Nanoclast

Last week I shared a video on this blog in which the noted University of Cambridge scientist, Professor Mark Welland, envisioned that someday nanotechnology could enable a device that would be implanted into our brain and would allow us to not only communicate with people like a miniature mobile phone but also would allow us to feel their sensations.

I was intrigued on where this idea came from based on the Cambridge Nanoscience Center’s current list of research projects. But over at Frogheart, the prospect of such a device seemed a good deal more foreboding.

This concern led to Frogheart discovering a very interesting story published over at Nanowerk in which researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health, have developed a brain implant that melts into place and can record the brain’s activity when exposed to visual stimuli.

The work was published in Nature Materials. While strictly speaking the device is not on the nanoscale, it’s clear to see that further development of the technology could lead down this road.

Nanowerk provides a quote from one of the researchers on the project. "The focus of our study was to make ultrathin arrays that conform to the complex shape of the brain, and limit the amount of tissue damage and inflammation," said Brian Litt, M.D., an author on the study and an associate professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. 

The immediate applications for such a technology would be to treat epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and neurological disorders. However, one does think this might be the way that Professor Welland’s vision could be realized—whatever misgivings some may have with such a prospect. 

When I saw the initial news reports on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, after I shook my head in despair for that region already struck by Hurricane Katrina just five years ago, I thought of how long it would take for people to turn to nanotechnology for a possible solution to clean up the mess.

I guess I wasn’t the only person to think this as the blog Nanopatents and Innovations pulled out at least four patents and/or innovations in nanomaterials that address the cleanup or remediation of oil spills.

Now as anyone who is familiar with how technologies are developed knows it is a far cry from securing a patent to getting it do something in the real world.

So to get a sense of where we really are I wanted to get the perspective of my colleague, Tim Harper, who in addition to being a noted expert on the commercialization of nanotechnologies also has devoted his attention to the use of nanotechnologies in cleantech including its remediation capabilities, leading him to his presentation this week in Australia at the conference Cleantech Science and Solutions: mainstream and at the edge.

“If you are looking for a quick fix from nanotechnology, forget it,” says Harper. “Nanotech is already making an impact in reducing energy, and therefore oil use, it is also being used to create stronger lighter materials that can be used for pipelines, and enabling better sensors for early warning of damage, but in terms of cleaning up the mess, the contribution is minor at best.”

Clearly not the hopeful words that many would have hoped for, and the pity is that it might have been different, according to Harper.

“As with all technologies, the applications take a while to develop,” he says. “If someone had come up with some funding 10 years ago for this specific application then we may have had better tools to deal with it.”

The situation is not without its irony, of course, since the reason we are not currently in a position to use nanomaterials for cleaning up this oil spill is in part environmental concerns.

“It is somewhat ironic that we spend so much time and effort worrying about the safety of a variety of nanomaterials that most people are unlikely to ever come into contact with, while we don't seem to be able to avoid environmental catastrophes on the scale of the Gulf of Mexico oil spillage occurring,” says Harper.

The way forward, according to Harper, will not be a quick fix but dedicated and broad-based work.

“As these events seem unavoidable, we should be looking at all forms of technology to enable a better disaster response,” urges Harper. “From engineering better nanomaterials for oil production, through to using biotech and synthetic biology to create organisms that can transform spilt oil into something more manageable, but more importantly reducing our dependence on something as messy, dangerous and polluting as oil.” 

While Harper did not note this, it would seem that for a small portion of the billions of dollars BP (or any oil company) is going to spend on containing and cleaning up this mess in the Gulf they could have now at their disposal a nanomaterial for cleaning up oil spills, and have gotten out of this on the cheap. But foresight is not the strong suit of businesses built around short-term profit motives as evidenced by them not even investing in the remote systems that would have turn the oil well off and possibly avoided the entire problem.

It seems that making videos available on the Internet that explain nanotechnology has almost become a sub-genre in the video clip universe. We have had competitions to find the best video for this purpose and gone so far as to create categories for the competition. Even noted nanotech experts have offered their take in video form on why anyone should care about nanotechnology, or if they do what it really means.

You might get the impression that I am somehow disapproving of these endeavors. On the contrary, I am addicted to them. The latest video in this growing genre is the product of a joint effort by the European Commission’s (EC) NANOYOU project  and the Nanoscience Centre at the University of Cambridge.

The quality of the video is given a huge boost by having the noted actor, essayist and so-called renaissance man, Stephen Fry, as the narrator. It seems that Mr. Fry has taken quite an interest in nanotechnology of late with his implicit recommendation of a UK report that contained somewhat dubious assertions.

The video does all the things you hope a video explaining nanotechnology would do, namely it tries to give a sense of the scale and what happens to materials at that scale and why that’s important. Of course, because it’s the University of Cambridge and nanotechnology the “Morph Phone” is trotted out again…sigh.

But I have to say it’s all really well done. Perhaps the most intriguing bit is at the end when are presented what the future of nanotechnology might be. Of course, we are given the molecular manufacturing future, but we are also presented with Professor Mark Welland’s vision of a future device that would be implanted into us and would operate “like a small mobile phone” with which we could not only communicate with anyone our mind thought of contacting, but we could also experience the sensations of that person. In Welland’s example he could talk to his son climbing the Himalayan mountains and also sense his experiences. 

A fun game is going through the current research projects at the University of Cambridge’s Nanoscience Centre and try to figure out which one of these projects might eventually lead us to such a device.

One of the biggest commercial applications of spintronics in computing to date has been the use of giant magnetoresistance (GMR), the material phenomenon that makes possible the huge storage capacity of today’s hard disk drives.

In the awarding of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics, GMR was cited as the first big commercial application for nanotechnology.

But extending the commercial application of spintronic-enabled systems beyond read heads for HDDs has proven to be a difficult task. One need only look at the seemingly endless travails of NVE Corporation, which in its financial results still shows it greatest revenue growth in contract research as opposed to product sales.

While recent research from a team of researchers at Ohio State University and the University of Hamburg in Germany may not turn around the fortunes of spintronics in the short term, it does provide a way to better characterize the spin of electrons and thereby promises better ways of exploiting it for electronics applications.

The researchers are reporting in Nature Nanotechnology that they have for the first time been able to create images of the spin direction of electrons.

They were able accomplish this feat by creating a custom-made scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) that was equipped with an iron-coated tip. In conjunction with this STM, the researchers used a plate of manganese as a substrate on which they manipulated individual cobalt atoms. The researchers were able to get the individual cobalt atoms onto this substrate by using the iron-coated tip of the STM, the process of which also resulted in altering the electrons' spin. At the same time, the STM took pictures of the spin.

According to the Science Daily article cited above, one of the researchers Saw-Wai Hla, an associate professor of physics and astronomy in Ohio University's Nanoscale and Quantum Phenomena Institute, believes this new imaging method could have broad reaching consequences for the future of spintronics in electronics and computing. 

"Different directions in spin can mean different states for data storage," said Saw-Wai Hla. "The memory devices of current computers involve tens of thousands of atoms. In the future, we may be able to use one atom and change the power of the computer by the thousands."

While avoiding terrorists attacks from Italian eco-terrorists, IBM researchers in Zurich have developed a patterning technique that is able to produce structures 80% to 90% more cheaply than electron beam lithography.

The work, which was originally reported in the journals Advanced Materials and Science is described in this video.

 The technique, which uses a heated silicon tip attached to a flexible cantilever, can make structures with features as small as 15 nanometers. To demonstrate this capability the researchers created 3D maps of the world that are so small that 1000 of these maps could fit onto a grain of salt.

Of course, in order to have the technique work the researchers needed to develop special materials and in these demonstrations the materials are a phthalaldehyde polymer film and molecular glass. 

The “a-ha” moment occurred to IBM Urs Duerig when he realized that they were removing material rather than displacing it after he looked at some indent patterns that were much different than from what he was expecting. According to Duerig, it was like fulfilling a dream of his of engraving information like the Egyptians chiseled characters into stone but doing it on the nanoscale.

So what happens when a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist trains his focus on how government (in this case, the US government) is responding to concerns about the risk of nanoparticles? Well, you get posturing.

Andrew Schneider wrote a series of stories for AOL News with the title “The Nanotech Gamble”. You can guess where this investigation is headed, right?

That’s right. We get hyperbole that borders on the misleading, or shall we say: wrong. For example, as noted over at the blog Frogheart, Schneider makes the statement in one of his articles from his investigative series that “…the NIOSH team discovered that beyond the well-documented lung damage that comes from inhalation of carbon nanotubes…”.

Now we could quibble and speculate about what Schneider meant by the adjective “well-documented” but at least one clear implication is that many studies have shown that carbon nanotubes cause lung damage. Now as far as I know, and Mr. Schneider or anyone sympathetic to his views should feel free to show me otherwise, there has been one study that links carbon nanotubes to lung damage.

While the research was done by one of the most eminent nanotechnology and toxicology experts in the world, and showed how the length of carbon nanotubes caused the same pathogenic effects as asbestos, there were some rather big gaps in that study. The study provided no data on key toxicological elements such as dose or exposure. To get more perspective on the study, I refer you to Richard Jones’ analysis of the study that came out at the time of its publication.

Not only is this study inconclusive in some important areas on determining whether carbon nanotubes damage your lungs, but it is also hardly a tidal wave of studies that would constitute a description like “well-documented”.

As shocking as this may sound, the reputation of Pulitzer Prize winning journalists is rarely built on balanced explanations but often are more about “blowing the lid off” of some human endeavor by exposing some scandal, whether it be real or merely implied.

So, what is the response? I am afraid the response has been somewhat ham-handed. Andrew Maynard over at his 20/20 Blog has a pretty thorough review of the whole imbroglio. Apparently, Schneider’s piece triggered Clayton Teague, Director of the US National Nanotechnology Coordination Office (NNCO) to write a response on the pages of AOL News.

But it didn’t end there. So stinging was the piece to the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) and the NNCO that they felt compelled to circulate a set of talking points to participants at a recent public forum on nanotechnology that attempted to refute many of Schneider’s points. Here’s are the talking points circulated by the federal government to participants at the March 30-31 NNI Capstone meeting on March 26 and as provided in Maynard’s blog:

• AOL Web site is running a three-day series on nanotechnology by a reporter who has spent months reporting the story, including interviews with many agency scientists.
• Takes an alarmist perspective: Despite the lack of evidence that anyone has ever been harmed by an engineered nano product, it presumes that nanotechnology (wrongly construed to be a singular entity) is inherently dangerous until proven safe, ignoring reality that nanotech encompasses an enormous range of materials and products whose risk—if any—depends on where and how they are made and used.
• Uses irrelevant examples, for example: Cites a study finding DNA damage in mice fed nano-TiO2 (used in paint and sunscreens), but no studies have shown a convincing link between this widely used chemical and human illness and the story does not mention (but we have checked and learned) that exposures in the study were more than 10 times those allowed in food by FDA regs.
• Claims that “most federal agencies “are doing little to nothing to ensure public safety” and are “ignoring warning signs.” Truth is the U.S. is the global leader in research into nanotech’s potential environmental, health, and safety (EHS) risks.
  • Between FY 2005 and FY 2009 the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) will have invested $254 million in research whose primary function is to understand EHS issues—more than all other countries in the world combined. And that does not count the large amounts of research that contribute to health and safety knowledge indirectly, such as basic research on how to measure the stuff in the first place.
  • Federal research dedicated to nano-related EHS research has grown substantially from $34.8 million in FY 2005 to $74.5 million in FY 2009 and an estimated $91.6 million for FY 2010. The FY 2011 request is a record $116.9 million.
• Risk must be balanced against benefits, and the essentially theoretical risk that has so far been identified should be balanced against the benefits in terms of sophisticated products and economic growth and jobs created by this expanding industry.
• Just yesterday (Thurs) PCAST released its report on the National Nanotechnology Initiative—the 10-year-old, multi-agency initiative that has supported this fledgling science of the extremely small to the tune of about $12 billion over the past decade—finding that the U.S. is the global leader in nanotech by any number of measures (including patent filings, scientific journal citations, and investments in R&D).  This is a young and promising industry we can still own as a Nation, so we should not let fear overtake common sense, even as safety studies and regulatory updates continue.

Whether the circulation of these talking points crossed some line, I am not going to debate here (although I am beginning to have that discussion on Maynard’s website). Instead I would prefer to point out how remarkably unhelpful all of this is towards addressing the risk issues of nanoparticles.

It seems that despite governments funneling funds towards toxicological studies and risk assessments of nanoparticles all we seem to get are endless catalogues of what we know and what we don’t know and little in the shape of lab research.

Thanks to TNTLog I now understand that this isn’t  just some perceived notion of mine but is actually the only way that toxicologists can respond given the level of funding. As TNTLog notes:

“When toxicologists ask for a global well funded long term study to allow the modeling of the interaction of various categories of nanomaterials with the environment, the funding agencies can only manage rustle up a few hundred thousand euros for a two or three year project. That gets you nowhere in understanding a new and rapidly emerging class of materials, so we just end up paying great scientists to sit on their backsides and browse the web for a few years.”

So, let’s set aside all the conspiracy theories of a complicit government in cahoots with big business to poison us with nanoparticles or on the other side empty counter arguments about how much is being spent on the research when everyone knows it’s not enough to get this all sorted out. Let’s get it done already.

Researchers at Oregon State University and Yeungnam University in Korea have reported in the latest edition of Current Applied Physics that they have successfully used continuous flow microreactors to make thin film absorbers for solar cells.

The system actually employs the century-old method of chemical bath deposition, but manages to do it with a high level of control over the thickness of the deposited layer. It seems the method will be far more economical than other manufacturing methods used for depositing nanostructure films on substrate, such as sputtering, evaporation, and electrodeposition, which can be time consuming, or require expensive vacuum systems or exotic chemicals that raise production costs.

“We’ve now demonstrated that this system can produce thin-film solar absorbers on a glass substrate in a short time, and that’s quite significant,” Chih-hung Chang, an associate professor in the OSU School of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering is quoted as saying in the OSU press release. “That’s the first time this has been done with this new technique.”

According to Chang in the same press release, further work is still needed on process control, testing of the finished solar cell, improving its efficiency to rival that of vacuum-based technology, and scaling up the process to a commercial application.

While potentially lowering production costs is always a good thing, it seems odd to focus on reducing manufacturing costs for a product that already is significantly cheaper to produce than its silicon rival but still lacks in silicon’s efficiency in turning sunlight into electricity.

I have lamented before on this unsatisfactory choice between efficiency or lower production costs in photovoltaics. Perhaps as one of the comments on my previous post suggested, we should aim at the “McDonald’s Model” just: “Make 'em cheap, make 'em fast, make 'em consistent, and have 'em ready when I'm hungry.”

But key to that working will be achieving competitive per kilowatt hour (kWh) that gets closer to the cost of generating electricity from wind ($0.05 per kWh) than where solar cells are at the moment (around $0.30 per kWh). I am not sure that a price target of $0.25 per kWh is really low enough to pave the world with solar cells, or that this new manufacturing process will help photovoltaics get to that number or lower. 

Unfortunately, millions of dollars have been invested in seeing if thin-film solar can do that with no real rousing successes to date.

When we get down to the nanoscale the world of macroscale physical phenomena we are familiar with is replaced in large part by a new set of phenomena. Among the key forces in this strange new world are Brownian motion and van der Waal forces. One of the great challenges of working on the nanoscale is finding ways to engineer things (move them around and generally get things to do what we want) with atomic forces such as these governing the nanoscale universe.

In a recent article here on the pages of Spectrum online the work of researchers Professor Robert Carpick at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor James Hone at Columbia University, in New York City has given us some better insight into how friction occurs at the atomic scale and how to engineer around atomic forces like the van der Waal force.

According to the Spectrum article, the researchers, who did much of their research with graphene, discovered that the thinner the sheets of the material the greater the friction.

The researchers observed that the atomic forces such as van der Waal forces would cause the sheets of graphene to be attracted to the tip of the atomic-force microscope as it drew closer thus bending the graphene and creating a “puckering effect” on the surface of the graphene. This puckering is what caused the friction.

To overcome this puckering effect the researchers also observed that the thicker the sheets the less they would bend when subjected to the atomic forces. 

By gaining a better understanding of the surface phenomenon at the atomic level, the researchers believe this will help in the engineering for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices and ultimately nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) devices. Meanwhile the researchers note that other work is going on now to figure out the best number of sheets of a material to combat this type of friction.

Researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara have reported that they have developed a glue that can be activated and deactivated by magnetism, a sort of on/off switch for the material’s adhesiveness, that mimics the adhesive characteristics of a gecko’s foot.

The research is being heralded because of its interdisciplinary nature, combining “biology, material science, physics, surface chemistry, nanoscience and mechanical engineering”. Also, the article cited above provides a laundry list of possible applications for the technology ranging from improved handling of microchips in semiconductor fabs to greater transport capabilities of robots in pipeline inspection.

But clearly both the researchers and the reporter of the article neglected to see the most obvious potential application for this technology: Making possible the  ability to scamper around urban canyons like Spiderman.

Kidding aside, researchers have been looking at the gecko’s foot for some time as an example of how nanoscale hairs can be used as an adhesive force. While other research in this area focused on just the adhesive qualities, the UCSB researchers are the first to look at turning that adhesive on and off.

This is significant because there is a great deal of super strong adhesives out there already. However, currently there is no adhesive that can be turned on and off. Translation: Commercial opportunity.

A few years back, I noted that the concept of materials by design had fallen out of the lexicon of nanotechnology proponents and suggested that this was due, at least in part, to how difficult it would be to achieve.

I received some pointed criticism for my view, which was characterized as being so conservative as to be radical.

When I saw recent news that researcher Ronald Zuckermann and his colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory had manufactured a large sheet, just two molecules thick, made of a polymer that mimics the precise structures seen in proteins and crystal structures, this “material by design” debate occurred to me once again.

I was struck by a quote that Zuckerman provides in the Wired article cited above in which he states, “It was a real thrill to figure out how to really order material in a precise way at the atomic level.” Then the articles author adds: “His team knows exactly where each atom is located in the structure, so it’s possible to chemically engineer the material to serve specific functions.”

While this possibility hints at the potential of material by design, earlier in the article the more accurate description of how this material came to be designed indicates that it followed a far more an iterative process than a deliberate one: “Zuckermann’s team made the discovery by stumbling upon a particular sequence of repeating units that formed perfectly aligned two-dimensional crystals.” (Emphasis added).

This question of material by design aside, the perfectly aligned two-dimensional crystals made into such a large structure is a remarkable achievement. It has been described as the “plywood” for building the electronic devices of the future.

Suggested applications are numerous ranging from tissue engineering and drug delivery to batteries and fuel cells. Clearly applications in which flat electrical components are needed such as in photovoltaics are a likely area for initial applied research.