Category Archives: Research

Manipulating Carbon Nanotubes

Photo: At left, the high conductance state has two molecular orbitals, shown in green. Some molecules even let the nanotube switch between highly conductive, left, and poorly conductive. MIT materials scientists tame tricky carbon nanotubes:

Now Young-Su Lee, an MIT graduate student in materials science and engineering, and Nicola Marzari, an associate professor in the same department, have identified a class of chemical molecules that preserve the metallic properties of carbon nanotubes and their near-perfect ability to conduct electricity with little resistance.

Using these molecules as handles, Marzari and Lee said, could overcome fabrication problems and lend the nanotubes new properties for a host of potential applications as detectors, sensors or components in novel optoelectronics.

Engineering Delivery Systems to the Brain

Engineering a ‘Trojan horse’ to sneak drugs into the brain by Terry Devitt:

Using engineered yeast as microscopic factories to produce human antibodies customized to recognize the surface features of cells that compose the blood-brain barrier, Shusta has developed a set of unique antibodies that may one day be used to ferry drugs to specified regions of the brain.
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With roughly 400 miles of blood vessels, the human brain is equipped with its own expansive delivery network for therapy – provided scientists are able to figure out a way to get past the blood-brain barrier. With different cell surface features in different parts of the circulatory system and also in different regions of the brain, it might be possible to customize antibodies to carry drugs to only those parts of the brain that would benefit from treatment.

MIT’s molecular sieve advances protein research

Separating proteins from complex biological fluids such as blood is becoming increasingly important for understanding diseases and developing new treatments. The molecular sieve developed by MIT engineers is more precise than conventional methods and has the potential to be much faster.
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The key to the molecular sieve, which is made using microfabrication technology, is the uniform size of the nanopores through which proteins are separated from biological fluids. Millions of pores can be spread across a microchip the size of a thumbnail.
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Juhwan Yoo, a Caltech undergraduate, also participated in the research as a summer visiting student. Funding came from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Singapore-MIT Alliance.

Clean Water Filter

Clean water project hit by funding drought

Charities estimate that more than a billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. In some parts of Africa, water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery and viral diarrhoea claim the lives of one in four children.
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The Newcastle project began after a group of postgraduate civil engineering students visited Ghana, Kenya and Malaysia and recognised the huge benefits that sustainable water filtration could have on health. One of the students, Matt Simpson, decided to devote his doctoral research project to this topic.
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At these temperatures the crop residue decomposes, releasing carbon dioxide gas which forms microscopic pores in the ceramic material exactly the right size to trap bacteria and viruses but allow water to pass through.

They are looking for funding to expand the adoption of this effort.

Millennium Technology Prize to Dr. Shuji Nakamura

Photo of Dr. Shuji Nakamura (from UC Santa Barbara)

The Millennium Technology Prize is a bi-annual award recognizing technology innovators created by a public private partnership in Finland. Finland understands the importance of technology advances for economic gains. Winners receive 1 million Euros. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the web, received the first prize in 2004. The 2006 prize was awarded to Dr. Shuji Nakamura:

According to Professor Nakamura, we have only just begun to explore the vast number of opportunities presented by applications using LEDs and lasers. ”I hope the award of this prize will help people to understand that this invention makes it possible to improve quality of life for many millions of people. This is not just a source of light that makes enormous energy savings possible, it is also an innovation that can be used in the sterilisation of drinking water and for storing data in much more efficient ways.”

As LEDs can be powered by solar panels, lighting can be provided in remote areas of developing countries. In his speech, Professor Nakamura said that he will be donating part of the prize money to organizations that promote the use of LED lighting in such locations.

Bacteria Power Tiny Motor

Wheel of Life: Bacteria provide horsepower for tiny motor by Peter Weiss:

To make the motors, Hiratsuka’s team, led by Taro Q.P. Uyeda of the National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, borrowed fabrication techniques from the microelectronics industry.

The machinery of each motor consists of two parts: a ring-shaped groove etched into a silicon surface, and a star-shaped, six-armed rotor fabricated from silicon dioxide that’s placed on top of the circular groove. Tabs beneath the rotor arms fit loosely into the groove.

To prepare the bacterial-propulsion units, the team used a strain of the fast-crawling bacterium Mycoplasma mobile that was genetically engineered to crawl only on a carpet of certain proteins, including one called fetuin. The researchers laid down fetuin within the circular groove and coated the rotor with a protein called streptavidin.

Nanoscientists Create Biological Switch

Nanoscientists Create Biological Switch From Spinach Molecule:

The scientists used a scanning tunneling microscope to image chlorophyll-a and then injected it with a single electron to manipulate the molecule into four positions, ranging from straight to curved, at varying speeds. Though the Ohio University team and others have created two-step molecule switches using scanning tunneling microscope manipulation in the past, the new experiment yields a more complex multi-step switch on the largest organic molecule to date.

The work has immediate implications for basic science research, as the configuration of molecules and proteins impacts biological functions. The study also suggests a novel route for creating nanoscale logic circuits or mechanical switches for future medical, computer technology or green energy applications, said Hla, an associate professor of physics.

Open Access Legislation

25 provosts from top universities jointly released a letter supporting current legislation to require open publication of scientific research. Good.

Open access can also match the missions of scholarly societies and publishers who review, edit, and distribute research to serve the advancement of knowledge. Sharing the fruits of research and scholarship inevitably leads to the creation of more research and scholarship, thus highlighting the need for publishing professionals to manage the selection and review of the highest quality research, both publicly and privately funded. Open access to publications in no way negates the need for well-managed and effective peer review or the need for formal publishing.

via: e3 Information Overload, Rallying Behind Open Access:

The Federal Public Research Access Act would require federal agencies to publish their findings, online and free, within six months of their publication elsewhere.

It seems to me most grants for scientific research should require open publication. I can imagine exceptions, but it seems to me that the expectation should be for open publication, in this day and age, and only allow non-open publication with a good reason.

For public funded research this open access expectation seems obvious. For private foundations in most cases I would think open access publication makes sense also. What business model is used to allow open access is not important, in my opinion. The important factor is open access, how that is accomplished is something that can be experimented with.
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If I were making the decision for a university I would have expectations that we publish openly.

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Research Career in Industry or Academia

In, Working in Industry vs Working in Academia, a computer scientist (software engineering) shares their experience and opinion on research career options. He discusses 4 areas: freedom (to pursue your research), funding, time and scale, products (papers, patents, products).

In academia, you’re under a huge amount of pressure to publish publish publish!
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In industry, the common saying is that research can produce three things: products, patents, and papers (in that order). To be successful you need to produce at least two of those three; and the first two are preferred to the last one. Publishing papers is nice, and you definitely get credit for it, but it just doesn’t compare to the value of products and patents.

Nanocars

Nano Car image

‘Nanocar’ with buckyball wheels paves way for other molecular machines

“The synthesis and testing of nanocars and other molecular machines is providing critical insight in our investigations of bottom-up molecular manufacturing,” said one of the two lead researchers, James M. Tour, the Chao Professor of Chemistry, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and professor of computer science at Rice University. “We’d eventually like to move objects and do work in a controlled fashion on the molecular scale, and these vehicles are great test beds for that. They’re helping us learn the ground rules.”

The nanocar consists of a chassis and axles made of well-defined organic groups with pivoting suspension and freely rotating axles. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece. The entire car measures just 3-4 nanometers across, making it slightly wider than a strand of DNA. A human hair, by comparison, is about 80,000 nanometers in diameter.