentially decorates tiny beads--so small that roughly 1,000 of them could fit across a human hair--with pins designed to join the DNA bar codes of drugs to matching diseases. This process enables researchers to match drugs to diseases in a single step, speeding up drug discovery by up to 10,000 times, the team reports.

"There are an infinite number of possibilities … Read more

A group of international scientists have collaborated to create what they say is the "world's thinnest" and smoothest metallic lines which are used in electronic components. The technological breakthrough will aid in future miniaturization of devices, they say.

Singapore's Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) said Tuesday that scientists from IMRE, the University of Cambridge in the U.K., and Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea have succeeded in creating metallic lines so thin and smooth that they can only be seen using electron microscopes.

This breakthrough was achieved through "material and technique," IMRE … Read more

Sashaying down the runway this weekend toward the future of wearable technology: a solar-powered dress that revs gadgets via a USB charger located in the waist.

Parts of the dress come from Cornell University's Textiles Nanotech Laboratory, which teamed up with two Italian universities to create cotton threads that can conduct electrical currents, yet remain light and comfortable enough to feel like the good old cotton we all know and love to sleep in.

"Previous technologies have achieved conductivity, but the resulting fiber becomes rigid and heavy," said Juan Hinestroza, an assistant professor of Fiber Science and … Read more

BOSTON--Solasta, a quiet Boston-area company, says it's a few steps ahead of the many researchers trying to design flexible solar cells using nanotechnology.

The company is now in the process of seeking a Series B round of venture capital in the range of $20 million with a target of starting production by the end of next year, said chief technology officer and co-founder Michael Naughton here on Friday.

Solasta was spun out of Boston College and raised a $6 million Series A round in 2006 from venture capital company Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers in a deal led by … Read more