On a December day, Richard Feynman gave a fun little lecture at Caltech — and dreamed up an entirely new field of physics.

During the talk, entitled "Plenty of room at the bottom," he described the enormous potential that could be realized if scientists could manipulate and control things at a "small scale."

How small? Feynman went on to discount advances of the time, such as writing the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, as trivial.

"But that's nothing; that's the most primitive, halting step in the direction I intend to discuss. It is a staggeringly small world that is below," Feynman said in his lecture. Rather, he suggested, people could write the entire 24-volume encyclopedia on the head of a pin, and elegantly showed that there's enough space there to write it legibly and read it out.

He then explored the possibility of a number of then-futuristic ideas: electron microscopes capable of manipulating individual atoms, ultracompact data storage, miniaturized computers, and powerful, ingestible biological machines that travel into organs like the heart, find defects, and repair them with tiny knives. He proposed a number of ways to create these small-scale innovations, including manipulating light and ions.

He ended the lecture by offering a reward of $1,000 to anyone who could miniaturize the text in a book 25,000-fold, such that it could be read using an electron microscope. He offered another $1,000 to anyone who could make a motor no bigger than 1/64th of an inch cubed.

The latter of these prizes was scooped up the following year by engineer William McLellan, who created a 250-microgram motor composed of 13 parts. In his award letter, Feynman congratulated McLellan on the feat but joked that he shouldn't "start writing small," lest he solve the first challenge, too and expect to receive the other $1,000 prize.

"I don't intend to make good on the other one. Since writing the article I've gotten married and bought a house!" Feynman wrote.The former challenge was eventually solved in 1985, when Stanford graduate Thomas Newman miniaturized the first page of the Dickens classic "A Tale of Two Cities." Feynman did, ultimately, pay up for the second prize.

Feynman's Caltech talk is now mythologized as having ushered in the field of nanotechnology. And yet, the term "nanotechnology" itself was not coined until 15 years after his talk, when scientist Norio Taniguchi penned a paper about manipulating material at the atomic scale.

In that 1974 paper, Taniguchi described nanotechnology as "the processing of separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule." Many science historians now argue that the field was following its own trajectory, and that Feynman's talk, while prescient, wasn't the actual driver of future innovations. Prior to 1980, his talk was cited less than 10 times.

Whether it drove innovation or not, since Feynman's famous lecture, many of his predictions have proven true. The scanning tunneling microscope manipulated individual xenon atoms in 1990. Computers more powerful than he described now sit in our pockets, rather than taking up whole rooms. And indeed, tiny nanobots have been designed that can repair damaged blood vessels.

If you are human, you are going to die. This isn't the most comforting thought, but death is the inevitable price we must pay for being alive. Humans are, however, getting better at pushing back our expiration date, as our medicines and technologies advance. 

If the human life span continues to stretch, could we one day become immortal? The answer depends on what you think it means to be an immortal human. 

"I don't think when people are even asking about immortality they really mean true immortality, unless they believe in something like a soul," Susan Schneider, a philosopher and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, told Live Science. "If someone was, say, to upgrade their brain and body to live a really long time, they would still not be able to live beyond the end of the universe." 

Scientists expect the universe will end, which puts an immediate dampener on a mystery about the potential for human immortality. Some scientists have speculated about surviving the death of the universe, as science journalist John Horgan reported for Scientific American, but it's unlikely that any humans alive today will experience the universe's demise anyway. 

Related: What happens when you die?

Many humans grow old and die. To live indefinitely, we would need to stop the body from aging. A group of animals may have already solved this problem, so it isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. 

Hydra are small, jellyfish-like invertebrates with a remarkable approach to aging. They are largely made up of stem cells that constantly divide to make new cells, as their older cells are discarded. The constant influx of new cells allows hydra to rejuvenate themselves and stay forever young, Live Science previously reported.

"They don't seem to age, so, potentially they are immortal," Daniel Martínez, a biology professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, who discovered the hydra's lack of aging, told Live Science. Hydra show that animals do not have to grow old, but that doesn't mean humans could replicate their rejuvenating habits. At 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) long, hydra are small and don't have organs. "It's impossible for us because our bodies are super complex," Martínez said. 

Humans have stem cells that can repair and even regrow parts of the body, such as in the liver, but the human body is not made almost entirely of these cells, like hydra are. That's because humans need cells to do things other than just divide and make new cells. For example, our red blood cells transport oxygen around the body. "We make cells commit to a function, and in doing that, they have to lose the ability to divide," Martínez said. As the cells age, so do we. 

We can't simply discard our old cells like hydra do, because we need them. For example, the neurons in the brain transmit information. "We don't want those to be replaced," Martínez said. "Because otherwise, we won't remember anything." Hydra could inspire research that allows humans to live healthier lives, for example, by finding ways for our cells to function better as they age, according to Martínez. However, his gut feeling is that humans will never achieve such biological immortality. 

Though Martínez personally doesn't want to live forever, he thinks humans are already capable of a form of immortality. "I always say, 'I think we are immortal,'" he said. "Poets to me are immortal because they're still with us after so many years and they still influence us. And so I think that people survive through their legacy." 

The oldest-living human on record is Jeanne Calment from France, who died at the age of 122 in 1997, according to Guinness World Records. In a 2021 study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers reported that humans may be able to live up to a maximum of between 120 and 150 years, after which, the researchers anticipate a complete loss of resilience — the body's ability to recover from things like illness or injury. To live beyond this limit, humans would need to stop cells from aging and prevent disease. 

Related: What's the oldest living thing alive today?

Humans may be able to live beyond their biological limits with future technological advancements involving nanotechnology. This is the manipulation of materials on a nanoscale, less than 100 nanometers (one-billionth of a meter or 400-billionths of an inch). Machines this small could travel in the blood and possibly prevent aging by repairing the damage cells experience over time. Nanotech could also cure certain diseases, including some types of cancer, by removing cancerous cells from the body, according to the University of Melbourne in Australia. 

Preventing the human body from aging still isn't enough to achieve immortality; just ask the hydra. Even though hydra don't show signs of aging, the creatures still die. They are eaten by predators, such as fish, and perish if their environment changes too much, such as if their ponds freeze in winter, Martínez said. 

Humans don't have many predators to contend with, but we are prone to fatal accidents and vulnerable to extreme environmental events, such as those intensified by climate change. We'll need a sturdier vessel than our current bodies to ensure our survival long into the future. Technology may provide the solution for this, too. 

Long live technology

As technology advances, futurists anticipate two defining milestones. The first is the singularity, in which we will design artificial intelligence (A.I.) smart enough to redesign itself, and it will get progressively smarter until it is vastly superior to our own intelligence, Live Science previously reported. The second milestone is virtual immortality, where we will be able to scan our brains and transfer ourselves to a non-biological medium, like a computer. 

Researchers have already mapped the neural connections of a roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans). As part of the so-called OpenWorm project, they then simulated the roundworm's brain in software replicating the neural connections, and programmed that software to direct a Lego robot, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The robot then appeared to start behaving like a roundworm. Scientists aren't close to mapping the connections between the 86 billion neurons of the human brain (roundworms have only 302 neurons), but advances in artificial intelligence may help us get there.

Once the human mind is in a computer and can be uploaded to the internet, we won't have to worry about the human body perishing. Moving the human mind out of the body would be a significant step on the road to immortality but, according to Schneider, there's a catch. "I don't think that will achieve immortality for you, and that's because I think you'd be creating a digital double," she said.

Schneider, who is also the author of "Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind" (Princeton University Press, 2019), describes a thought experiment in which the brain either does or doesn't survive the upload process. If the brain does survive, then the digital copy can't be you as you're still alive; conversely, the digital copy also can't be you if your brain doesn't survive the upload process, because it wouldn't be if you did — the copy can only be your digital double. 

Related: What is consciousness?

According to Schneider, a better route to extreme longevity, while also preserving the person, would be through biological enhancements compatible with the survival of the human brain. Another, more controversial route would be through brain chips. 

"There's been a lot of talk about gradually replacing parts of the brain with chips. So, eventually, one becomes like an artificial intelligence," Schneider said. In other words, slowly transitioning into a cyborg and thinking in chips rather than neurons. But if the human brain is intimately connected to you, then replacing it could mean suicide, she added. 

The human body appears to have an expiration date, regardless of how it is upgraded or uploaded. Whether humans are still human without their bodies is an open question. 

"To me, it's not even really an issue about whether you're technically a human being or not," Schneider said. "The real issue is whether you're the same self of a person. So, what really matters here is, what is it to be a conscious being? And when is it that changes in the brain change which conscious being you are?" — In other words, at what point does changing what we can do with our brains change who we are? 

Schneider is excited by the potential brain and body enhancements of the future and likes the idea of ridding ourselves of death by old age, despite some of her reservations. "I would love that, absolutely, she said. "And I would love to see science and technology cure ailments, make us smarter. I would love to see people have the option of upgrading their brains with chips. I just want them to understand what's at stake."

Originally published on Live Science.

Elon Musk is in the middle of a very public meltdown right now.

It began when the PayPal billionaire turned SpaceX and Tesla founder tangled with Twitter users about complaints of union-busting tactics in his factories, along with a report from the nonprofit investigative reporting outfit Reveal suggesting Tesla failed to disclose and properly guard against workplace injuries. But it's since spiraled, and Musk has doubled down against "the media" writ large, and gotten into snits with a number of other Twitter users.

At one point, Musk posted a tweet goading "the media" to perform better in a Twitter poll he created, writing, "Come on media, you can do it! Get more people to vote for you. You are literally the media."

Upulie Divisekera, an Australian molecular biologist, cancer researcher and nanotechnologist, responded with a tweet saying, "With all due respect, this is pathetic."

Musk tweeted back, "Ahem, you have 'nano' in your bio. That is 100% synonymous with bs."

"Nano," of course, is a prefix refering to a particular very small size scale. (A nanometer is one-billionth the size of a meter.) This set off a bit of a firestorm between users taking Divisekera's side and Musk's online fans. And several scientists jumped in to say their piece.

Robert McNees, a physicist at Loyola University, pointed out that the computer Musk used to diss nanotechnology almost certainly involved nanotechnology.

Ajit Bhaksar, a chemist at Unilever, pointed out a number of important technologies that involve nanotechnology.

Ketan Joshi, a science writer, pointed out that the terminology of one of Musk's industries, solar power, is often used in silly ways, and suggested Musk's tweet verged on pseudoscientific thinking.

Musk later doubled down in a separate tweet to the engineer Michelle Dickinson, writing that "Nano applies to everything & therefore means nothing. Definitely indicates bs. Sorry."

Here's how Divisekera explained what "nano" means in a series of replies to Musk:

Originally published on Live Science.

An artificial retina made of organic ink and gold may be able to restore vision someday, a new study suggests.

The new device is an extremely thin sheet of organic crystal pigments, which are widely used in printing ink, cosmetics and tattoos. When these pigments are arranged in a particular layered geometry, the crystals can absorb light and convert it to electric signals, just like the light-sensitive cells — called photoreceptors — in the eye's retina and make vision possible, according to the study, published May 2 in the journal Advanced Materials.

The device holds promise for restoring vision for the millions of people with diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic eye disease, and age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness among the elderly.  

In these diseases, photoreceptors are lost, but other neurons in the retina that process the electric signals and transmit them to the brain are preserved. "We have these neurons that are perfectly healthy and functioning," said senior study investigator Eric Glowacki, a researcher who studies organic electronics at Linköping University in Sweden. "So it follows, can we bypass the photoreceptors and just stimulate the neurons directly?"[Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Bypassing the photoreceptors in the eye is not a new idea. There are other retinal implants that are being tested in humans or that are already on the market. Some use external cameras that transmit to electrodes implanted into the retina, and power the device using another unit implanted behind the ear. Other teams are exploring wireless approaches using miniaturized solar cells as stand-ins for photoreceptors.

What sets apart the new implant is that it is wireless and uses organic compounds instead of silicon-based material, making it more likely to be accepted by the body.

"This is pretty unique," said Derrick Cheng, a researcher at Brown University who studies biohybrid approaches to retina implants but was not involved with the new study. "The eye naturally has a pigmented layer in it. So this approach is more akin to what the retina actually looks like."

The device is also extremely thin, which is critical for anything that's to be implanted in the delicate eye tissue, Cheng told Live Science. Indeed, at only 80 nanometers, it is 100 times thinner than a single neuron and 500 times thinner than the thinnest silicon retinal implants, according to the study.

It is difficult to create wireless implants that can generate enough power on their own to activate neurons. For Glowacki and his colleagues, finding the solution involved testing and optimizing different combinations of pigments that are good at absorbing light. They put two layers of two different pigments on a layer of gold. When this sandwich is exposed to light, electrons accumulate on top, and the positive charge goes to the bottom, loading up the gold layer. When placed in salt water, which is similar to the environment inside the eye, the device generates an electric field that is sensed by neighboring neurons.

When it came time to test the device on a retina, Yael Hanein, a professor of electrical engineering at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and her team extracted retinas from chicken embryos. As a chicken grows in the egg, its eyes develop by day 14, but the photoreceptors do not form until day 16. This gives researchers a two-day window to get their hands on a "blind" retina.

After attaching the device to the extracted chicken retina, the researchers shined light on it and found that it generated enough electricity to stimulate the rest of the retinal neurons. "That was the crowning achievement," Glowacki told Live Science.

The team is now testing the device in live rabbits, with the help of volunteer human retina surgeons. Although the rabbits are not blind, they naturally don't see red because they have photoreceptors only for green and blue spectrums. If the retina implant, which picks up the red spectrum, works as intended, the researchers would be able to see the resulting neuronal response in the animals' visual cortex, Glowacki said. In other words, they'd be able to see if the device allowed the animals to see red.

Original article on Live Science.

Many people with diabetes need to prick their finger for a drop of blood up to eight times a day to monitor their glucose levels, an uncomfortable and cumbersome task. It can all add up to tens of thousands of finger pricks over a person's lifetime.

Now, South Korean researchers may have a means of measuring blood sugar without a finger prick in sight: The scientists developed a glucose monitor embedded in a soft contact lens that measures glucose levels in tears and transmits that information wirelessly to a handheld device… and you don't even need to cry.

The device has been tested so far only on live rabbits, with no signs of discomfort. But the researchers who created the device predict that this sugar-sensing contact lens may be available commercially for people in less than five years. The device would be placed in one eye and not be used to correct vision, like traditional contact lenses. ['Eye' Can't Look: 9 Eyeball Injuries That Will Make You Squirm]

The device is described today (Jan. 24) in an article published in the journal Science Advances.

More than 30 million Americans, or 9.4 percent of the U.S. population, have type 2 diabetes, and another 80 million have prediabetes, a condition that if not treated often leads to type 2 diabetes within five years, according to a 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Diabetes is a health concern in South Korea, as well, where the rate rose from 5.6 percent in 2006 to 8 percent in 2013, according to data from the Korean National Health Insurance Service.

Diabetes is a condition in which the body periodically has levels of blood sugar, or blood glucose, that are higher than normal. The cause might be the pancreas's inability to produce enough insulin to help metabolize the glucose (called type 1 diabetes) or, much more common, the body's inability to use insulin properly (called type 2 diabetes).

In either case, many (but not all) of those with diabetes need to monitor their glucose levels through the course of the day. Prolonged, elevated glucose levels can damage blood vessels and increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, vision problems and nerve problems.

A glucose-sensing lens

Previous attempts to embed glucose monitors into a contact lens had been fraught with difficulties. The electronics were too brittle and the lenses were too rigid, leading to a fragile device that was both uncomfortable and prone to breaking, said lead study author Jang-Ung Park, a professor of engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science & Technology in South Korea. Elements in these earlier devices blocked vision, too, and would potentially damage the eye, according to the paper.

But advances in materials science and nanotechnology in recent years have enabled Park's team to design flexible, or stretchable, structures and circuits, including an LED display embedded in the lens.

The resulting product measures glucose levels in real time in natural tear secretions and relays this data through LED display that can emit a non-intrusive light if glucose levels get too high. Or, with the inclusion of a miniature antenna in the lens, information can be transmitted wirelessly.

"The key difference is the soft lens with stretchable electronics and displays," Park told Live Science. "This soft contact lens is stretchable and can be turned over. So, the LED light can be emitted into the [eye of the] wearer or into the opposite direction, dependent on the wearer's choice."

Glucose monitoring is optional for some people who don't need insulin injections. But everyone who uses insulin to regulate their condition must do finger sticks for blood glucose testing, even if only to calibrate the glucose monitor. This includes the 1.25 million Americans with type 1 diabetes and another approximately 6 million with type 2 diabetes, according the American Diabetes Association (ADA).

A blood sample from a finger stick is the gold standard for accurate blood glucose measurements. Techniques have been available for years to measure glucose in tears, but measurements tend not to be as accurate for a variety of factors; for example, glucose concentrations can be lower when your eyes are more watery from allergies or crying.

"Tear glucose levels do vary in relation to blood glucose levels, [so] much research still needs to be done to clarify the correlation and how closely tear glucose levels track with blood glucose levels," Matt Petersen, managing director of medical information for the ADA, told Live Science.

However, the researchers who have created the new lens-based device said that monitoring glucose via tears may serve as a convenient proxy to blood measurements because it is done continually in real time, compensating for sampling inconsistencies.

Petersen noted that, while there are challenges in testing tears, the potential to eliminate finger sticks is something that would likely appeal to people with diabetes.

The researchers hope that their technique of embedding sensors on soft contact lenses also can be applied to other areas, such as smart devices for drug delivery, augmented reality and even biomarker monitoring via a smartphone.

Follow Christopher Wanjek @wanjek for daily tweets on health and science with a humorous edge. Wanjek is the author of "Food at Work" and "Bad Medicine." His column, Bad Medicine, appears regularly on Live Science.

For decades, X-ray computer tomography (CT) scanning has enabled scientists to noninvasively examine the insides of organisms and objects, and model them in 3D. But the technology only worked on subjects that were larger than 500 nanometers (a nanometer is 1-billionth of a meter, or 400-billionths of an inch).  

Recently, scientists developed a tabletop Nano-CT system capable of capturing images in 3D at an unprecedentedly small scale — 100 nanometers. Its limits were recently tested on a velvet worm’s minuscule legs, which measure a mere 0.02 inches (0.4 millimeters) long, and this novel technology successfully visualized individual muscle fibers inside the worm's leg, the researchers reported in a new study. [Images: Tiny Life Revealed in Stunning Microscope Photos]

When an object is CT-scanned, multiple X-ray images are taken from many angles, creating cross-sectional views of the object's internal structure. Using computer processing, these individual image "slices" are then combined to rebuild the interior of the image in 3D, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Nano-CT uses nanotubes to tightly focus X-rays and visualize much smaller objects at higher resolution than had been possible with CT scans until now. As the process creates a digital 3D model of the object from a single scan, it is cheaper and less time-consuming to use than other high-resolution imaging methods that can only capture 2D images on a single plane, such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM), the researchers explained in the study.

The scientists tested the system by looking inside the legs of the tiny velvet worms —soft-bodied animals that resemble worms with multiple sets of limbs. They are part of the group panarthropoda, which includes arthropods and tardigrades. The scans revealed that the worms' feet contained circular muscles, which had been hinted at in prior studies but were not meticulously described, the scientists reported.

"Our data confirm the existence of these muscles and reveal details of their position, arrangement and size," the researchers wrote. And the characteristics of the muscles suggest that they are used to extend claws in the feet, but the shape and function of most of the velvet worm's muscles are still unknown, according to the study.

Velvet worms are an ancient lineage that has changed little in 500 million years, and their closest relationships on the tree of life are still being debated, the scientists wrote in the study. Internal examination of their delicate limb structures could offer scientists new insights into the animals' locomotion, and may help researchers puzzle out how segmented limbs in arthropods evolved, study co-author Georg Mayer, head of the Department of Zoology at the University of Kassel, said in a statement.

There could also be biomedical applications for this technology, according to Franz Pfeiffer, a professor of biomedical physics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and a fellow at the TUM Institute for Advanced Study (TUM-IAS).

"We will be able to examine tissue samples to clarify whether or not a tumor is malignant," Pfeiffer explained in the statement.

"A non-destructive and three-dimensional image of the tissue with a resolution like that of the nano-CT can also provide new insights into the microscopic development of widespread illnesses such as cancer," Pfeiffer said.

The findings were published online Nov. 21 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Original article on Live Science.

A new type of 3D computer chip that combines two cutting-edge nanotechnologies could dramatically increase the speed and energy efficiency of processors, a new study said.

Today's chips separate memory (which stores data) and logic circuits (which process data), and data is shuttled back and forth between these two components to carry out operations. But due to the limited number of connections between memory and logic circuits, this is becoming a major bottleneck, particularly because computers are expected to deal with ever-increasing amounts of data.

Previously, this limitation was masked by the effects of Moore's law, which says that the number of transistors that can fit on a chip doubles every two years, with an accompanying increase in performance. But as chip makers hit fundamental physical limits on how small transistors can get, this trend has slowed. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

The new prototype chip, designed by engineers from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tackles both problems simultaneously by layering memory and logic circuits on top of each other, rather than side by side.

Not only does this make efficient use of space, but it also dramatically increases the surface area for connections between the components, the researchers said. A conventional logic circuit would have a limited number of pins on each edge through which to transfer data; by contrast, the researchers were not restricted to using edges and were able to densely pack vertical wires running from the logic layer to the memory layer.

"With separate memory and computing, a chip is almost like two very populous cities, but there are very few bridges between them," study leader Subhasish Mitra, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford, told Live Science. "Now, we've not just brought these two cities together — we've built many more bridges so traffic can go much more efficiently between them."

On top of this, the researchers used logic circuits constructed from carbon nanotube transistors, along with an emerging technology called resistive random-access memory (RRAM), both of which are much more energy-efficient than silicon technologies. This is important because the huge energy needed to run data centers constitutes another major challenge facing technology companies.

"To get the next 1,000-times improvement in computing performance in terms of energy efficiency, which is making things run at very low energy and at the same time making things run really fast, this is the architecture you need," Mitra said.

While both of these new nanotechnologies have inherent advantages over conventional, silicon-based technology, they are also integral to the new chip's 3D architecture, the researchers said.

The reason today's chips are 2D is because fabricating silicon transistors onto a chip requires temperatures of more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius), which makes it impossible to layer silicon circuits on top of each other without damaging the bottom layer, the researchers said.

But both carbon nanotube transistors and RRAM are fabricated at cooler than 392 degrees F (200 degrees C), so they can easily be layered on top of silicon without damaging the underlying circuitry. This also makes the researchers' approach compatible with current chip-making technology, they said. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]

Stacking many layers on top of each other could potentially lead to overheating, Mitra said, because top layers will be far from the heat sinks at the base of the chip. But, he added, that problem should be relatively simple to engineer around, and the increased energy-efficiency of the new technology means less heat is generated in the first place.

To demonstrate the benefits of its design, the team built a prototype gas detector by adding another layer of carbon nanotube-based sensors on top of the chip. The vertical integration meant that each of these sensors was directly connected to an RRAM cell, dramatically increasing the rate at which data could be processed.

This data was then transferred to the logic layer, which was implementing a machine learning algorithm that enabled it to distinguish among the vapors of lemon juice, vodka and beer.

This was just a demonstration, though, Mitra said, and the chip is highly versatile and particularly well-suited to the kind of data-heavy, deep neural network approaches that underpin current artificial intelligence technology.

Jan Rabaey, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, who was not involved in the research, said he agrees.

"These structures may be particularly suited for alternative learning-based computational paradigms such as brain-inspired systems and deep neural nets, and the approach presented by the authors is definitely a great first step in that direction," he told MIT News.

The new study was published online July 5 in the journal Nature.

Original article on Live Science.

Some of today's biggest science innovations are happening at the smallest scales.

Nanotech — "nano" is short for "nanometer," referring to length scales in billionths of a meter — describes technologies that are built to perform complex tasks, but at the scale of molecules or even atoms. To put that into perspective, a structure called a nanotube is 1 nanometer in diameter — about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative.

Thanks to nanotech, engineers can design microprocessors for your smartphone that are smaller and more efficient than ever. In addition, gadgets in the not-too-distant future could incorporate sophisticated security safeguards powered by nanotech. Scientists are also exploring how nanotech can deliver medical treatments that target genes themselves. Or build cables strong enough to support an elevator in space, according to a panel of experts at Future Con, a conference highlighting the intersection between sci-fi and cutting-edge science that was held June 16-18 in Washington, D.C. [5 Amazing Technologies That Are Revolutionizing Biotech]

Medical researchers who are looking to build machines that can operate at the nanoscale need to "follow the blueprints of biology," Lloyd Whitman, chief scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, told the audience at the panel titled "Indistinguishable from Magic: Nanotech in Sci-Fi" on June 17.

Any type of robot crafted at the nanoscale won't look like a typical robot — it'll look more like a virus, Whitman said. Evolution has already figured out how to construct functional, autonomous forms even at the microscopic level, and engineers can learn much from studying these minuscule success stories to inform their own work on particles that perform on the nanoscale, Whitman said.

Looking to viruses for inspiration can be particularly helpful for scientists investigating potential nanotech uses in medicine and human health, according to panelist Jordan Green, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, ophthalmology, oncology, neurosurgery, and materials science and engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland.

Direct-to-cell delivery

Viruses affect our genome by inserting their own genes into our cells in order to replicate themselves, Green said. Could researchers perhaps design a synthetic particle capable of delivering genetic information the same way? Particles made of non-toxic and water-soluble materials could be engineered to deliver DNA directly to cells, coding them into RNA molecules outside the nucleus, where they would be translated into proteins to convey a function, according to Green.

"This could change a cell's genetic makeup, or it could have a short-term therapeutic effect," he said.  

For people with genetic diseases, such as hemophilia or cystic fibrosis, this approach could deliver healthy genes to target cells and repair the errors in their DNA that cause the disease, Green told the panel audience.

Nanotech could also inform more effective cancer treatments, Green said. A mutation in cancer cells deactivates the control switch that tells them to stop growing, but targeted gene therapy using nanoparticles could reactivate their self-destruct button, halting cancerous growths in their tracks, according to Green.

By directing nanoparticles to specific tissues and delivering precise instructions to just the right cells, "nanoengineering and nanotech in medicine can help medicines be more precise," he explained.

To the moon

Nanotech could also help to realize an idea that has fascinated and stymied engineers since at least the late 19th century — how to build an elevator that extends from Earth into space, Lourdes Salamanca-Riba, a professor in the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, told the Future Con audience.

One type of space elevator could run up a long cable anchored at the equator and attached to a floating "base" outside Earth's atmosphere and in geosynchronous orbit, Salamanca-Riba said. The cable would need to cover approximately 10,000 miles (66,000 kilometers) in length, and it would have to be made from a substance that's exceptionally strong and light — or it would collapse under its own weight, she added.

Carbon nanotubes — cylindrical nanostructures made from carbon atoms — are extremely strong and only one atomic layer thick, and could be a suitable material for these cables, Salamanca-Riba said.

A floating space station that's accessible by elevator would make it significantly easier for astronauts to travel to the moon or other cosmic regions, Salamanca-Riba said. And while a space elevator would be expensive to build, once in place, it would significantly reduce the cost of transporting payloads into orbit — from thousands of dollars per kilogram to just a few hundred dollars per kilo, she added.

However, it may be some time before researchers can produce the thousands of miles of carbon nanotubes that would be required to tether a space elevator — currently, they exist only in lengths of a few centimeters, Salamanca-Riba said at the panel.

Original article on Live Science.

Printed newspapers may be going out of style, but what if you could have a flexible electronic paper that reads headlines or the weather report and skips to the sports section on voice command?

Researchers at Michigan State University have developed a sheet-like device — known as a ferroelectret nanogenerator, or FENG — that acts as a loudspeaker and microphone and can generate energy from human motion, such as swiping a finger across a screen. [Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World]

"It's a device that you can roll up and put in your pocket and then get somewhere and unroll and put it on a screen or a window or any platform and use it as a both a microphone and loudspeaker," said Nelson Sepulveda, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University, and the primary investigator of the new study published online May 16 in the journal Nature Communications.

Last December, Sepulveda and his team detailed the main component of this device, the FENG, in the journal Nano Energy. At that time, the researchers showed off the thin film's ability to generate power from motion. It had the added benefit of being able to exponentially increase its voltage every time it was folded, the scientists said.

This latest research builds on that capability. The device now works as a microphone, picking up vibrations in the air (in other words, sound waves) and converting them into electric energy. It also turns electrical signals, from a computer file, for example, into vibrations that people can hear as sound.

In a couple of different demonstrations, the scientists showed how it could work. They embedded the FENG into the university's Spartan flag and then played the school's fight song through it. They also showed it could work as part of a voice-recognition system to authenticate access to a computer.

"The fidelity and the quality of the sound recognition is high enough to recognize the pitches and the frequency components of an individual's voice," Sepulveda told Live Science.

The device's microphone feature works in a way similar to high-end microphones already on the market. These rely on crystalline components, called piezoelectric transducers, that pick up sound and convert it to electrical signals that a computer can then turn into audio.

Piezoelectric crystals work this way in part because of their atomic structure, which contains pairs of positive and negative charges, called dipoles. As sound waves bounce off the crystal, they cause the positive and negative charges to align and misalign — and that creates a signal.

Sepulveda and his colleagues were able to mimic this structure in the FENG, but with much larger dipoles.

The device is made of very thin layers of environmentally friendly substances, including silver, polyimide and polypropylene ferroelectret. Positively and negatively charged particles are added to the layers, which are stacked in an uneven way. The unevenness creates microscopic pockets of air between the layers that are analogous to the dipoles in piezoelectric crystals, the researchers said. As sound waves bounce off the pockets of air, they compress the hollow dipoles, causing the positive and negative charges to align and misalign.

"We are generating the same electrical output as the very expensive microphones that use brittle crystals," Sepulveda said.

The reverse is also true. An electric signal sent through the device can cause vibrations that produce sound.

Another potential application, Sepulveda said, would be as a noise-canceling device. For example, a person could mount the film on a window, where it would pick up street noise and play the opposite sound waves to dampen the noise.

"There are so many ideas, and we keep learning about the technology and learning its tricks every day," Sepulveda said.

Original article on Live Science.

Laser printers that "sculpt" images at miniscule scales could one day make color photos that don't fade over time the way ink does, according to a new study.

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark made a sheet of polymer and semiconductor metal that reflects colors that never fade, using tiny structures that diffract, absorb and reflect light of different wavelengths. A coating made of the material would never need repainting, and the resulting image would retain its vibrancy over time, the scientists said.

This printing process also allows people to choose more specific colors, because exact wavelengths can be selected, meaning there's less guesswork involved with mixing pigments and comparing color charts, the researchers said. The same technique could be applied to making watermarks or even encryption and data storage, the researchers said. [The 10 Weirdest Things Created by 3D Printing]

In this technique, the images are printed with a laser, which is fired at a sheet made of plastic on one layer and germanium on top of that. The sheets are made by depositing nanometer-thin layers of polymer and germanium into shapes, small cylinders and blocks, none measuring more than 100 nanometers across. (For comparison, an average strand of human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.)

"We generate a nano-imprint," study lead author Xiaolong Zhu, a nanotechnology researcher at the Technical University of Denmark, told Live Science.

Similar to what a laser printer does, the laser reshapes the tiny structures by melting them. Varying the intensity of the laser at tiny scales melts the structures differently, so they take on different geometries.

This is why the image resolution can be so fine, the researchers said. An image from an inkjet printer or laser printer typically consists of 300 to 2,400 dots per inch. A nanometer-size pixel is thousands of times smaller, meaning a resolution of 100,000 dots per inch, the researchers said. In fact, the whole collection of pixels resembles a miniature city of skyscrapers, domes and towers. 

When white light hits the various shapes, it can reflect, be bent or diffract, the researchers said. Since the shapes are so small, some won't reflect certain wavelengths, while others will scatter or bounce the light. The result is that a person sees a color, depending on the specific pattern of shapes, according to the study.

Butterfly wings and bird feathers work in a similar way, Zhu said. Tiny structures  cover butterfly's wing or a bird's feather, scattering light in specific ways, making the colors that people see. Butterfly wings, though, transmit some of the light, creating iridescence, the researchers said. Zhu and his colleagues got more specific than that — the combination of germanium and polymer means they can control which wavelengths of light are reflected from a given spot or not, so they don't produce the iridescent effect. This means vibrant, single colors where they want them, the researchers said.

Since the colors are built into the very structure of the sheets, they won't fade the way pigments do when exposed to light, the study said. Ordinary paint, for example, fades when sunlight hits it, because the ultraviolet light breaks down the chemicals that make up the pigment. On top of that, paint or ink can oxidize or come off when exposed to solvents, such as heavy-duty detergents. (Just drip water on an inkjet image, and you can watch the ink become dilute and run.) On old masterpieces, there's even a phenomenon called "metal soaps" based on the complex chemistry that occurs as paints age, according to Chemical & Engineering News.

Using their technique, Zhu and his colleagues made small pictures of the Mona Lisa and a portrait of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, as well as a simple photograph of a woman and a bridge, each measuring about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) across.

To mass produce this kind of printer, researchers would need to make laser technology smaller and might need a different material for the layers of sheets, the researchers said. That material would need to have a high refractive index, meaning it bends light a lot and absorbs light at the wavelength chosen for the laser, they added. In their experiments, the scientists chose green light for the wavelength and experimented with silicon for the material, which Zhu said doesn't absorb green laser light as efficiently.

Even germanium, though, is a possibility, because it isn't too expensive. "A few kilograms can cover a football [soccer] field," he said, noting that the germanium and polymer layers are only up to 50 nanometers thick. Germanium, though, isn't necessarily the best option, because it doesn't produce green colors well, Zhu said.

The new study appears in the May 3 issue of the journal Science Advances. 

Original article on Live Science.

Frozen organs could be brought back to life safely one day with the aid of nanotechnology, a new study finds. The development could help make donated organs available for virtually everyone who needs them in the future, the researchers say.

The number of donated organs that could be transplanted into patients could increase greatly if there were a way to freeze and reheat organs without damaging the cells within them.

In the new work, scientists developed a way to safely thaw frozen tissues with the aid of nanoparticles — particles only nanometers or billionths of a meter wide. (In comparison, the average human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.) [9 Most Interesting Transplants]

The researchers manufactured silica-coated nanoparticles that contained iron oxide. When they applied a magnetic field to frozen tissues suffused with the nanoparticles, the nanoparticles generated heat rapidly and uniformly. The tissue samples warmed up at rates of up to more than 260 degrees Fahrenheit (130 degrees Celsius) per minute, which is 10 to 100 times faster than previous methods.

The scientists tested their method on frozen human skin cells, segments of pig heart valves and sections of pig arteries. None of the rewarmed tissues displayed signs of harm from the heating process, and they preserved key physical properties such as elasticity. Moreover, the researchers were able to wash away the nanoparticles from the sample after thawing.

Previous research successfully thawed tiny biological samples that were only 1 to 3 milliliters in volume. This new technique works for samples that are up to 50 milliliters in size. The researchers said there is a strong possibility they could scale up their technique to even larger systems, such as organs.

"We are at the level of rabbit organs now," said study senior author John Bischof, a mechanical and biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota. "We have a way to go for human organs, but nothing seems to preclude us from that."

However, this research will likely not make it possible to return frozen heads back to life anytime soon, if ever, the scientists noted.

Since the first successful kidney transplant in 1954, organ transplantation has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients. If it weren't for the large and growing shortage of donor organs, the life-saving procedure might help even more people. According to the U.S. Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, more than 120,000 patients are currently on organ-transplant waitlists in the United States, and at least 1 in 5 patients on these waitlists die waiting for an organ that they never receive.

Right now, the majority of organs that could potentially be used for transplants are discarded, in large part because they can only be safely preserved for 4 to 36 hours. If only half the hearts and lungs that are discarded were successfully transplanted, the waitlists for those organs could be eliminated in two to three years, according to the Organ Preservation Alliance.

One way to save donated organs for transplantation is to freeze them. Ice crystals that can damage cells typically form during freezing, but in prior work, researchers have found a technique known as vitrification — which involves flooding biological specimens with antifreeze-like compounds — that could help cool down organs to stave off decay, while also preventing the formation of ice crystals.

Unfortunately, ice crystals can also form during the reheating process. Moreover, if thawing is not uniform across samples, fracturing or cracking may occur. Although scientists had developed methods to safely use freezing-cold temperatures to "cryopreserve" tissues and organs, they had not yet developed a way to safely reheat them. [5 Amazing Technologies That Are Revolutionizing Biotech]

In future research, scientists will attempt to transplant thawed tissues into living animals to see how well they do. "From my perspective and my collaborators' perspective, there is no reason why that should not work," Bischof told Live Science.

However, the researchers stressed that it was unlikely these findings would apply to the controversial field of cryonics, which seeks to freeze patients — or their brains — in the hope that future scientists will find a way to safely revive people. "There are huge scientific hurdles ahead of us, and it's rather premature to get into rewarming a whole person," Bischof said.

"Even if you preserved the whole body, the chances that neural pathways established during life were maintained during and after cryopreservation are probably remote," said study co-author Kelvin Brockbank, chief executive officer of Tissue Testing Technologies in North Charleston, South Carolina. "I don't think we'll see success for rewarming whole bodies within the next hundred years."

The scientists detailed their findings online March 1 in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Original article on Live Science.

It's a temporary tattoo more advanced than anything you'll ever find in a Cracker Jack box: Researchers have developed a thin, flexible electrode that can measure electrical signals on the skin after being applied like a temporary tattoo.

The technology was designed to make long-term, stable recordings of muscle activity without inconveniencing the person wearing it.

"The key innovation is making the electrodes extremely thin," study leader Yael Hanein, a professor of electrical engineering at Tel Aviv University in Israel, told Live Science in an email. "This feature solved all the challenges in regular electrodes." [Bionic Humans: Top 10 Technologies]

The electronic tattoos could have a variety of applications, including to map emotions based on facial expressions, study neurodegenerative diseases and control prostheses, the researchers said in a statement. Hanein added that her lab is already exploring potential ways the tattoos could be used for psychological evaluations and as a diagnostic tool for Parkinson's disease, a neurological disorder that can cause tremors, muscle stiffness and coordination problems.

The "electric tattoo" is made up of three main parts: a carbon electrode, an adhesive surface that fastens the tattoo to the skin and a polymer coating that can conduct electricity, Hanein said in the statement.

"The major benefits include long-term stability and comfort, and in addition, simple and quick application on the skin," she said. However, "there is still more work to be done on the data capturing and analysis," she added.

The new technology represents an exciting development, said Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist who studies emotion at Northeastern University but wasn't involved with the new study.

"Right now, we apply sensors to people's skin with gel, and it's messy," Barrett told Live Science.

Even though she anticipates using this sort of technology in her own lab, Barrett said there are some things an electrode simply won't be able to measure. "There are no technological advances of this sort that will ever let you read emotions in someone's face. Emotions just don't work like that," she said.

According to Barrett, cross-cultural studies demonstrate that emotions aren't universally linked to certain facial expressions, and context is crucial when we guess the feelings of those around us. "Emotions aren't detected — they're perceived," she said.

Original article on Live Science.

Electronics such as solar panels and flexible gadgets may someday be able to heal their "wounds," thanks to tiny, self-propelled nanoparticles that detect and repair damage.

Microscopic scratches in electrical circuits can interrupt the flow of electricity and seriously impact the performance of devices, but such scrapes are hard to detect and even harder to repair, researchers say.

Now, engineers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Pittsburgh have designed so-called nanomotors that can autonomously detect and move toward these scratches before wedging themselves into the cracks. [Video: Watch the Nanomotors in Action as They Heal a Scratch]

Because the particles are made from gold and platinum, which conduct electricity, they bridge the gap — healing the wound — and complete the circuit again, according to the researchers. The nanomotors are applied in a liquid solution that also contains the hydrogen peroxide fuel that powers them.

Tiny particles found in the blood of mammals called platelets inspired the design of the system, said the scientists, who presented their research at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, on Sunday (March 13). These platelets clump together at the site of a wound to form clots that stem bleeding and help the wound heal.

To build the nanomotors, the researchers first created tiny gold spheres and coated one-half of each sphere with platinum, which acts as a catalyst to break down the fuel that propels them. [Top 10 Inventions that Changed the World]

Then, the gold hemispheres were specially modified to take advantage of the hydrophobic effect — the phenomenon that causes oil droplets to separate from water and merge together.

The cracks in electrical circuits are typically hydrophobic, so by making the particles hydrophobic too, the researchers were able to nudge the particles to naturally seek out scratches. The tiny particles are also drawn to other nanomotors, thus allowing them to form clusters that can bridge larger gaps in a circuit.

In the study presented at the meeting, and published last September, lead author Jinxing Li, a doctoral candidate in the UCSD Department of Nanoengineering, and his colleagues described how they had demonstrated that the system could repair a deliberately damaged circuit consisting of a gold electrode, a direct power source and a red LED, within 30 minutes.

According to Li, electronics' ability to self-heal could be particularly useful for solar panels, which are often placed in remote and hostile environments, as well as for future flexible electronics integrated into things like clothes that will experience a lot of mechanical stress.

"These are extremely small nanoscale particles for precision repairing, so they should save a lot of costs compared to using conventional soldering," Li told LiveScience. "The next step is to investigate how to integrate these nanomotors into electronic systems for on-demand activation."

Previous research into self-healing electronics generally has focused on creating self-healing materials that conduct electricity and can become integral parts of a circuit. For instance, Guihua Yu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas, and his team created a self-healing, conducting gel designed to act as a soft joint on circuit junctions, where breakages often occur.

"The nanomotors described in this study are more like a repairing tool outside the electronics," Yu told Live Science. "People can use the nanomotors to repair the cracks in circuits just like they use concrete to fix cracks on a wall."

But he said the need to create a designed chemical environment at the site of damage by adding fuel along with the nanomotors could make it challenging to  integrate the new technology in electronic s. A fully autonomous self-healing system would need to be able to sense when damage occurs and apply the nanomotors and fuel to the correct area.. "This poses a limitation in terms of how they can be applied to versatile electronic systems, and how they can be easily incorporated into circuits to do the self-healing work," Yu added.

The system relies primarily on materials traditionally used in electronics, and it does not matter how much time has passed since the damage to the circuit occurred, the UCSD researchers said.

The approach could also have applications outside electronics, Li said. In 2013, a group from Pennsylvania State University revealed a similar system that used the ion gradients caused by the minerals released when a bone breaks to power and direct drug-carrying nanoparticles to the site of the crack.

Li said their approach could be used for a similar purpose, and they have already demonstrated that they can power nanomotors using gastric acid, or even water, as fuel.

"The concept demonstrated here could have a profound impact on medicine delivery," Li said. "We would like to develop nanoscale medicine shuttles, which could swim and detect disease sites next. For example, we can modify nanomotors with antibodies on the surface and use them to swim and target tumors."

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Alan Brown, writer and blogger for the Kavli Foundation, contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. 

From inside our bodies to under the ocean floor, microbiomes — communities of bacteria and other one-celled organisms — thrive everywhere in nature. Emerging at least 3.8 billion years ago, they molded our planet and created its oxygen-rich atmosphere. Without them, life on Earth could not exist. 

Yet we know surprisingly little about the inner workings of nature's smallest and most complex ecosystems. 

Microbiomes have a great deal to teach us. By learning how members of microbiomes interact with one another, scientists might discover innovative green chemistry and life-saving pharmaceuticals, or learn how to reduce hospital infections, fight autoimmune diseases, and grow crops without fertilizers or pesticides.

The sheer complexity of microbiomes makes them difficult to study by conventional biochemical means. Nanoscience provides a different and complementary set of tools that promises to open a window into this hidden world. [The Nanotech View of the Microbiome]

Earlier this month, The Kavli Foundation hosted a Google Hangout with two leaders in the emerging applications of nanoscience for studying microbiomes. They discussed the potential of natural biomes, why they are so difficult to understand, and how nanoscience may help us unlock microbiome secrets. 

Joining the conversation were:

Eoin Brodie, a staff scientist in the Ecology Department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was part of the team that pioneered a device capable of identifying thousands of the bacterial species found in microbiomes, and is currently developing ways to combine data from many different types of measurement tools into a more coherent picture of those ecosystems.

Jack Gilbert is a principal investigator in the Biosciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory and an associate professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago. He has studied the microbiomes of hospitals and is working on ways to use nanostructures containing bacteria to help infants fight immune diseases.

Below is a modified transcript of their discussion. Edits and changes have been made by the participants to clarify spoken comments recorded during the live webcast. To view and listen to the discussion with unmodified remarks, you can watch the original video.

The Kavli Foundation: So let's start with an obvious question, what exactly is a microbiome?

Eoin Brodie: A microbiome is a connection of organisms within an ecosystem. You can think of the ecosystem of microbes in the same way you think of a terrestrial ecosystem, like a tropical forest, a grassland, or something like that. It is a connection of organisms working together to maintain the function of a system. 

Jack Gilbert: Yes. In a microbiome, the bacteria, the archaea (one-celled organisms similar to bacteria), the viruses, the fungi, and other single-celled organisms come together as a community, just like a population of humans in a city. These different organisms and species all play different roles. Together, they create an emergent property, something that the whole community does together to facilitate a reaction or a response in an environment. 

TKF: How complex can these microbiomes? Are they like tropical forests? Are they more complex, less complex?

J.G.: The diversity of eukaryotic life — all the living animals and plants that you can see — pales into insignificance beside the diversity of microbial life. These bacteria, these archaea, these viruses — they've been on the earth for 3.8 billion years. They are so pervasive, they have colonized every single niche on the planet. 

They shaped this planet. The reason we have oxygen in the atmosphere is because of microbes. Before they started photosynthesizing light into biomass, the atmosphere was mostly carbon dioxide. The reason the plants and animals exist on Earth is because of bacteria. The diversity of all the plants and animals — everything that's alive today that you can see with your eyes — that's a drop in the proverbial ocean of diversity contained in the bacterial and microbial world. [Can Microbes in the Gut Influence the Brain?]

E.B.: We tend to think of the earth as being a human planet and that we're the primary organism, or the alpha species. But we're really passengers, we're just blow-in's on a microbial planet. We're recent, recent additions.

TKF: You both wax so poetic about it. Yet we know so little about microbiomes. Why is it so hard to understand what goes on in these ecosystems?

E.B.: Jack eluded to it. The first problem is that microbiomes are very small. We can't see them, and it's very difficult to understand how things work when you can't see them. So tools are needed to be able to see these organisms. 

We also can't grow them. It's very hard to bring them from the natural ecosystem into the lab for study. Probably less than one percent, depending on the ecosystem, can actually be cultivated on growth media in the lab so that we can do experiments and understand what functions they carry out. That leaves 99 percent — the vast majority of the microbes on Earth and most of their ecosystems — unknown to us, apart from their DNA signatures and things like that. 

Now, Jack has pioneered DNA analyses. When you look at the DNA signatures from these environments, there are all these new organisms, new proteins, and new functions that we have never really seen before. This has been called earth's microbial dark matter. Just like dark matter and energy in the universe, this has been unknown to us, but it is extremely important if the planet — and humans — are to continue to function. 

TKF: So, what makes it so hard to grow these microbes in a Petri dish? 

E.B.: They're very fussy. You can think of it that way. They don't like to eat the food that we give them, in many cases. They eat things that we don't know they can eat. They breathe things that we don't know that they can breathe. 

We breathe oxygen, they breathe oxygen, but they also breathe nitrates, iron, sulfur, even carbon dioxide. Getting the right concentrations and combinations of what they eat and breathe is very difficult. 

In some cases, even if you can work that out, there may be something that they need to get from another member of the ecosystem. That member may supply an essential nutrient or a cofactor for them to grow. 

So getting all of those possible permutations and combinations right is extremely challenging. A lot of people are working on it, and there's a lot of expertise being put into this, but it's extremely difficult and complicated. 

J.G.:& That's an interesting point. I liken it to having a baker. You know, if you have a baker in a human community, the baker needs somebody who can make the flour, somebody who can provide a bit of yeast, and someone who will buy the bread. They exist as a network of individuals living in a community. 

If you take the baker out of the community, he or she cannot make the bread and so they are no longer a baker. Removing a microbe from its community reduces the likelihood that it will be able to perform the roles and tasks that it does in that environment.

So it's almost like you don't want to try and grow these things in isolation. Because, while isolating them makes our job as a microbiologist easier, it's also much more difficult to understand what they actually do in the environments in which they live. We can't figure that out in isolation because they are community players. 

TKF: What are some of the tools that we can use today to look at microbiomes? Is there a state of the art? 

J.G.: So I'll take on that. I mean this is a very dynamic evolving field. It is not a field where everyone seems to rest on their laurels. 

To understand microbes, we have a couple of tools that are available to us. One of those tools is genomics, so we can sequence the genome of bacteria, archaea, viruses and fungi, just as we've done for the human genome. 

The second one is the transcriptome, which looks at RNA, a transient molecule that creates the cell by translating what's in the genome into proteins. That's useful, because it tells us which genes are being turned on and off when we put those microbes under different conditions. 

Then we have the proteome, the proteins that actually make up the cell. They are the enzymes that enable the organism to interact with its environment, to consume its food, to respire carbon dioxide, oxygen or iron, and so on.

Then you have the metabolome, the metabolic molecules living organisms consume as food and produce as waste products. 

The genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome are four of the tools in our toolbox that we can actually use to examine the microbial world. But they are by no means the limit of our tools or our goals. We have ambitions far beyond just examining those components. Eoin is developing some of these, and maybe Eoin, you want to jump in now? 

E.B.: Yes, I'd add to that. The challenge of understanding the microbiome, and even individual microbes, is that they're just so small. They're complicated and small, so understanding their activity — their transcriptomes or proteins or metabolites — at the scale at which they exist, is extremely challenging. 

All the technologies that Jack mentioned are being developed with larger organisms in mind. Scaling them down to deal with the size of microbes, but then increasing their throughput to deal with the complexity of microbes, is a huge, huge challenge. 

I'll give you an example. When you look at the activity of an ecosystem, say a tropical forest, you look at the distribution of trees and animals, and look for the association between the vegetation and animals. 

So if you want to understand insects, you have a space in mind. You think, "This lives near this. It interacts in this area." So there's an interaction, a fundamental association between those members of the ecosystem. 

The way we typically looked at microbiomes — though this is changing now — was to mash up the entire forest in a blender. Then we would sequence all of the DNA, and look at the RNA and proteins, and the metabolites. 

Then we try to go back and say, "This tree is interacting with this insect." Whereas, in reality, that tree is hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from that insect, and they never see each other. 

That's the problem we have in the microbiome. When we mash up those organisms to look at their DNA, RNA, proteins and metabolites, we get rid of that spatial structure and its associations. And we lose the importance of space in terms of facilitating interactions. [The Nanotech View of the Microbiome (Kavli Roundtable)]

So, really, I think the next wave in microbiome research has to target this microbial activity and interactions at the scale of the microbe. Do they see each other? Do they interact, and how do they interact? What chemicals do they exchange, and under what conditions? I think that's the real challenge. That's why we're talking to the Kavli Foundation, because that's where nanoscience comes in. 

TKF: This is an excellent transition to my next question: How do we use nanoscience to learn about microbiomes? For example, could we use some of the same nanoscale probes we are developing to study the brain to, say, investigate microbiomes in the ocean or soil?

E.B.: I think there are some interesting parallels. I mean, you can think of the brain as this extremely complicated network of neurons. The BRAIN Initiative is attempting to map those neurons and to follow their activity. 

Similarly, the microbiome is a network of interacting organisms that turn on and turn off. The connections and the structure of that network are extremely important to the functioning of the system, just as it is for the functioning of the brain. 

For the BRAIN Initiative, people got together and said, "Well what do we need to do to look at electrical charge and electrical flow through neurons, noninvasively, and in real time?" And they came up with some technologies, that can potentially, do remote sensing on a very small scale, and watch how the system changes noninvasively. 

So, one approach to understanding the brain is to use external imaging, and another approach is to embed sensors. 

In the BRAIN Initiative some sensors are being developed here at Berkeley lab and elsewhere that use RFID — radio frequency identity — technology. They are similar to tags used to track shipping containers, goods in department stores, and things like that. They both transmit information and harvest energy from radio frequencies, so they're autonomous devices. I think that the challenge now is coupling that technology to sensors that can monitor something in the environment and send that information autonomously — no batteries required — to receivers. Then, if these sensors are distributed in an intelligent way, just like with GPS, you can triangulate where that information is coming from.

How could you use this to understand a microbiome? Well, the sensors that are being developed are still relatively large scale, about one square millimeter in size. That's pretty small for us, but very large for a microbe. 

So you can think about this in soil. Let's say we want to understand what happens when a root grows through soil. The root stimulates microbes, and there are ten times more microbes near the root than there are away from the root in soil. They all have different chemistries and different functions that are very important for the nutrition and health of the plant. 

If you could distribute very small sensors in the soil and have them sense things like carbon from roots or oxygen consumed by microbes, then you can build a three dimensional picture of how the soil microbiome is changed and altered as a root moves through the soil. That's one example of how advances in other fields, driven by nanotechnology, could be applied to microbiome. 

TKF: These RFID sensors would be based on semiconductor chips, right? So you could take a wafer, make a lot of them cheaply, distribute them in the soil, and get a picture you couldn't get any other way?

E.B.: Yes. There's an emerging field called predictive agriculture. It's like personalized agriculture, where fertilizer addition, for example, in a field would not be uniform. Instead, you would deliver the fertilizer where it's needed. You would irrigate the field exactly where it's needed. So you have this massive network of distributed autonomous sensors, and that would allow us to more efficiently use fertilizer. Then it wouldn't be leached or lost from the system, and cause water pollution and things like that. These examples are not on a microbial scale, but microbial processes control the availability and uptake of these fertilizers.

TKF: Thank you. Hold that thought and we'll come back to it in a few moments. In the meantime, Jack has been studying microbiomes in a new hospital to see how they evolve and affect the spread of disease. Could you tell us what you are doing, and how nanotechnology might help?

J.G.: Yes. The microbes that exist in a hospital have been a focus of clinicians and medical researchers for a couple of hundred years. Ever since we uncovered that bacteria might actually be causing disease, we've been trying to eradicate as much microbial life as possible. 

That paradigm is shifting to one where we're more interested in trying to understand how bacterial communities in a hospital may facilitate the spread of disease and antibiotic resistance, and maybe promote health as well. 

We've been going into hospitals and, with a very, very high temporal resolution, exploring how their bacterial communities change over time. So, looking at a scale of hours to days, we're trying to understand how — when a patient moves into a new room to have an operation or to undergo a procedure — the microbes that are already in that room affect the outcome of the patient's stay in the hospital. We want to know if it makes them either healthier or sicker.

So, we've been cataloging the microbes at these very fine scales. And what we see is an exchange between the bacteria in the room and inside the patient's body. 

But we've also discovered that the vast majority of bacteria that we would normally associate with so-called healthcare-associated infections — pathogens that we thought people acquire during hospital stays — appear to be bacteria that patients brought into the hospital themselves. They're bacteria that we have inside us. 

Remember, we have one hundred trillion bacteria living inside us. They weigh about two pounds, about the same as the brain. So if you think that the BRAIN Initiative is important, well maybe a microbiome initiative would also be important, because it weighs about the same as the brain.

The human microbiome has a lot of players. Most of them are friendly to us, but they can turn on us too. I liken this to a riot spreading in the city. You know, if you take things away from people, they will generally rise up and try to overthrow the very thing which was supporting them in the first place.

Microbes are the same way. We give a hospital patient antibiotics and radiation therapy to kill bacteria. Then we cut open his or her intestine and expose the bacteria to oxygen, which they don't like, and stitch the gut back up. When we look at the bacteria, we see that previously friendly bacteria have started to riot. They've been insulted so many times by the patient's treatment that they've decided that they've had enough. Then they go and attack the host to regain the resources which are being taken away from them.

This is very important. Understanding a patient's hospital stay from the microbes' perspective is helping us to design better ways to treat patients and reduce the likelihood that those microbes inside us will rebel, attack us, and make us sick. 

Nanotechnology is helping us to achieve a finer scale of visual resolution, so we can see exactly when, during a surgical procedure, bacteria go rogue and start to attack the host, and the molecular mechanisms that underpin that behavior.

We have a great example that we found by placing nanoscale molecular biosensors in the gut. It measures phosphate levels. Phosphate is a very important molecule that is used to create the DNA and proteins in our body, and in the cells of those bacteria. 

When the phosphate level drops below a certain threshold, the microbes turn on a mechanism to acquire phosphate from their environment. And where's the best source of phosphate? It's in the gut lining of their host. So they migrate to the gut and start to break down the human cells. We experience that as a several pathogenic infection, which often kills us. 

Because we understand that process, we are developing mechanisms to release phosphate at exactly the right time during surgery to prevent those bacteria from ever experiencing that phosphate reduction. To do those micro phosphate releases, we're developing nanotech scaffolds to hold phosphate, and placing them into the gut during surgery. This will reduce the likelihood that microbes will become pathogenic. 

TKF: Not only is that interesting, but it leads one of our viewers to ask whether we can adjust microbiomes so that they can target diseases and other human conditions. Can they go beyond just adjusting acidity or phosphate levels and do something more aggressive?

J.G.: Yes. The case where we've had the best success is in treating chronic infections caused by Clostridium difficile bacteria. C. diff infections are chronic gastrointestinal infections. Our treatments use a shotgun approach. We take the bacteria from a healthy person and transplant them into somebody with a chronic C. diff infection. That's overridden the C. diff infection, and established a healthy microbiome in the patient's gut so that he or she is no longer sick. 

The Chinese did this about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. They called it yellow soup, and they fed the stool from a healthy person to a sick person, and that made the sick person healthy. We just rediscovered this process, and we are now applying it in a more clinical setting.

So far, it's a very untargeted approach. What we're trying to do with our research arm, American Guts, and programs associated with autism, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's, is to identify specific bacterial community members that are either absent or overgrown in those patients. Then we want to explore how to adjust them — maybe we implant one that is missing or knock one back that is over-grown, to make that person healthier. 

E.B.: I'd like to add something to that. There's an interesting analogy, I think, in what we're doing for C. diff — fecal transplants — and restoration ecology. That's where you weed out an invasive plant species and plant another species to out-compete that invasive plant species. It's the exact same process, so the same ecological principles and ecological theory that's used in restoration ecology can be used in medicine. In some cases, it may not be as simple as removing one organism or adding one or two other organisms. It might be a community function, where we may actually need that complexity to be able to out-compete the organism that's causing the disease. 

J.G.: That's a really interesting point. Both Eoin and I are microbial ecologist at our core. I started out in marine microbial ecology, and now I work in soils, plants, humans, and disease. Eoin does the same. And both of us can apply the ecological principles of microbes to any environment because microbes are everywhere. 

TKF: Good. So, Eoin, we have two questions for you from our audience. The first involves agriculture. A viewer want to know whether nanoscience help us alter microbiomes in ways that change how we grow, fertilize, and protect plants from pests? 

E.B.: That's a great question, and I think a really timely one as well. The world population is seven billion, heading to nine, and then 11 billion. We're going to run out of fertilizer, we're going to run out of space to grow food, and we're running out of water — we're in a severe drought in California. These are our challenges, feeding a global population and providing fuel for a global population. 

The things microbes and nanotechnology can do mainly revolve around improving the resistance of plants to stresses, such as drought. Microbes can help plants acquire water. For example, mycorrhiza fungi can increase the root system, improve its drought tolerance, and improve nutrition. 

We can also identify bacteria that can produce fertilizer in or near the plant. So bacteria that can take nitrogen from the atmosphere and fix nitrogen can potentially offset the use of nitrogen fertilizer, which takes a lot of energy and causes a lot of pollution to manufacture. 

Bacteria can also mine critical minerals from the soil. We can have bacteria growing with the plants that acquire phosphorous, like Jack was saying. We can choose bacteria so that they mine more phosphorous than they need and supply that to the plant. 

All of these things would reduce our reliance on mining phosphorous from strip mines or using five percent of our world's energy to product nitrogen fertilizer. I think it's a big, big challenge. 

Nanotechnology, as I mentioned earlier, can be used to characterize these organisms and understand how they work. We can also build sensor systems to identify when nutrients are limiting growth. So instead of spreading nutrients and fertilizer in a very inefficient way, we can use it in a very targeted, specific, and much more sustainable way.

TKF: Can we take a step beyond that, and perhaps use microbiomes to control pests?

E.B.: Actually, that's been done for a long time. As you know, there are GMO crops out there that have taken genes from microbes that are used to kill insects. This could be carried out in a more natural way, as well, for example, by growing these bacteria with the plants and potentially inhibiting insects from grazing and feeding on the plants. We can learn a lot from nature. Nature has already developed these strategies for pest control, and we can learn from that to design our protections in a more, controllable and intelligent way.

TKF: Another question from a viewer: Is it possible to make an artificial microbiome community do a particular task?

J.G.: Yes. We've actually been working in that area, trying to create what we call a simple minimal community. This is a community of organisms that performs a task, such as creating acetate or generating hydrogen or butanol as potential biofuel source. So we're looking at microbes that grow on the surface of cathodes, and take raw electrons from those cathodes and integrate them with a carbon dioxide source, such as blue gas from a factory. We want to create a community that drives it's metabolism towards a set goal. 

That will take a mathematical modeling approach. So metabolic modeling, trying to synthesize in a computer how these microbes interact to release a certain product. So, in that sense, you need nanotechnology to sense the metabolic relationships that exist between those organisms, so that you can engineer that community towards producing a particular product. That's going to be very important to achieve biotechnology results.

E.B.: Actually, I've got to turn that question on its head. I would like to take a natural microbial community and stop it doing something, in certain cases. 

Let's say, for example, you've got cattle livestock. They are a significant source of global methane that contributes to global warming. Part of that is because of their diets, which provide an excess energy. That results in increased hydrogen, which results in a lot of methane, and cows release a lot of methane.

So, could we go in and use targeted synthetic biology or chemical interference approaches to stop the production of methane? To alter the balance of the cow's rumen, the cow's gut microbial ecosystem? We could not only inhibit methane production, but improve nutrition to the animal, because it's microbes that control the flow of energy to the animal from the food that it eats. 

It's a complicated ecosystem, but specifically tweaking it for the benefit of the animal and the benefit of the planet, is an interesting challenge and there are people working on that.

J.G.: I'd like to take that exact system and apply it to coal, in order to make more methane that we can then capture and pump into people's homes as biofuel.

TKF: Interesting thought. I have another question from a viewer, and Jack, I think you are the one to answer this. She has of experimental treatments that involve implanting health gut bacteria into people with autism. Why might this work? And will this be something that we see soon?

J.G.: The bacteria in our gut have an impact upon neurological behavior — the way we behave — through our immune system. They elicit a certain immune response in our gut, which feeds back on our nervous system to create a certain characteristic behavior in our brain. 

We've known this in animal models for a number of years now. We're just starting to understand the extent to which neurological diseases, such as autism, Parkinson's, and conditions such as Alzheimer's, are attributable to a disruption in the bacterial community in somebody's intestine.

There have been several experiments with very low numbers of children. In several cases in South America and a number in Australia, the children have had a fecal microbiome transplant, a healthy microbial community implanted into their own gut. 

The results are variable, and not exactly something that you would want to try at home. But they do hint, in some instances, of a favorable outcome where the child's neurological disorder is lessened, or significantly reduced. 

There are groups at Cal Tech are generating probiotics, particular bacteria species, that they hope to add to a child's diet or put into a capsule that can be swallowed. They seem to have a benefit in reducing the neurological abnormalities associated with autism, though they are still in their early days. 

TKF: That leads to another question I wanted to ask you. Jack, you're also working on encapsulating microbiomes in some sort of nanostructure and applying them to homes or offices. Your hope is that these biomes will expose people to microbiomes that will help their immune system develop resistance to these neurological problems. Could you tell us about that?

J.G.: Yes, we're working on animal models at the moment. Imagine recreating structures that these animals can interact with. Imagine I build you a building that was biologically alive, where the walls were deliberately teeming with a healthy microbial community.

Now, we have only a very limited idea what healthy means, but essentially what we're doing is creating structures, 3D printable structures, impregnated with certain nutrients. We're working with Ramille Shah at Northwestern University to create a 3D structure which allows that bacterial community to thrive. 

We can then introduce these structures into a mouse's cage. The bacteria associated with the 3D surface will colonize that mouse, and reduce certain abnormalities that we see in that mouse, such as an allergy response. So we've been growing bacteria which can produce a chemical that, once released into the gut of the mouse, will form a colony and reduce the likelihood of that mouse having a food allergy. 

I'm also working with Cathy Nagler at the University of Chicago. We're hoping to prove that we don't have to pump kids full of probiotics. Instead, we can just redesign homes, schools, and maybe daycare centers, so that children will get an appropriate microbial exposure that would mirror how they would have grown up if they were in a natural ecosystem. Hopefully, that will be the future of architecture. 

E.B.: And, you know, as a possible alternative, we can send our kids outside to play more.

J.G.: You got it. 

E.B.: Not bad.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

David Gerlach is the Executive Producer of Blank on Blank and he contributed this article and video to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

If you don't really have a head for math and science, physics may be the most intimidating subject of them all. It's space and time, the make-up of the entire universe — incredibly abstract and mind-bending stuff, and enough to make a lot of students throw in the towel. And that's where Richard Feynman really made his mark. Of course he did all kinds of groundbreaking work, like his theory of quantum electrodynamics. He proposed the parton model in the field of particle physics. He was even part of the atomic bomb project and part of the team investigating the explosion of the NASA Challenger space shuttle. [The Physics of Peeing, and How to Avoid Splash-Back ]

But he was also an amazing teacher, a dynamic and charismatic lecturer who showed the fun in physics . He was one of those rare people who not only naturally understood math and science, he was actually able to make other people understand it, too. And like it.

Richard Feynman on What It Means | The Experimenters | Blank on Blank from Quoted Studios on Vimeo.

Starting in 1966, science historian Charles Weiner interviewed Richard Feynman as part of an extensive oral history project at the American Institute of Physics. Recording hours of tape, Weiner recorded the details of Feynman's entire career, his whole life. On that tape, Feynman talked about his earliest memories — what and who shaped the world-famous physicist — and the teacher he'd later become. And most influential of all, a man who was neither a scientist nor a mathematician, a man who didn't even have any formal education — his dad.

"Richard Feynman on What It Means" is part of The Experimenters series, from the creators of Blank on Blank. This special series is all about discovering the stories behind innovators and their creative ways of thinking. 

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

A new so-called cyberwood that continues to work even after its living components die could lead to technological advances in thermal night-vision cameras and temperature sensors.

This "zombie" cyborg wood is a hybrid material made of tobacco laced with teensy carbon tubes, and the whole contraption can act like a heat detector even after the plant cells have perished.

Currently, electronic thermometers and thermal night-vision cameras sense heat by using materials whose electrical conductivity changes as the temperature changes. The best heat-detecting materials available now change their electrical conductivity just by a few percent per degree temperature change.

In contrast, the new cyberwood that the scientists created is hundreds of times more responsive to changes in temperature than the best man-made materials currently used in heat detectors. Samples of cyberwood were sensitive enough to detect people from only their body heat from a distance of up to 31.5 inches (80 centimeters) away. [Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature]

Making cyberwood

Prior research had revealed that living plants are exceptionally sensitive to changes in temperature. Their sensitivity is based on the behavior of chemicals within the cell walls of the plants. However, this sensitivity fades after the cells die.

To create a material with the potential to be as temperature-sensitive as plants, scientists watered tobacco cells with a solution loaded with carbon nanotubes, hollow pipes just nanometers (billionths of a meter) in diameter. Although carbon nanotubes are only about the width of a strand of DNA, they are about 100 times stronger than steel and only one-sixth as heavy. Moreover, their conductive properties for both electricity and heat rival those of the best metal conductors.

The carbon nanotubes formed a complex network among the plant cells and partially infiltrated the plant cell walls. The resulting cyberwood has a microscopic structure that resembles that of natural wood, and mechanical properties similar to those of balsam fir, a kind of pine tree, the researchers said in the new study.

"We are not trying to engineer plants with nanotechnology — we let plant cells do the nanoengineering," said study co-author Chiara Daraio, a materials scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. "Instead of trying to mimic properties found in biological systems, we allow biological systems to fabricate new materials for us, with properties not achievable before in man-made materials."

The carbon nanotubes served as permanent electrically conductive pathways that substituted for water after the cyberwood dehydrated, stabilizing its unique properties even after the plant cells died.

"It is possible to immortalize, in composite materials that combine biological and synthetic elements, properties that are common only in living plants," Daraio told Live Science. [Incredible Tech: How to Engineer Life in the Lab]

The cyberwood proved exceptionally sensitive to temperature, with its electrical conductivity changing by about 1,730 percent per 1.8 degree change in Fahrenheit (1 degree change in Celsius) at about room temperature. This temperature sensitivity worked best at temperatures below the boiling point of water, 212 degrees F (100 degrees C), after which the cyberwood's structure began to unravel.

"The cyberwood response to temperature changes was so extreme, we initially could not believe the data," Daraio said.

Future cyberwood devices

The carbon nanotubes in the cyberwood remain highly electrically conductive. This suggests that materials like cyberwood — a specimen of what the researchers call "plant nanobionics" — could be connected to electronic circuits for use in devices, the researchers said.

"The creation of nanobionic materials, derived by combining living cells with synthetic nanostructures, is an emerging area of research, which offers numerous opportunities to create materials with properties so far only found in biological materials," Daraio said.

The scientists also found that humidity influenced cyberwood's electrical response to changes in temperature. This suggests that a material like cyberwood could be used as a temperature sensor as long as the humidity is kept constant, and as a humidity sensor as long as the temperature is kept constant.

Cyberwood itself may not be the material that ultimately ends up in future devices. Instead, by using cyberwood to understand why plants are so temperature-sensitive, scientists "now hope to be able to extract from plants the relevant molecules to create new materials using a scalable and economically viable synthesis process," Daraio said.

"For example, we envision creating materials with similarly extreme temperature sensitivity, which could also be flexible, transparent and even biocompatible," Daraio added. "These new materials could then be used to create affordable thermal cameras for night vision, or in new temperature sensors for biomedical applications or as sensors embedded in consumer products."

Daraio and her colleagues Raffaele Di Giacomo of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Bruno Maresca of the University of Salerno in Italy detailed their findings online March 30 the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Britt Faulstick, engineering and technology news officer at Drexel University, contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Three shelves full of leafy, green, tobacco plants take their place under the growing lights next to the microscopes, fume hoods and heat-transfer experiments in Matthew McCarthy's lab. 

Unlike most tobacco farmers, McCarthy isn't worried about the health of his crops — in fact, he's actually taking steps to ensure they get sick. McCarthy grows the tobacco to harvest the plants' viruses, tiny nanomachines that are perfect templates for rapidly manufacturing nanostructured coatings. [Nanoscale Super-Sponges Boost Boiling (Gallery )]

"Mosaic viruses" as machines

Admittedly, as a mechanical engineering professor in Drexel University's College of Engineering, McCarthy isn't much of a green thumb, but just a few dozen plants will yield trillions of tobacco mosaic viruses — and that's what he's really after. McCarthy's talent lies in using the minuscule protein bundles to engineer nanostructures that can change the properties of the surfaces to which they're attached.    

Tobacco mosaic virus was one of the first viruses, of any kind, to be identified and widely studied, due in some part to the devastation they caused at the turn of the last century. In McCarthy's Microscale Thermofluidics Laboratory, the viruses have found a more beneficial niche as self-assembling scaffolding for nano-construction. 

McCarthy and his doctoral assistant Md Mahamudur Rahman have engineered viruses to cling to a variety of surfaces — from stainless steel to gold, and just about every combination in between. They approached the U.S. National Science Foundation with a proposal to make these surfaces better at boiling water, and with the funding are now producing structures that do exactly that. 

It's not just as easy as boiling water

Phase-change heat transfer, the technical moniker for boiling water, is ubiquitous in nearly all industries. It plays a critical role in electrical power generation, chemical processing, water purification and HVAC systems in residential and commercial buildings — to name just a few applications. So even modest improvements to the phase-change heat transfer process could translate to energy and cost savings on a large scale.

If McCarthy’s work is one day put to use in steam-producing power plants, it has the potential to improve not only their efficiency, but also the maximum temperature at which they can safely operate — thus enabling them to produce more energy. [Steam Machine Turns Poop into Clean Drinking Water ]

Enhanced boiling delays the onset of the undesirable condition engineers call critical heat flux (CHF). This is essentially the failure of a surface during boiling. When CHF occurs, the production of vapor cannot be balanced by replenishing liquid, and that is the first step in a dangerous progression that can cause the destruction of electronic components or even the catastrophic meltdown of a nuclear reactor. 

"One route to enhance the way a surface transfers heat during boiling is to control how hydrophilic it is," Rahman said. Hydrophilic surfaces are particularly effective at attracting water. "A surface can produce steam at a higher rate if it's able to quickly rewet itself during boiling. This allows rapid boiling to safely occur at higher heat fluxes." 

Drawing water toward the heat

The science behind McCarthy's work is the same that drives the design of high-performance athletic apparel and thermal gear: capillary action. To keep the wearer dry, microfiber material wicks perspiration away from the body by drawing it into the tiny spaces between its woven fibers. Using the viruses, McCarthy creates a coating of porous metallic structures that draw water down into the spaces between them, which keeps the water molecules in contact with the boiling surface. 

"This is time-tested science, it's the same reason a paint brush draws in paint or a dry sponge absorbs water." McCarthy said. "We've just figured out how to turn a piece of metal or a composite material into something more sponge-like using an extremely thin surface coating."   

The researchers built each virus with a chemical binding site at the tip of its protein chain. This allows the viruses to attach to just about any metallic surface they contact. Each virus has a slight electrostatic charge, so while it's binding to a surface it's also pushing itself away from surrounding viruses, which is how the structures are able to arrange themselves in relatively vertical positions. This alignment is important because it creates a space, between the tip of each virus structure and the boiling surface, into which water can be drawn.

Building virus sheets

Viral biotemplating is the process of using viruses as a scaffold for making nanostructures. It's a tool McCarthy learned to use as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, where he worked with Reza Ghodssi and James Culver to use tobacco mosaic viruses for enhancing micro-battery performance. 

Using similar techniques, McCarthy's lab can coat full surfaces simply by submerging them in a viral solution for 12 to 24 hours, letting the grass-like substrate take root. Then, the researchers coat the viruses with palladium and nickel to form the actual nanostructure that will do the wicking. The entire process can be completed at room temperature in a little over a day, which makes it quick and easy to repeat on a variety of surfaces. 

"As mechanical engineers studying fluidics, it's very helpful to have a number of different samples to study," McCarthy said. "We can better understand the nature of phase-change heat transfer by observing and comparing the behavior across surfaces of different composition and shape."

In addition to coating different metallic surfaces with the virus-templated nanostructures, the group is designing surfaces with particular shapes that could help control the formation of vapor bubbles during boiling. 

"Right now we're specifically studying the fundamentals of boiling heat transfer and its enhancement, but this technology could one day be applied to new heat exchanger designs and high-performance thermal management systems of the future," McCarthy said. "It could also be used to retrofit existing heat exchange systems with self-assembled viral nanostructures — which could prove to be a cost-effective way to improve their efficiency." 

As McCarthy’s research moves forward, the team will identify the best combination of surface design, materials and nanostructure coating to produce the most efficient heat transfer. Preliminary results are already quite promising. The super-wicking surfaces have shown a tripling in the efficiency of the boiling process and a 240-percent increase in the maximum heat-transfer rate at which critical heat flux occurs. 

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Drexel University contributed these images to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Using viruses that once plagued the U.S. tobacco crop, mechanical engineers at Drexel University have created molecular scaffolds to grow sophisticated nanosponges. For more on the research, see the video feature "Virus-Crafted Metal Nano-Sponges Boost Boiling," and for more images of the sponges, see the gallery that follows. (Images credit: Drexel University.)

Infected

A tobacco leaf infected with the tobacco mosaic virus showing the characteristic mosaic pattern.

Nanocoatings 

Scanning electron microscope image of virus-templated nanocoatings on a stainless steel substrate, where the underlying stainless steel is intentionally exposed for contrast. 

Healthy 

Healthy tobacco plants growing in the Drexel Multiscale Thermofluidics Lab.

Mosaic virus

Scanning electron microscope image of virus-templated nanostructures (right), including a schematic of the core shell structure (left) where the tobacco mosaic virus is shown in green, palladium in purple, and the nickel shell in orange.

1 micrometer

Scanning electron microscope image of 1-micrometer-thick virus-templated nanocoatings on a silicon substrate.

Fast and hot

High-speed imaging of nucleate boiling on a surface treated with Drexel University's virus-templated nanocoating.

A tiny hierarchy

Hierarchical structures comprised of virus-templated nanostructures on a polymer micropost array.

Up close and personal

Close-up image of conformal nickel nanostructures on a silicon micropost sidewall.

Nanostructures 

Close-up image of the Drexel University lab's virus-templated nickel nanostructures.

Microstructures

Hierarchical structures comprised of virus-templated nanostructures conformally coating silicon microstructures.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley announced today that they have developed an ultra-thin material that can change color on demand by bouncing back light on the nanoscale level.

Well, the on-demand element is a little more nuanced. The “chameleon skin” material actually changes color when flexed, or when a small amount of force is applied to the surface. 

Chameleon’s Color-Changing Trick Taps Crystals: Photos

But because the material is much lighter and more flexible than previous efforts, the color-shifting effect could have a wide range of color-on-demand applications when applied to different surfaces.

It works like this: Tiny ridges — smaller than a wavelength of light — are etched into a layer of silicon film one thousand times thinner than a human hair. The silicon layer, approximately 120 nanometers thick, is flexible and functions as a skin that can be adhered to other surfaces. 

Spacing of the ridges produces different colors. On top of that, the material is highly reflective — bouncing back up to 83 percent of incoming light, which makes it quite efficient at producing those colors. 

The technology takes an entirely different approach to generating color, compared to what we’re typically used to seeing. 

With most natural materials — or paints or fabrics — color depends on chemical composition. When white light hits the surface of these materials, certain wavelengths of light are absorbed and the rest are reflected back, generating particular colors. Changing color, therefore, requires changing the chemical composition of the material.

The material developed by the UC-Berkeley team, on the other hand, leverages something known as structural coloration. The phenomenon isn’t new, and in fact occurs in nature all the time — those iridescent colors in peacock wings or beetle shells are generated by structural coloration.

Isaac Newton conjectured on the effect 300 years ago, and certain structural coloration techniques have been previously deployed in commercial and industrial applications.

Body Armor Based On Snake, Fish And Butterfly Scales

But the new technology promises much greater efficiency, flexibility and precision in generating specific colors. The research team says the silicon material could have wide-ranging applications in display technology, camouflage materials, or even as a way to visually indicate structural fatigue in buildings or bridges.

The paper was published today in the journal Optica.

Originally published on Discovery News.

Alan Brown, writer and editor for the Kavli Foundation, edited this roundtable for Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Microbiomes — communities of microorganisms — exist nearly everywhere, from the soil and the sediment under oceans, rivers and lakes to the landscapes of the human body. They are ubiquitous, mediating the interactions of plants and animals with their environments, and yet we know very little about them. 

The Kavli Spotlight, a series of roundtables and live Internet events, has previously covered how the human microbiome influences brain development, and how the study of natural microbiomes drives the search for extraterrestrial life. Our latest roundtable looks at the role of nanoscience and nanotechnology in revealing microbiome communities.

The challenge is significant. Within only a few grams of soil or ocean sediment, rich and complex ecosystems exist that contain hundreds of thousands of different microbial species. Scientists cannot yet grow the vast majority of these single-celled organisms in a lab, and so they are immune to classification by conventional technologies. 

Nanoscience  may be able to help tease apart how the members of natural microbiomes interact with one another. To discuss this, the Kavli Foundation has invited two leaders in the field:

Eoin Brodie is staff scientist in the Ecology Department at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. He has pioneered technologies for accurately measuring microbiome community dynamics.

Jack Gilbert is principal investigator in the Biosciences Division at the DOE's Argonne National Laboratory and associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. He has studied the microbiomes that exist within hospitals and is working on ways to use bacteria-embedded nanostructures to rebuild infant microbiomes.

Below is an edited transcript of their discussion. The participants have also been provided the opportunity to amend or edit their remarks.

The Kavli Foundation: What makes a microbiome a microbiome? Is it only about size, or does it require a certain complexity?

Jack A. Gilbert: A microbiome is a community of single-celled microbes. It could include bacteria, fungi, protozoa, algae and viruses. It's a little community whose members are interacting with each other. It can be anything, from ten different species to 1,000 species to 200,000 species. 

Eoin Brodie: Consider this analogy: Think of all the different things you might find in a tropical forest. You've got different types of trees and animals and insects. All these things have evolved to work together to form some sort of stable system, in many cases, an ecosystem. So a microbiome is the microbial version of that forest ecosystem. Individually, each different species provides different functions that, together, are essential for the stability and activity of the system. [Body Bugs: 5 Surprising Facts About Your Microbiome Countdown]

TKF: Are there properties that emerge when microbiomes reach a certain size or level of complexity? Are they different from the properties of individual microbes?

J.G.: There are. This is an area of ongoing research, though we can start by looking at how ecological theory plays out in larger organisms. That helps us interpret and predict what microbiomes might do as they grow in complexity.

As complexity increases, we see more interconnections in the system. Think of it like a food web. If it combines multiple insects, trees, plants, and other things, it is potentially more stable than if it has only a single insect and a single tree. The more participants, the more interactions, and these interactions trigger still more interactions. Together, they regulate the abundance of specific types of organisms. Nothing takes over, they all share resources.

At exactly what point an ecosystem becomes stable or resilient is less clear. Macro-ecological theory suggests that when there are more connections, you build in redundancy. This makes the system more robust and resistant to disturbance, though there is a sweet-spot that may be hard to define. Larger ecosystems may have several organisms doing the same thing, though not necessarily at the same time or in the same place. But those organisms could step in when another organism performing that function cannot do so. 

J.G.: This is an interesting point. The very definition of a highly robust community or ecosystem is inherent flexibility. It's like a reed bending in a stream, flexing with changes in stress and pressure. Redundancy is part of that. There may be 20 organisms that produce methane, which is then used by other organisms. The members of that methane-producing community will respond differently to changing conditions. One might grow better at higher temperatures, another if temperatures drop. But the fundamental function of that assemblage producing methane, hasn't changed. 

TKF: Microbiomes are clearly complex and interconnected. They can have hundreds of thousands of different species. How do we begin to understand something like that? What's the current state of the art?

J.G.: There are multiple states of the art. 

E.B.: It's true. For example, we can only grow between 0.001 percent and maybe 10 percent of the microbes we find. For some systems, like the human gut, we are getting better because we know more about them. 

In soils, we're not very good. That's because it's very hard to predict what these microbes need to grow. They may have unusual nutritional requirements are, or need other organisms to grow. It almost impossible to grow them in a pure culture. 

One window into their function has been things that Jack has pioneered, using metagenomics and sequencing technologies that were developed for human genome sequencing. We can apply those technologies to these incredibly complicated microbial communities. 

So we take this community apart, just like an enormous jigsaw puzzle, and break it up into tiny, tiny molecular pieces that we can measure with sequencing machines. The real challenge, however, is putting those pieces back together again in a way that tells you something about the whole community. So, that's one approach. 

Another approach involves imaging organisms. You can see them using visible light or other wavelengths, identify their shapes, and learn about the chemistry associated with them. We have done that in some very simple artificial microbial communities we’ve grown in the lab. The challenge is finding ways to apply these technologies to increasingly more complicated systems.

J.G.: You know, you can put "omics" at the end of anything and get a new tool out of it. Genomics measures genes. Transcriptomics covers RNA transcribed from genes. Proteinomics looks at proteins folded by transcribed RNA. Metabolomics analyzes the chemicals and metabolites mediated by those proteins. There's a whole slew of them, and that means we have a lot of tools that can interrogate the components of the system. [The Hunt for Alien Extremophiles is Taking Off (Kavli Q+A) ]

One of our key challenges is to integrate all this information. Eoin's been developing some techniques to attack this problem by compiling this data into an interoperable data framework. It's all very well having a genome, a transcriptome, a metabolome — but pulling those together and creating knowledge out of the chaos can sometimes be an über challenge. 

E.B.: I'd say it's one of our grand challenges at the moment, and it is not going to be solved any time soon. 

TKF: Why so long? Are we talking weeks, months or years?

J.G.: Decades. 

TKF: For a single one?

J.G.: Sometimes. We're developing novel, high-throughput technologies that can help to alleviate that problem. But let's say I have a thousand genes. I don't know what function they encode. We may be able to express a small fraction of them and fold only some of their proteins. I might be able to figure out the function of maybe five of those proteins — I'm being generous. So out of 1,000 targets, today it would be reasonably simple for me to examine five of them. What about the other 99.95? What do we do with those? 

E.B.: It's a huge roadblock, but there's a whole new set of high-throughput technologies to automate this process. There are technologies for producing and folding proteins, screening protein function, and finding protein structures without crystallization. All of those things sort of exist, but there's no one lab or initiative that's pulling them together. And that's what we need to understand microbiomes.

J.G.: Even so, it's a big problem. Let me give you an example. E. coli has been our main microbial bacterial workhorse for 100 years, and we still don't know what one-third of the genes do. It's kind of crazy. I work on something called the Microbiome Project, which estimates that there are well over 50 million bacterial species on Earth. We know two-thirds of the genome of one of them. 

Still, we can study microbiomes in different contexts. For example, we can look at the emerging properties of an ecosystem, such as its ability to generate methane or consume carbohydrates. Then we can make and test predictions about the functions that community needs. It would be much better if we had all that genomic information, but we don't need it to advance our understanding. 

E.B.: Right, this glass really is half full. There are all these amazing chemistries that microbes perform that that can do really wonderful things for humanity, like providing new antibiotics and nutrients for crops. It's pretty much an unlimited resource of novelty and chemistry — if we can develop improved tools to tap into it.

TKF: How does nanoscience help?

E.B.: One of the great advances in sequencing a genome is parallelizing biological assays. So instead of sequencing 12 or 96 or even a few hundred strands of DNA at a time, we can sequence millions at a time. To characterize the biochemistry and chemistry of microbial communities, we have to scale in the same sort of way.

Using nanotechnology, we can build nanofluidic devices to run these assays. These would be the size of semiconductor chips, with nanoscale channels to capture tiny samples of DNA and test them with tiny amounts of reagents, all in parallel. We could use nanoscale imaging sensors to detect these reactions, instead of the large cameras we use today. And we can use semiconductor technologies to make tens of thousands of them from a single silicon wafer, which massively reduces the cost of those assays. 

There are clear paths to do this, but we need to rally around the challenge and bring different industries, like the semiconductor industry, together. 

J.G.: One of the most exciting things, from my perspective, is to use nanoscience to reduce the complexity of our datasets. Let's say I have 100,000 organisms in a few grams of ocean sediment or soil. I want to understand the role of a complex lipid in this community. If I knew which microbes were involved, I could target them and analyze which genes created or used that lipid. But I don't, so instead, I bind a quantum dot nanoparticle to a food particle used in making the lipid. The organisms that consume it will light up under x-ray analysis. 

That will show me the active organism. Then I can start looking for the genes that degrade or transform that lipid. We can use it to narrow down our search window to something that's a little bit more manageable. There are many ways we can deal with this, but this is a good nanotech route. 

E.B.: There've been some early successes, but also issues. A quantum dot may be tiny to us, but it is a big thing to a microbe. It can be hard to actually get it inside a cell. The organisms that ingest it in your experimental system may not be the ones that ingest it in nature. Still, variants of those approaches have a lot of potential. 

J.G.: As we've always said, my very act of observing this system has changed its nature. Still, either you don't bother or you try these techniques. You've just got to be careful interpreting what you see. Very careful. 

E.B.: Science is built on observation, manipulation, more observation, reforming your hypotheses, and repeating that cycle. Manipulation is a key part of that. 

Think about how we've manipulated individual microorganisms to understand their function. We start with a hypothesis about a gene's function, knock it out, and see if the organism has lost that function. We can then add that gene back and see if it regains that function, which would prove the hypothesis. 

We don't have an analogous way of doing that in a complicated microbial community. We need to knock out an entire species to see if they perform a particular function and observe what happens when that function is not present. 

A new approach to genetically engineering individual organisms might help. It's called CRISPR, and it is based on tricking bacteria into self-destructing. For this to work, you have to introduce a genetic construct, a plasmid or something like it, into the bacterial cell. Then it will create a protein that triggers a highly specific self-destruct mechanism. Many bacteria won't take up pieces of foreign DNA for that very reason, because it might mess them up. 

Nanoscience might be able to help us trick bacteria into ingesting this plasmid. For example, as Jack was saying, we can stick a quantum dot onto various molecules to identify compounds that bacteria will regularly ingest. We could also attach a CRISPR payload to those same molecules to trigger self-destruction, or knock out or potentially add a new function to the organism. CRISPR and a few other analogous technologies are potentially transformative for microbiome research, and nanotechnology could help us find the delivery mechanisms we need to make it work.

TKF: Is this something we can do relatively soon or are we talking about decades of research?

E.B.: People are doing it now, but they're using E. coli and other organisms that we know and can manipulate in the lab. We've already worked out the theory of how we could target a strain of microbes in a natural microbiome. We know it will work on some bacteria, but it will be difficult to inject these pieces of DNA into others. That's a big research challenge right now. 

TKF: What about applying some of the nanotechnology being developed to study the brain to investigate microbiomes in the soil or water?

E.B.: There's amazing work going on in developing miniaturized sensors based on radio frequency identification technology, or RFID. RFID tags are used by companies to track shipments. They can both transmit and acquire energy from radio waves, so they don't need batteries. It gives us a way of getting information from very small sensors without any wiring.

Researchers want to inject them into the brain to sense electrical impulses. I'm not exactly sure how that would work, but the idea is to wind up with a distributed network of sensors. You could read out their location and what they sense remotely.

Now, think about doing something like that in soil. We could make tens of thousands of them from a single silicon wafer, mix them with soil, and plant something. As the roots grow and pass the sensors, we would get a readout of things like temperature, moisture, pH, oxygen concentration, the presence of specific chemicals, and how that initial reading changes over time.

We could build these complicated three-dimensional pictures of how microbes are influencing the area around the root and soil. And perhaps we can use that in an agricultural setting to optimize things like water irrigation and fertilization.

J.G.: We could also use quantum dots here. We could, for example, tag an amino acid with a quantum dot, stick it in the community, and see which members take it up so we can determine who's active. 

The cool thing about this technology is that if you take a small sample of soil, maybe 10 microns by 10 microns, you could theoretically use this technique to identify where the active members of that community are. In a community of thousands of organisms, not all will be active at the same time. Some may be living with a very, very low level of activity, waiting for the right conditions to wake up. So we've got to map not only the 3D location of the organisms, but the fourth dimension of time to understand how that community is changing and responding to environmental stimuli. 

TKF: You've done something similar with hospital floors, correct?

J.G.: We had a grant to examine the microbiome of hospitals, specifically a new, $800 million facility being built in Chicago. We started looking at the floor when the building was an empty shell and watched as doctors and patients moved in and it became an active, functioning hospital.

We wanted to see how the ecology of that microbiome changed. That might give us some insights into health care-associated infections, the dissemination of antibiotic resistance, and the development of pathogen reservoirs.

It quickly became obvious that the vast majority of the bacteria released by people in the hospital die shortly after landing in what is a remarkably inhospitable ecosystem. We want to understand which ones remain active and which ones go dormant and could revive under different conditions. That's very important to understanding the transmission of diseases in hospitals, and how to control and manipulate microbial ecosystems in our homes, offices and public spaces.

TKF: So what happens next?

J.G.: It's a huge study. We're still working on it. It's an enormous study. We did it every day for 365 days, and generated 8.5 million data points. They included everything from activity assays and bacterial cultures and DNA sequencing to patient and staff medical records. We are teasing apart this complex database of interactions to see how this system actually developed and how it works. 

We would like to continue that monitoring. We would like to use some of these novel sensor technologies to continuously monitor this ecosystem and generate this data in a regular, detailed fashion. High-frequency spatial and temporal data is incredibly important if we want to discern trends and understand how to manipulate ecosystems. 

TKF: How would you use nanotechnology in your hospital project?

J.G.: As Eoin said, it's about shrinking our sensors down to very small scales. In a built environment, especially a hospital, people don't want to see these things. We need to take samples, process and analyze them, and transmit the data in a space smaller than a light switch. So we need to make everything incredibly small. That means immobilizing probes or primers on certain nanomaterial surfaces and using nanofluidics to reduce the amount of samples we need to capture. 

We would like to go even smaller, and compress these capabilities into a pill that you could swallow so you could analyze the human microbiome — or metabolome or even the proteinome — at any point in the gut. You could even put an RFID transmitter in there, so the pill could communicate with your phone and you could see what your microbiome was doing in real time. 

TKF: What other things might nanoscience do? Could it provide information that biologists typically cannot access? 

E.B.: You know, the same tools used in nanoscience to analyze materials and processes at the atomic scale are being used to understand microbial processes and microbial communication networks. One good example is electrical conductivity. Some microbes conduct electricity, which is how they make the energy they need to live. These processes are very diverse and varied, and researchers have used atomic force microscopy and similar nanoscience tools to understand how those electrons flow at the atomic scale. 

At the same time, researchers are studying how to couple these bacterial nanowires to inorganic or organic nonliving things. These nanowires can transfer electrons over long distances, and have incredible properties that are very different from our man-made wires. We can learn by biology, and we can also fuse biology with our electronics. 

TKF: What about using nanoscience to improve agriculture?

E.B.: We typically use chemicals, especially nitrogen in the form of ammonia, as fertilizer. Microbes can also generate nitrogen by taking carbon and using it fix atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Some bacteria do this within certain plant roots, but we'd like to look at nitrogen-fixing bacterial that live in other parts of many plants. Nanoscience has a role in understanding how those microbes talk to plants, how they share metabolites, and what regulates nitrogen fixation. If we could do that, we might be able to improve crop productivity and reduce or eliminate fertilizer use. 

TKF: What about manipulating the microbiomes in homes or people? Could nanoscience help with that?

J.G.: Eoin was just talking about restructuring the microbial environment for plants. We could do something similar in our buildings to give children the microbial exposure to develop a healthy immune system.

E.B.: Exactly. The early months of life are critical to the development of our immune system. The microbiome in our home may have a big impact on this. For example, if you have two large dogs that go outside, you're less likely to develop asthma. The hygiene hypothesis says this is because you are exposed to a greater diversity of microbes that the dogs bring inside. Cleaning and disinfecting prevents this exposure, and it may contribute to the rise of such inflammatory disorders as asthma and eczema.

J.G.: Exactly. We're interested in constructing new architectural interfaces and environments that give our children the right microbial exposures. That involves working with nanoscale interfaces. After all, a bacterial cell is only 700 or 800 nanometers across, and we're talking about creating nanostructures to understand and manipulate its surfaces. 

For example, we're very interested in constructing materials with pockets with embedded nanoparticles. These nanoparticles would have chemically modified interfaces that would attract the right kinds of microbes. 

TKF: How would you use these ideal microbiome environments?

J.G.: We might embed nanoparticles in 3D printing materials to promote an environment that enables the stable formation of biofilms of bacteria. We might be able to use them as probiotics that a child could take to reconfigure the microbiome in his or her gut. We might have microbial 3D printed walls or floors or carpets or even chairs or door handles. 

We're exploring ways to create very specific kinds of 3D printing inks that promote the development of specific kinds of microbiome. This may sound a little bit bizarre, but there's very hard science underneath it. You can't create a carpet and hope for the best. You have to understand how to appropriately manipulate microbiomes, and then create materials that interact with the right microbes and support a thriving microbiome. 

E.B.: That's a really interesting concept. You know, our buildings filter out everything below a certain particle size. Perhaps we could engineer intelligent filters that weed out dangerous toxins but allow more of the outdoor microbiome to enter. That would be an amazing contribution. There's no doubt that the microbiome we've evolved with has to have some impact on our heath, particularly in the early life stages. 

TKF: A final question. The use of nanoscience to study the microbiome is so new, I'm not even sure we can call it an emerging field yet. How do we achieve the critical mass of researchers we need to achieve significant breakthroughs?

E.B.: We clearly need to work across disciplines and keep extending our networks of researchers. Jack and I have a certain network, and then there are nanoscience researchers who are thinking about the intersection between their work and biology. We need to keep reaching out.

We also need to keep talking about the potential of the microbiome to improve the health of our planet, the health of humanity, our production of food, and our fundamental understanding of our world. No matter what discipline you're in, I think we're asking compelling questions and posing challenges that people can find scientifically interesting.

So we need to get our questions out there, seed the broader community with some potential ideas of where nanotechnology might fit, and I think people will find ways to use nanoscience in ways we never would have imagined. 

J.G.: Our team is working with Argonne National Labs and at the University of Chicago, which have large efforts in nanoscience, to implement some of the concepts we've been talking about. 

One of the major things we need to overcome is nomenclature. What I call the surface is not what they call the surface. What I call a biological agent is not what they call a biological agent. We have many words for which we have two separate meanings. Since we don't speak the same language, it is often much harder to get things started. 

We also need funding initiatives. When the U.S. National Institutes of Health committed $180 million to the Human Microbiome Project, lots of clinicians jumped at the opportunity. There has not been a similar initiative to use nanoscience to explore the microbiome. If someone put $200 million on the table, people would work harder at overcoming those communication barriers, and we'd see significant and rapid advances.

Which leads me to another point. We need to create a data commons — a stronger, much more cohesive capacity to analyze multiple data streams. Just as we need to overcome communication problems between people, we also need to overcome communications between data so we can use everything we generate. That is, in itself, another grand challenge. 

TKF: Another grand challenge?

J.G.: We have thousands of grand challenges. But it's a worthwhile effort to try and overcome them, to do nanoscience at the largest scales, because the largest scales achieve the greatest rewards. 

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Alan Brown, writer and editor for the Kavli Foundation, edited this roundtable for Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

For two decades, scientists and engineers have labored to build and control nanomaterials and to understand how they interact with the world around them. Now, researchers have begun to harness that knowledge to change the world. The results of their efforts include "invisibility cloaks," nano-coated stealth antibiotics that slip past a cell's defenses to attack a disease's vulnerabilities, artificial systems that mimic photosynthesis, quantum computing, and even instant transmission of information over long distances. More prosaic advances include longer-lasting batteries and energy storage systems, more efficient water purifiers, and even improved golf clubs and bicycles. In fact, research at the nanoscale is so broad and so profound, it is often difficult to understand how its various strands fit together.

To unravel the answers, the Kavli Foundation invited the directors of three of its nanoscience institutes to discuss the future of nanoscience and nanoscale technologies:

Paul Alivisatos, director of the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute at University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory;

Paul McEuen, director of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science;

Nai-Chang Yeh, co-director of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at the California Institute of Technology.

Below is an edited transcript of their discussion. The participants have also been provided the opportunity to amend or edit their remarks.

Kavli Foundation: Nanoscience encompasses everything from quantum computing and understanding the brain to creating targeted medicines. It also seems to make the seemingly fantastic possible, such as teleporting information and invisibility cloaks. How can all these things fall under the heading, "nanoscience?" What ties them together? Are they really that similar?

Nai-Chang Yeh: Size. The prefix "nano" is short for nanometer, and it refers to length scales in the billionths of a meter. All the topics you mentioned deal with objects and phenomena that take place at similar length scales. While nanoscience is a multidisciplinary field that branches off in many different scientific and technical directions, its methodologies and approaches to fabrication, characterization, and integration of nanostructures are similar across those fields.

Paul Alivisatos: Maybe I could jump in and add that nanometers are not a randomly chosen length scale. It's the size where our building blocks — atoms, crystals, and molecules — start to show certain types of phenomena, or they achieve sufficient complexity to demonstrate certain functions. So, control of matter on the nanoscale becomes unusually important.

Until recently, we've built nanoscale objects by carving small structures out of larger wholes. This top-down approach limited our ability to access the nanoscale realm. As we learn to build from the bottom up, we can access the type of things you mentioned in your question, like quantum phenomena and the complexity and functionality of an enzyme catalyst. The length scale is a very specifically relevant one, and that's why the applications of nanoscience can be so broad.

Paul McEuen: I'll throw in one other thought. In addition to being an important length scale, nanoscale is also defined by its difficulty. It pushes researchers from every discipline outside of our comfort zones. It's too small for solid state physicists, it's too big for chemists, and it's too interdisciplinary for biologists. We don't know how to play very well at that length scale, all the way from imaging to manipulation and control.

P.A.: Meanwhile, we can be very jealous of nature, which seems to have no trouble doing it at all.

P.M.: Correct.

TKF: Clearly, this is field with great diversity and rapid growth. That makes it hard for people to get their arms around it. Can you explain how our understanding of nanoscience is changing, and discuss its potential?

P.M.: There are many answers to that question. One is that, in many ways, we spent the past decade or two learning how to make and measure individual nanoscale objects. These are sort of nano building blocks. Now, people are putting a lot of effort into learning how to put these building blocks together to create systems with interesting properties or functions that emerge only from these more complex structures.

N.Y.: I completely agree with that. Today, we seeing new approaches to put those building blocks together in novel ways. We can build metamaterials with unusual properties. We can couple functionalities that don't usually go together, like microwaves and optical lenses, do innovative physics, or manipulate quantum information. All of these things are really new dimensions in our study of nano science and nanotechnology.

P.A.: Now the research is more fun, because we're not stumbling around completely anymore. We can approach these problems in a more interesting way because we've got a little bit more control.

P.M.: I could say this is a very optimistic viewpoint.

P.A.: Well, at least we're stumbling around on a different stage, let's put it that way.

P.M.: Like a child who has his fingers in the paints, and now we're going to have to make art.

P.A.: Exactly like that. At least we've got the paint.

N.Y.: I would like to bring up another point. People are realizing that we have to deal with the hazards and safety of nanosystems , and that as we develop the capability of nanoengineering biological systems, there are also issues related to ethics. We're not just scientists playing in our sandboxes. We also need to be aware of some of these societal issues.

TKF: Could you give me an example of a health, safety, or environmental issue related to nanoscience?

N.Y.: For instance, if certain types of nanoparticles get into the environment, they may not decompose. They might prove hazardous if they get into the bloodstream. Airborne nanoparticles might get into your lungs. Nanomaterials promise many benefits, but people must also pay attention to potential hazards as well.

P.A.: I agree. These are important issues, and people have been sort of grappling with them for a while, actually. We've made a lot of progress in understanding nano toxicology and availability intellectually. One of the things that's been difficult is that you can start with nanoparticles with identical compositions, and depending on how you formulate them, they will behave very differently.

For example, we can coat nanotubes so they disperses very nicely into a liquid or precipitate as an ultrafine powder. We can embed the same nanotube inside a chunk of glass and it will never come out, or make it as a powdery substance that wafts into the air. We start with the same building block, but each formulation behaves differently. That's made it more difficult to understand the toxicology. After all, how do you build a firm foundation for the science when the formulation is as important as the substance you're looking at?

The nanoscience community started working on these issues almost from its start, though maybe not as systematically it could have. Over the past five years, I think researchers have made a lot of progress in building those foundations, learning how to classify these materials and formulations in ways that allow a lot more understanding.

P.M.: Actually, the health and safety issues that we're facing are not unique to nanoscience in any way. Chemical safety issues have a long history. Take, for example, thalidomide, a drug that was introduced for morning sickness in the 1950's. No one realized that there were two chiral forms, one left-handed and one right-handed. One made you feel better if you had morning sickness, the other gave you birth defects. So we need to understand the complexities of what we're working with, and not just label it based on its atoms.

Also, there are well-defined regulatory structures designed to deal with these issues. Most nanoscience research does not present particularly unique challenges in terms of how we regulate other chemicals or biological agents or what have you. I think that's good news. It means, there's a system out there for us to plug into. Of course, nano has unique aspects, but it's not like we have to build something new from the ground up.

TKF: Is there a role for nanoscientists in dealing with health and safety?

P.A.: Different societies take very different approaches to risk. The United States and European Union take different approaches to how they deal with regulation and risk. Because our understanding of these issues has grown much stronger, we have a better basis for approaching them more systematically. I think we are actually getting close to the stage where future decisions will leave the science realm and enter the policy realm. At that point, nanoscientists could be helpers, but they are not as good as policymakers at determining regulatory outcomes.

TKF: Researchers often talk about grand challenges, big questions whose answers promise to open up new possibilities and unexpected avenues of research. What are the grand challenges in nanoscience?

P.M.: I'll throw out one. One of key problems we face is that we don't have good tools. What we want is a magic box, where we can put in a nanostructure and find the location and movement of all the atoms as they respond to external stimuli. In other words, we want to make atomic-scale movies of what's happening inside nanostructures. That would push things forward in a thousand different ways, because very often we don't know what's going on and we have to infer indirectly. This year's Nobel Prize in chemistry for super-resolved microscopy was a small step forward toward such a magic machine.

N.Y.: I completely agree with Paul on this one. Basically, we need a four-dimensional tool that can characterize properties spatially over time. There are some tools out there, but generally, if you get the spatial resolution you don't have the time-dependent information, and to do both together is not easy.

Another big challenge is the integration of a large number of nanostructures into functional devices. And the reliable mass production of those nanodevices with proper error corrections. Nanostructures are usually more prone to errors than large structures, so this is not easy.

Another grand challenge is understanding how the properties of nanoscale objects relate to the properties of larger structures built from those objects.

Those are technical challenges, and they are important. There are also other challenges that are more societally related. As our research grows more expensive, we need to find ways to fund our work at a time when our government seems to be reducing its support. Also, very multidisciplinary nature of nanoscience poses challenges to our education, training, and research.

P.A.: Maybe another way of saying that is we face both inward-looking and outward-looking challenges. Developing better instruments is an inward-looking challenge. The outward looking challenges touch on societal needs, and there are many of them.

For example, the BRAIN Initiative, which uses nanotechnology to measure how neurons function in large groups, is very, very important. There is also a slew of needs that relate to energy and the environment, such as whether we could make materials that have an intrinsic ability to be recycled easily.

I think there will be increased long-term interaction between those inward and outward-looking challenges. The field's just getting to a stage now where the outward-looking challenges feel more achievable, although they're still really hard.

P.M.: Paul and I were recently part of a panel that reviewed National Nanotechnology Initiative grand challenges. These included nano-enabled desalination of seawater to solve the emerging water crisis. This was an example of outward-looking challenges. Another was the creation of 3D nanoscale printing, which was more of an inward challenge.

I also wanted to mention a grand challenge that is both inward and outward looking, one that we have been discussing for probably two decades. This would be making self-replicating systems from simple, basic constituents. This type of system would borrow from biology, harvesting energy to manufacture copies of itself and perhaps even improving its functionality over time. I can't help but think it's the most interesting thing out there.

P.A.: In the two decades we've been thinking about it, I'm not so certain we've gotten all that much closer to achieving something like that. It is a really interesting challenge, of course, but I don't know anybody that's seriously got their sights set on being able to do this in the next 10 or 20 years, or in any other reasonably foreseeable unit of time.

But borrowing from biology opens some very interesting doors. Think, for a moment, about all the garbage people generate. Imagine having materials that, instead of making copies of themselves, would break apart into constituents that we could reuse to make other products.

That would be a big step forward. A characteristic of life on the global scale is that it unmakes what it has done. Otherwise, it creates a big, unsustainable waste problem. I think that creating reusable nanomaterials is actually pretty achievable if we work on in it more systematically.

N.Y.: We can also borrow from biology to achieve energy sustainability. For example, nanoscientists hope to learn from nature and become very efficient at artificial photosynthesis or splitting molecules. We could do this in ways that would be simpler than imitating nature's complex biological functions, and that would be a big step forward.

P.A.: That's a good example. That way, if we make carbon dioxide by burning fuel, we could turn the carbon dioxide back into fuel. That would close the cycle, and you have to close the cycle if you want to be sustainable on a planetary scale. When we learn biology in grade school, it's all about cycles — nitrogen, carbon, water, whatever. That's what nature evolves towards, because that's what's stable when you talk about really big systems.

TKF: There are many great challenges. So, should nanoscience researchers try to prioritize them? One reason physicists and astronomers can line up money for expensive experiments is that they can agree on the experiments they need to run. And really, they are interested in knowledge for its own sake, while you want to give us cheap renewable energy and safe drinking water. Is there any chance of nanoscience researchers getting behind a single research agenda and lining up the money for breakthrough experiments?

P.A.: If you aggregate all nanoscience research, it adds up to many billions of dollars. It's just done in many smaller pieces. Now, I happen to believe that, in many cases, there are enormous advantages to large organizations that bring people together to achieve a goal more efficiently through larger scale cooperation. I think the astronomers do that because, if they make a small instrument, they can't learn anything new.

Nanoscience is different. We're still at a stage where we can make a lot of progress in a laboratory with a small group of faculty, post-docs, and students.

That said, I'm so happy that astronomers get major funding. It means that society is still moved to understand what goes on around us, and that's a really good thing. But I don't look at that funding with much jealousy myself. Given our stage in understanding, I think nanoscience's scale of funding makes a lot of sense.

N.Y.: That's a good point. I also want to mention that when astronomers are ready to take the next big step, they often rely on a people with completely different backgrounds and strengths. For instance, some cosmology experiments rely on people who can make excellent superconducting nanoscale devices. My colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Lab team with condensed matter physicists and low temperature physicists to develop the new tools and concepts needed to further our study of the cosmos. So, while we funnel that money into astronomy programs, we are also pushing many other research fields, including nanoscience.

P.M.: I want to make two completely independent points. The first is that one thing astronomers have going for them, even more than agreeing on research goals, is that they've got great pictures.

N.Y.: In false colors.

P.M.: Yes, but they use their pictures well. They tap into wonder, and people will fund wonder. And I think we in nanoscience could do a better job of tapping into wonder.

The second point is that we really have to make sure that the type of funding matches the type of research. There's no doubt that we could do big projects, especially in areas like electron microscopy and imaging, where researchers just need a bigger, better instrument.

But many of the major advances in nanoscience over the last couple of decades have come from oddball people working in strange corners of the field. Graphene is the classic example. Everybody thought it was a complete waste of time, right up until it took over the nano research world.

My second example involves imaging, and two guys who were out of work and building an instrument in their living room. They won the Nobel Prize in chemistry this year. It just shows that it's not always big money that's needed, but also money for really creative, out-of-the-box stuff. In a field like nanoscience you really have to fund both.

P.A.: I totally agree with that, Paul, but there are also fields where we need the big push. Brain imaging is an example. People are very close to reaching the threshold of what can be achieved in individual laboratories. The complexity of the problem has reached a scale that is very, very challenging because it requires integration of detectors, materials, computing and many other types of engineering.

Brain science is at the threshold , and to cross it, we need to change how we are organized. That takes a little bit of time, but we've seen this before. Take, for example, the human genome initiative. We started with small, laboratory-based science and learned to manipulate and sequence DNA. But larger scale projects created the field of genomics that we have today. That was unachievable by individual laboratories. It required the community to come together. It was hard to do in the beginning, and I think that's where brain projects are at the moment. Much of the nanoscience we need is still in its cottage industry mode.

N.Y.: I see your point, Paul. Bigger themes, like the brain, draw people together and enable them to deal with complex issues. Under a well-designed plan, the government probably can come in and support these bigger themes.

On the other hand, we should not only fund big projects. It's also very important to nurture independent researchers with very creative ideas. But supporting high-risk research is an area where the United States is getting worse. That's something that other nations — China and others in Asia — are doing much better. They are investing a lot of money in trying to encourage creativity, and yet in this country we're seeing dwindling support for high-risk projects by creative individuals.

TKF: What do you think about what Nai-Chang is saying? Is the government spending enough on the right type of research? And what roles do you see for non-government funders, such as foundations and corporations?

P.M.: I think we are talking about two completely separate questions. The first involves the total amount of research funding, and if you ask any scientist, he or she will tell you that we always need more.

The second question is about whether we are spending our research dollars efficiently and effectively. I think a lot of us feel like we could do much, much better. I think it dovetails with what we've already discussed. Sometimes we do need grand challenges that identify important national needs or major projects. We are seeing attempts by federal funding agencies to adopt this model to some degree.

But we also need to fund the most creative and best people. University professors create science, but our real product is the people we train as we pursue that goal. And supporting our best people is the key thing that we need to do better. We need to give those people the freedom to do creative work without overburdening them with quarterly reports aimed towards an objective that is going to change every quarter, because that's the way we fund science now.

I think funding the people, not the project, is one positive step forward. We could, for example, fund a lot more National Science Foundation fellowships for graduate students, rather than supporting those students through individual and investigator grants. Having their own funding would free students to vote with their feet by moving to the most exciting topics, and enable them to explore some crazy idea. Of course, they would do this in concert with a faculty member, but there would be a lot more freedom of movement than in the current system.

For both young and senior faculty, funds that allow us to try out our craziest ideas and really take risks are very, very important. That is money that's very hard to come by.

P.A.: I think right now is a really interesting and very positive moment in funding. This is exemplified by Fred Kavli, a very practical engineer whose interest was always in really new ideas. So he dedicated his fortune to fostering new fundamental discoveries.

He is an exemplar of a whole community of scientific philanthropists that did not really exist 20 or 25 years ago. The science community has an unusually positive opportunity to engage with these people, because they can add value to our existing and very impressive federal science funding system. I think this is really going to be enabling.

You also mentioned companies. They have become more focused on the immediate term, yet they realize that they have enormous needs for longer-term research. As a result, the partnerships between companies and universities have gotten much deeper and more substantive over the past 10 years. It looks like that trend is going to continue.

I think these are good trends. The philanthropists want to promote early discovery, and the companies are asking us to focus on the technologies they really need. Both types of research enrich the science community in the United States, and create avenues to do really vital work.

N.Y.: I completely agree, and want to inject one more point. Generally, government funding comes with regulations that limit how you interact overseas. Foundations have no such limitations, and make it easier to bring people together beyond national borders. The Kavli Foundation, for example, established institutes around the world. They play a very, very important role in teaming up international talents and facilitating interactions through conferences, workshops, or even exchange programs.

TKF: Paul, earlier you said that your most important product is the researchers you train. I wanted to ask you about that. At the nanoscale, the differences between conventional disciplines begin to blur. If you want to study the mechanical properties of materials, you might need to understand quantum or electrical interactions. If you want to investigate chemistry, you may need to know about optics and electromagnetism. Do we need to train students differently to study nanoscience?

N.Y.: I'm still a strong believer that we need to train students to be very, very strong in one of the core disciplines. Then, of course, if they're moving into nanoscience or nanotechnology, we need to help them broaden their horizon beyond that core. If they're dealing with nanoscales, that's a size where quantum mechanics matters. Even biologists investigating nanoscale phenomena must be very strong in the physical sciences.

P.A.: I also believe students need to learn one core discipline really well, because otherwise they won't be able to solve new problems when they come across them. But, to make an analogy, they also need to learn to speak multiple languages better.

Here's what I mean. We live in such an interconnected world, anybody who speaks several languages can automatically do more things than somebody who speaks only one. I think nanoscience is like that. It has all these interconnections. So, while it's important to really be good at one language, like physics, all the more power to you if you can learn one or two more.

In fact, I think most students yearn to learn another language or two. So the question becomes, how can we train them up in one discipline while helping them get better in one or two others? The students want to do it, and in many cases, they're just doing it themselves. The whole way the current generation of undergraduate and graduate students learn is different than the way I might have learned because they have different and more efficient ways of accessing information. So, for universities, the challenge is to move the curriculum along so they build that strong foundation while allowing them to do more to learn that a second or third language.

P.M.: I agree. And just to follow up, what we don't need is to create and learn a new language and then not be able to talk to anybody but ourselves.

P.A.: That's right.

N.Y.: That's an excellent point.

P.A.: The languages that are out there are already quite nice.

TKF: So, final question. You're all involved in some of the most exciting nanoscience going on right now. If we were to meet again in five or 10 years, what do you think we would be talking about?

P.M.: The past 50 years has all been about miniaturization of information technologies. I think the next 50 will be about the miniaturization of what I call machines: nanoscale devices with physical parts that move and can do anything from drug delivery to disassembling themselves for recycling. Small scale machines are going to be a huge growth area, and I think that's what we will be talking about in 10 years.

P.A.: I'm hesitating here because I see our field reaching out into so many disciplines. There's progress happening in so many areas, I have a hard time choosing any one of them.

N.Y.: I think we will be talking about integrating nanoscale devices and small machines into nanosystems with special properties. Like Paul, I see many different directions where we can go. I believe that some years from now, we will see advances in information, communication technology, energy, and sustainability, as well as new materials based on nanotechnology, and new tools to better understand nanosystems. I see major things happening in nano-facilitated medicine, and, as we learn more about brain function, new types of artificial intelligence and a better understanding of complex biological systems.

P.A.: I'm hoping that people will look back on this moment as a very special one, because this was when nanoscience began to change the way we look at the world. It is like a movement, a new way of thinking and bringing things together. Instead of trying to break everything down into individual disciplines, nanoscience show us how to bring them all together. It represents an important stage of scientific development, and has many implications for technology.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Google is developing nanoparticles that the company hopes will catch early signs of diseases such as cancer, but are there potential drawbacks to the technology?

The microscopic particles would be designed to bind to certain dangerous cells or molecules, such as cancer cells, or plaques in blood vessels that have the potential to cause heart attacks, according to BBC News. A person would swallow a pill containing the nanoparticles, and the tiny particles would travel through the body, looking for signs of disease.

Then, because the particles are magnetic, a person could wear a magnetic wristband that would attract the particles, and allow the device to interpret information from the particles, according to the Wall Street Journal. [10 Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True]

"Just by putting a magnet there [on the wrist], you can trap them, and you can ask them what they saw," Andrew Conrad, of the Google X research lab, said at a technology conference hosted by the WSJ. "Did you find cancer? Did you see something that looks like a fragile plaque for a heart attack? Did you see too much sodium?"

The hope is to catch signs of diseases before a person develop symptoms. "Every test you ever go to the doctor for will be done through this system,” Conrad told the Wall Street Journal.

The research is in the early stages, and it could be more than five years before it becomes a reality, the WSJ reported.

"It's an exciting concept, for sure," said Dr. Clay Marsh, chief innovation officer at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, who is not involved with Google's project.

However, nanoparticles have held promise for years, but there are challenges that come with these nanoparticle treatments, Marsh said.

One issue is safety — nanoparticles that monitor your health may need to stay in the body for a long time.

"Leaving something inside the body for your life, or for a long time, has potential complications," Marsh said. The nanoparticles might injure cells, or damage DNA, which could accelerate aging, Marsh said. Nanoparticles might also build up in the organs that clear unwanted substances from the body, such as the liver or spleen, he said.

For these reasons, it will be important to study the technology in animals for safety before trying it in people, Marsh said.

Another problem is that the new technology, like screening tests in general, may have the potential for false positives, which can lead people to undergo treatment when they are not sick, Marsh said.

In fact, people already have differences in their diet and blood chemistry that may make it harder to diagnose diseases in the way the nanoparticles will aim to do, he said.

In addition, the assumption that finding a disease early is always better is not necessarily true.

"Maybe we all have some cancer hidden away somewhere but it doesn't grow, so it doesn't cause a problem," Marsh said.

Once researchers identify the very early stages of disease, they have to do further studies to know whether treating it at that stage is beneficial, he said.

Dr. Jack Hoopes, a professor of medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, said the concept of nanoparticles binding to specific cancer cells or proteins is feasible. "Many people are working on it, including us. This technology should be pursued," Hoopes told Live Science in an email.

But researchers still need to better understand aspects of the cancer biology, such as which proteins to look for with nanoparticles, what concentration of the proteins is necessary for detection and whether cancer cells are always present in the blood, Hoopes said.

Follow Rachael Rettner @Rachael Rettner. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

To stop identity thieves and counterfeiters, a group of researchers is looking for inspiration from an unlikely source: butterflies.

In order to attract a mate, the male Pierella luna butterfly of Latin America uses its wingsto perform an advanced optical trick known as reverse color diffraction. Thanks to the microstructure of its wings — made up of tiny scales curled slightly upward at the end to diffract light — the butterfly appears to change color when it's viewed from different angles.

Now, researchers at Harvard University have figured out a way to use artificial photonic materials to mimic the Pierella luna's attractive light show. They've created what's known as a diffraction grating, a surface that splits white light into its individual wavelengths of color and sends those colors traveling in different directions. When the photonic material is viewed from one angle, it looks to be one color, but from a different angle, the color appears to change, according to study co-author Mathias Kolle, a member of the Harvard research team and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [Butterfly Gallery: Beautiful Wings Take Flight]

If you've ever owned a CD, then you've probably witnessed normal color diffraction in action, Kolle told Live Science. Imagine putting a CD shiny side up on a table and then shining a light on it. Different colors appear on the CD's shimmery surface, depending on how you move your head.

This happens because the tiny data tracks that make it possible for you to listen to the CD also serve as a diffraction grating, splitting white light into its different wavelengths of color.

But this optical trick is more than just something to stare at; it can also be put to good use, the researchers said.

"We thought there could be some benefit for such a unique [material] in security printing," Kolle said. "Or, potentially, we could tailor the output of light-emitting devices by putting such a structure on top of them. The material could also coat the solar panels, to manipulate how light enters the individual cells, he added.

It's the new photonic material's microstructure that could make it valuable for a range of applications. The superthin, transparent material consists of an array of microscopic plates, or scales, that mimic those that make up the Pierella luna's wing. Each plate is about 18 micrometers tall — about one-fifth the diameter of a human hair — and each features a scalloped, or ridged, edge. The ridges on each plate look like tiny lines running through the material and are spaced about 500 nanometers apart.

"It's like if you take a notebook and put it on its side standing up, and then you put many notebooks the same distance from each other. That's the fundamental structure," Kolle said.

All of these features — both the plates themselves and the ridges running through them — can be manipulated to create different optical effects, Kolle said. By changing the height size and spacing between the plates or the ridges, the researchers can change how the material diffracts light — a feature that Kolle calls "tunability."

The material is also fairly difficult to recreate, Kolle said, which is why he thinks it could be used to make more secure banknotes or passports. If used for such purposes, it would lend these printed objects a so-called "optical signature," he said.

The ability to tune the material to specific wavelengths could also make it valuable for producers of solar cells or light-emitting diodes (LEDs) used inside consumer electronic devices. Both of these products need to be as efficient as possible in the ways they absorb or release light, the researchers said.

"We're also hoping we can tailor these structures to increase the coupling efficiency of light into a solar cell. And it's the inverse problem with light-emitting devices: Light has to come out of the LED, and we think that we can improve the out-coupling efficiencies from LEDs," Kolle said. Increasing coupling efficiency means that light enters a solar cell or exits a LED in a more precise way, resulting in a stronger and longer lasting optical signal, he added.

The study was published online today (Oct. 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

The U.S. military doesn't just build big, scary tanks and giant warplanes; it's also interested in teeny, tiny stuff. The Pentagon's latest research project aims to improve today's technologies by shrinking them down to microscopic size.

The recently launched Atoms to Product (A2P) program aims to develop atom-size materials to build state-of-the-art military and consumer products. These tiny manufacturing methods would work at scales 100,000 times smaller than those currently being used to build new technologies, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The tiny, high-tech materials of the future could be used to build things like hummingbird-size drones and super-accurate (and super-small) atomic clocks — two projects already spearheaded by DARPA. [Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects]

"If successful, A2P could help enable [the] creation of entirely new classes of materials that exhibit nanoscale properties at all scales," John Main, a program manager in DARPA's defense sciences office, said in a statement.

When materials are created with dimensions of about 1 to 100 nanometers (that's between one and 100 billionths of a meter), the materials' properties change significantly. At nanoscales, materials may have different melting points, electric conductivity, magnetic properties and different reactions with certain chemicals, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a U.S. government program.

Those nanoscale properties also offer advantages for larger materials, according to DARPA researchers.

And these atomic-scale properties can lead to certain advantages when it comes to building both military and civilian technology, DARPA said. The agency said it believes it can use tiny materials to make products whose parts stick together without glue or other adhesion methods. These materials could be used to build armorthat can withstand rapid changes in temperature.

DARPA also wants to explore what it calls "tunable" light absorption and scattering. "Tunability" refers to another quality of nanomaterials: By changing the size of the particles in a material, scientists can literally fine-tune certain properties of that material to better suit the researchers' purposes, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative. DARPA has shown interest in using tunability to create technology, perhaps sensors or microchips,that only absorb or reflect certain wavelengths of light.

Tunability could also help researchers miniaturize materials, processes and devices that can't be miniaturized with current technology, Main said.

Follow Elizabeth Palermo @techEpalermo. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Money, gadgets and credit cards could soon have tiny, invisible anti-counterfeiting "fingerprints" embedded into them, making it pretty much impossible to falsify such objects, say scientists.

South Korean researchers have developed tiny tags made of silver nanowires that are randomly scattered, then form a unique pattern — just like the one-of-a-kind designs in each spider web.

The research is "an important and inspiring idea to use nanotechnology for anti-counterfeiting," said Zhao Qin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., who was not involved in the study.

More than $178 million worth of counterfeit products were seized at the U.S. border in 2011, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

For years, researchers have sought ways to fight counterfeiting, with many methods currently under development in labs around the globe. The technologies range from invisible woven patterns to printing techniques inspired by butterfly wings to synthetic DNA. But many of these approaches are complex and costly. [7 Cool Animal-Inspired Technologies]

The group from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), however, has proposed a much simpler method, described in the March 20 issue of the journal Nanotechnology from the Institute of Physics.

Random dumping

First, the scientists created a solution with silver nanowires, each wire only about 10 to 50 microns — a millionth of a meter — long. The average human hair is 18-80 microns wide.

The researchers coated the wires with silica and doped them with fluorescent dyes, making them visible when analyzed with a fluorescence microscope. The scientists then placed drops of the solution onto a thin plastic film, randomly arranging some 20 to 30 nanowires within the drops.

The team analyzed the dried drops with a microscope, imaging the wires — invisible to the naked eye — in the process. Using a special algorithm to note the positions and colors of the wires, the researchers compared the wire patterns with a signature stored in a database, which was obtained at the fingerprint's creation. If the two matched, it meant that the product was not a fake. [Magnificent Microscope Images: 50 Tiny Wonders]

The researchers say that to help locate the reference print-data in an online database, the fingerprint could be tagged with a unique barcode. While counterfeiters could conceivably reproduce that barcode, there would be no point in doing so, since the reference-print itself would not match up.

"Once a pattern is tagged and stored on a database using a unique ID, a certain substrate, whether this is a bank note or a credit card, could be authenticated almost immediately by observing the fluorescence images and comparing it with stored images," said lead scientist Hyotcherl Ihee.

"These authentication processes can be automated by employing an algorithm that recognizes the positions and colors of the silver nanowires and digitizes that information in a database. Such digitized information could significantly reduce the size of the stored data and reduce the time required for the authentication process."

The scientists believe that it is nearly impossible to replicate the fingerprints, because the nanowires are so tiny and tricky to manipulate into a specific pattern. "The cost of generating such an identical counterfeit pattern would generally be much higher than the value of the typical product being protected," said Ihee.

However, creating each original print would be relatively easy and would cost less than $1, the authors said. "The point is that it is so easy to make a pattern. Just use a drop of nanowire solution. Even a normal customer or seller can make their own."

Scanning spider webs

Qin of MIT agreed. "They have shown in their work that the nanowires and nanoparticles can form complex patterns with true randomness during the preparing process of the sample, probably because of the complex flow and random motion that are difficult to be reproduced," he said.

"Therefore, these patterns are much superior to the barcodes that are currently widely used for products, making counterfeiting almost impossible."

The method included in the paper was inspiring, he said, as the complex, random pattern can be generated from nanostructures and many other sources, for example, structures like cytoskeletons, surface fragmentation and spider webs that are randomly organized, and found in nature. Researchers could scan those patterns and store them in a database.

"Those patterns with high complexity and true randomness will make counterfeiting extremely difficult, if not impossible," said Qin.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. Follow the author on Twitter @SciTech_Cat.

Why bother to manufacture materials if you can grow them organically?

Researchers have produced "living" materials by nudging bacteria to grow biological films. In turn, this process could lead to the development of more complex and interactive structures programmed to self-assemble into specific patterns, such as those used on solar cells and diagnostic sensors, and even self-healing materials that could sense damage and repair it, a new study finds.

"In contrast to materials we use in modern life, which are all dead, living materials have the ability to self-heal, adapt to the environment, form into complex patterns and shapes, and generate new functional materials and devices from the bottom up," said study lead author Timothy Lu, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Such "living materials" are essentially hybrids that have the best of both worlds: the benefits of both living cells, which can organize and grow on their own, and nonliving materials, which add functions such as electricity conduction or light emission. [Biomimicry: 7 Clever Technologies Inspired by Nature]

For instance, other researchers have looked at the possibility of organizing viruses into new materials. But Lu said his team's approach is different. "Previous systems do not leverage the characteristics of living organisms," he told Live Science. "Also, most modern materials' synthesis processes are energy-intensive, human-intensive endeavors. But we're suggesting to use biology to grow materials from the bottom up in an environmentally friendly fashion."

Learning from bones

To create the materials, Lu's team took inspiration from natural materials, such as bone and teeth, which contain a mix of minerals and living cells. Bones grow when cells arrange themselves into specific patterns and then excrete special proteins to produce the calcium phosphate structures.

Lu's team tried to do the same by reprogramming Escherichia colibacterial cells using genetic engineering to produce the proteins.

E. colinaturally produce biofilms that contain a special type of protein called curli fibers that help the bacteria attach to surfaces, and are known to have the strength of steel. Each curli fiber is composed of a chain of identical protein units called CsgA, which can be changed by adding protein fragments called peptides. These peptides can capture nonliving materials, such as gold nanoparticles, and incorporate them into the biofilms.

The researchers' goal was to get the bacteria to secrete the protein matrix in response to specific stimulants.

To do so, the researchers disabled the bacterial cells' natural ability to produce CsgA and replaced it with an engineered genetic code that produces CsgA proteins only under certain conditions — when a molecule called AHL is present.

The scientists could then adjust the amount of AHL in the cells' environment, and when AHL was present, the cells produced CsgA, making curli fibers that merged into a biofilm.

The team then modified E. coli in a different way, to make it produce CsgA with a specific peptide with many histidine amino acids, but only when a molecule called aTc was present.

"This allowed us to control the materials that were made by the bacteria using external signals," said Lu. Just by increasing or decreasing the amount of AHL and aTc in the modified E. coli's environment, they were able to modify the production and composition of the resulting biofilms.

The team then modified the proteins to make inorganic materials, such as gold nanoparticlesand quantum dots, to grow on the biofilms. By doing so, the researchers engineered self-growing E. coli biofilms that could conduct electricity or emit fluorescence.

"Talking" cells

The researchers also modified E. coli so the cells could "talk" to each other and coordinate the formation of materials whose properties change over time, without requiring human input. "Ultimately, we hope to emulate how natural systems, like bone, form. No one tells bone what to do, but it generates a material in response to environmental signals," Lu said. [Bone Basics: 11 Surprising Facts About the Skeletal System]

"One can imagine growing materials using sunlight rather than needing to have very energy-intensive processes for top-down materials' synthesis," he added.

Lu also envisions living cellular sensors that change their properties when they detect specific environmental signals, such as toxins.

Finally, by coating the biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose, this work could lead to materials that convert agricultural waste into biofuels.

The research is not limited to E. coli. "We are considering the use of photosynthetic organisms and fungi as other fabrication platforms," Lu said. "In addition, we have only demonstrated the interface of biology with gold and semiconductor nanocrystals, but there are many other materials that can be interfaced."

Ahmad Khalil, a biomedical engineer at Boston University who was not involved in the study, applauded the work.

"This work presents, to my knowledge, one of the first demonstrations of using synthetic biology approaches to rewire or engineer these cellular mechanisms to precisely control how inorganic materials are assembled or synthesized on a molecular bio-template, thus providing an avenue for genetically encoded materials engineering," Khalil told Live Science.

The study was detailed in the March 23 issue of the journal Nature Materials.

Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. Follow the author on Twitter @SciTech_Cat.

(ISNS) -- From socks to medical supplies, retailers have spent the past few years seeing silver. The popular precious metal has powerful antimicrobial properties, especially when broken down to nanoparticle size, so it’s been added to everything from washing machines to keyboard covers. But two new papers suggest that the miniature version of the material should be used cautiously. 

"Silver nanoparticles are a continuous source of ions that could be toxic for aquatic organisms that are swimming around or in the sediment. It will end up in the food chain,” said Smitha Pillai, an environmental toxicologist with the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology and first author on a paper published in March in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, algae were exposed to silver ions, which are silver nanoparticles release in water. Larger pieces of silver release some ions, but at much lower concentrations. Within fifteen minutes, the algae showed signs of being exposed to a toxin, including significant reduction of photosynthesis and a defense response. Previous research has showed that silver ions are toxic to rainbow trout, causing eggs to hatch before they are fully developed and leading to high rates of death for the baby fish.

A search for “nanosilver” at online retailer Amazon.com returns 612 results, ranging from food storage containers to supplements, all touting supposed benefits of the substance. “Nano-silver material can kill up to 650 types of bacteria,” reads the description for a keyboard cover impregnated with it.

The most common source cited for the 650 strains is a 1978 issue of the now-defunct Science Digest, which claimed that silver can kill 650 “disease organisms,” though the article provided no source.

In 2006, Samsung introduced a line of washing machines that released silver ions into the wash water. When asked about why the line was discontinued, a representative emailed the following statement to Inside Science: “We are continuously innovating our products with new technologies to meet the highest level of quality and performance consumers have come to expect from the Samsung brand.”

A separate research paper, published in the February issue of ACS Nano, studied the effects of nanosilver on human intestinal cells. Researchers found that exposure to nanosilver did damage to the cells’ DNA and temporarily changed their protein production.

However, cells can rebound from the damage. They are full of other ions that will bind to the silver, rendering them harmless and allowing the cells to recover. One such ion is chloride. "As soon as ions go inside the cell, there are a lot of salts in the cell that will scavenge the silver. If we have silver and chloride, they will react. Silver chloride is not toxic," said Thiago Verano-Braga, a molecular biologist at University of Southern Denmark and first author on the ACS Nano paper.

Individual cells recover when they are no longer exposed to silver ions. But Verano-Braga worries that if nanosilver is not disposed of properly, it could become more prevalent and lead to trouble. “If this material is not handled well, it will accumulate in the ecosystem,” he said.

If it gets into the water supply, nanosilver could move up the food chain in a process called bioaccumulation, perhaps reaching a point at which cells will contain too much silver to operate normally. Algae may be exposed to a small amount of silver, but animals that eat the algae will get a little more silver with each meal. In this way, the higher up the food chain you go, the more concentrated the silver will be.

“It's already been [known] in the science community that there are negative effects with nanoparticles, but it somehow didn't reach the general public. That really concerns me,” Verano-Braga said. Many materials are being miniaturized and sold at nano-size, in everything from batteries to sunscreen. But their tiny stature means they can get into parts of the body larger particles can’t reach - past the blood-brain barrier, for instance. There’s been little research into possible human health concerns (though no signs that they’ve caused trouble, either).

Based on Verano-Braga’s research, Denmark’s version of the FDA, the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration, recommended that people stop taking the silver supplements that are commonly sold as a natural remedy under the name “colloidal silver.”

Other members of the scientific community don’t share these concerns.

“Most silver toxicity experiments we have had are from waste water from photofilm processing and using silver to seed clouds for rain. I am aware of no big problem from either, certainly not like [lead, mercury or arsenic], which cause major human and environmental troubles,” Simon Silver, a microbiologist at University of Illinois at Chicago who studies how bacteria cope with toxic ions, including silver, wrote in an email to Inside Science. “Most things are toxic in large enough amounts.”

Pillai sums it up most succinctly. “I think we should be worried but not panicked. We don't know much about it, and with more and more consumer products coming onto the market with silver particles, the chance of organisms in the wild being exposed are getting higher and higher,” she said.

This story was provided by Inside Science News Service. Cat Ferguson is a science and technology journalist based in California's Bay Area.

Researchers have begun engineering plants to produce more loads of energy or sense pollution and even explosives.

In a new study, researchers embedded tiny structures called carbon nanotubes into the energy-making factories of plants, increasing their light-capturing ability by 30 percent. Using other carbon nanotubes, the researchers made plants sensitive to the atmospheric pollutant nitric oxide.

"Plants are very attractive as a technology platform," Michael Strano, leader of the study detailed March 16 in the journal Nature Materials, said in a statement. "They repair themselves, they're environmentally stable outside, they survive in harsh environments, and they provide their own power source and water distribution," said Strano, a chemical engineer at MIT.

Strano and his colleagues are pioneering a new field they call "plant nanobionics." "Nano" refers to the scale of the materials, which are on the order of one-billionth of a meter, and "bionic" refers to the use of nature to inspire engineering. [Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies]

Super-powered plants

The researchers were originally working on building self-repairing solar cells based on plant cells, which convert light into chemical energy, in the form of sugars and other compounds, by a process known as photosynthesis. The process relies on chloroplasts, the tiny energy factories inside plant cells.

Strano and his team wanted to isolate chloroplasts from plants and make them more efficient. But if chloroplasts are removed from plants, they start to degrade after a few hours due to light and oxygen damage.

To protect chloroplasts against this damage, the researchers embedded the chloroplasts with tiny antioxidant particles, or nanoparticles, which scoop up oxygen radicals and other highly reactive molecules. In order to deliver the nanoparticles, the researchers coated them in a highly charged molecule that allowed the particles to penetrate the fatty membranes of the chloroplasts. As a result of the nanoparticles, the amount of damaging molecules plummeted.

Next, the researchers coated tiny cylinders called carbon nanotubes in negatively charged DNA and embedded them in the chloroplasts. The nanotubes worked like artificial antennae that allowed the plant to capture more light than usual.

The rate of photosynthesis in the chloroplasts with embedded nanotubes was almost 50 percent greater than in isolated chloroplasts that lacked the nanotubes. When the researchers embedded both antioxidant nanoparticles and carbon nanotubes in the chloroplasts, these cells continued to function outside of the plant for even longer.

The researchers also improved the energy efficiency of living plants. They infused nanoparticles into a small flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana, improving photosynthesis by 30 percent. What effect, if any, this has on the plant's sugar production is a mystery, the researchers said.

Pollution sensors

Strano and his colleagues also found a way to turn the Arabidopsis thaliana plants into chemical sensors, using carbon nanotubes that detect the pollutant nitric oxide, which is produced by combustion.

The researchers have previously developed carbon nanotubes that detect the explosive TNT and the nerve gas sarin, so they might be able to turn plants into sensors to detect these toxins at low concentrations. Nanobionic plants could also be used to monitor pesticides, fungal infections or bacterial toxins. In addition, the team is now working on incorporating electronic materials into plants.

Follow Tanya Lewis on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A beam of light can make waves in crystals, and those waves can be "tuned" — a phenomenon that might open up new technological possibilities, researchers say.

At the University of California, San Diego, physicists led by Dimitri Basov and Siyuan Dai fired a beam of infrared light at a tiny crystal of boron nitride. They focused the beam on the tip of an atomic force microscope. An atomic force microscope probes surfaces at the scale of atoms and molecules with a needle at the end of an arm, like that on a vinyl record player. The microscope transferred the momentum from the light to the crystal.

The light generated ripples — waves — in the boron nitride. The waves, called phonon polaritons, had wavelengths as short as those of ultraviolet light, about 300-400 nanometers, or billionths of a meter. [Magnificent Microphotography: 50 Tiny Wonders]

"A wave on the surface of water is the closest analogy," Basov said in a statement. "You throw a stone and you launch concentric waves that move outward. This is similar. Atoms are moving. The triggering event is illumination with light."

A chemical used in cosmetics, boron nitride (BN) is a van der Waals crystal, which means its atoms form layers, stacked on top of one another and held together by forces between molecules. By adjusting the wavelength of the light and the number of layers of boron nitride, the researchers were able to adjust the shape and size of the polaritons.

"The key novelty is that the wave properties can be tuned by altering the number of atomic layers in a [boron nitride] specimen," Basov told Live Science.

Since it's possible to control the size of the waves, it's also possible to use the crystal to transmit information, in a way similar to how light is used in radio communications. "You can direct information where you want it at the nanoscale," Basov said. 

The ability to tune polaritons also means one can control the flow of heat in a material, since heat is just the movement of atoms and molecules in a substance.

Control of waves could be important to building nanometer-size circuits. Right now, information is transmitted between circuit components with electrons. Light has all kinds of properties that make it useful for transmitting data; for instance, it's fast. But to use light waves to transmit information, a simple antenna generally has to be at least half as large as the light waves (this is why antennas for radios are as big as they are). It's possible to make them shorter, but there are trade-offs in efficiency. [The 9 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]

Radio waves, in even the fastest networks, have wavelengths measured in tenths of a millimeter. The infrared waves common in TV remotes are even smaller, just micrometers long. Even so, that's thousands of times the size of typical computer circuits, which are tens of nanometers across — they are simply too small to use radio frequencies. (When you use a Wi-Fi network, the radio signal is converted into electrons so the computer can "hear" it, and requires an antenna — the Wi-Fi radio can be large compared to a processor.)

Making the radio waves in the signal shorter isn't always an option; such wavelengths eventually move from radio into the visible light range, and that requires re-tooling the transmitter and receiver. Also, how well waves transmit can be highly dependent on the wavelength used and the environment they are in. For example, longer radio waves bend around corners more easily than visible light, which is why you don't need to be in the line of sight of the local FM station.

The ability to transmit light-like waves in a solid substance would mean that technologists would get many of the advantages of light waves, without some of the problems of generating ultra-short wavelength signals like the need for a transmitter/receiver setup.

Smaller circuits also have a bigger problem radiating away heat. Computers have fans to keep the processors cool, but using light to control the temperature might mean future machines could dispense with them.

The work started with experiments in graphene, Barsov said. Graphene, which is made of carbon, also forms single-molecule layers, and also can make polaritons in response to light. The waves, however, don't last as long as they do with boron nitride. "People thought boron nitride was just a bystander material – we never thought it would be useful," Basov said.

The work is detailed in the March 7 issue of the journal Science.

Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A nanotech-based vaccine that can be applied to the body's mucus membranes could be an effective, needle-less vaccination method, a new study in mice shows.

In experiments, nanocapsules loaded with a vaccine and deposited in the mice's airways were able to get past the mucosal barrier, enter the bloodstream, and elicit an immune response in the vaccinated animals, according to the study published today (Sept. 25) in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The mucosal surfaces of the body – which cover the insides of the nose, lungs and reproductive tract— are the point of entry for many pathogens. While vaccines can be administered this way, for example, with nasal sprays, the lungs often clear away the vaccine before it can provoke an immune response.

The nanocapsules the researchers used were shown to be strong enough to not dissolve, or be cleared out by the lung mucus. The researchers' aim is to make a vaccine that could be administered by an inhaler, study researcher Darrell Irvine, a professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told LiveScience. [5 Crazy Technologies That Are Revolutionizing Biotech]

"Many pathogens infiltrate the body and initiate infection via mucosal surfaces. Hence, eliciting cellular immune responses at mucosal portals of entry is of great interest for vaccine development," the researchers said in their study.

The nanocapsules used in the study consisted of small shells, about 1,000 times smaller than a human hair, made of fat molecules.

The technique "was safe and well tolerated in mice," the researchers said. 

More than just goo, mucus is part of the body's immune system -- it is one of the outermost barriers that prevents foreign particles and pathogens from entering the body. It traps germs in its sticky layers, and contains enzymes that dissolve potentially harmful pathogens and proteins.

In the study, the researchers vaccinated mice by depositing a fluid containing the nanocapsules directly onto the surface of the trachea. The compared the mice's immune response to that of a vaccine injected under the skin, which is not a mucosal surface. The mice received two doses of vaccines a few weeks apart.

The results showed the mice produced a widespread immune response to the vaccine deposited in their windpipe. Immune cells, including those that can recognize and attack the pathogen, increased not only in the lungs, but also at distant places in the mice's bodies such as the intestine, vaginal tract, blood and spleen.

If the mucosal vaccine proves effective in larger animals, it could be useful for creating vaccines against pathogens such as influenza or human papillomavirus (HPV) that invade the body through mucosal surfaces of respiratory and reproductive tracts, the researchers said.

Email Bahar Gholipour. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

(ISNS) -- When 4.9 million barrels of crude oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico following the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, cleanup crews rushed to deploy floating barriers to contain crude oil collecting on the water's surface. However, this did nothing for the oil that never reached the top.

Crews released more than 2 million gallons of an experimental dispersant, Corexit, to break up the underwater oil and prevent it from reaching coast lines. Still, tar balls washed up on beaches lining the Gulf Coast and mixed in with the sandy ocean floor. Corexit didn't remove oil. It only broke it down so that the environment could handle the tiny droplets of dispersed oil. But Corexit may have made the oil more toxic, and killed microscopic marine animals at the bottom of the Gulf, one study found.

Now, researchers at Texas A&M University, in College Station, have developed a non-toxic solution to clean up residual crude oil after bulk removal following a spill. They've designed nanoparticles that soak up underwater oil like millions of tiny sponges and remove it from the environment. Each "nano-sponge" is 100 times thinner than a human hair and can hold more than 10 times its own weight in oil. The particles can be removed from the water after absorption and reused after the oil is removed.

"When I was a Ph.D. student, I remember reading about sludge in the Hudson River," said chemist Karen Wooley, the project's lead researcher. "Even back then, I was imagining particles that could be dispersed and sunk to the bottom, take in the sludge and float back to the top."

That's exactly what she made.

The design is based on iron oxide nanoparticles coated with a polymer -- a mixture of Styrofoam and the absorbent material in baby diapers -- that absorbs the crude oil. The polymer layer mixes with water to reach the oil below the surface. And although some water is absorbed, the nanoparticles still take in large amounts of oil. After soaking in the oil, the nanoparticles change color from light tan to black and float to the surface.  

Since the iron oxide center is magnetic, a magnet waved over the surface can collect the swollen nanoparticles. The particles are washed with ethanol -- concentrated grain alcohol -- to remove the oil, leaving behind fresh nanoparticles that can be used again and again.

Researchers simulated the Deepwater Horizon spill to show that their system will work in real-world conditions. Crude oil is made of many different compounds, from long carbon chains such as the very flammable category of octanes to dangerous, carcinogenic rings such as benzene. Wooley's nanoparticles absorbed them all.

The nanoparticles are so small you can't see one with your unaided eye, but they can have a huge impact. Soaking up a barrel of crude oil, which is roughly 300 pounds, requires about 30 pounds of nanoparticles.

Still, applied to a 4.9 million barrel spill, the amount of nanoparticles needed would be dizzying. But if the majority of the oil were removed by traditional means, such as burning and skimming, the nanoparticles could handle the remainder.

"It's an interesting opportunity to think about how we can better respond next time," said Helen White, a chemist from Haverford College, in Pa., who studies the Deepwater Horizon spill but was not involved in this research. "In the future we can have more choices in terms of deciding what technology we can use to clean up the environment."

Researchers must resolve several practical questions before these magnetic nanoparticles are ready for real oil spills, from how much to release, to how waves might complicate recovering the swelled-up particles.

"That's the next step -- how to actually use this in the environment," White said.

The particles aren't expensive to make either. Wooley's team estimated that the price is comparable to current oil clean-up technology. The polymer and iron oxide cores are used for consumer applications, so mechanisms are already in place for large scale production of the starting materials. After that, the two pieces are mixed together in a solution and assemble into nanoparticles without additional intervention.

Although the particles are non-toxic -- similar systems are used for drug delivery -- they are not biodegradable. If any were left behind, they would float around the ocean indefinitely, possibly joining with existing islands of plastic garbage.

"If there are some particles that aren't captured and recovered, it may be better to have particles made of degradable polymers," Wooley said. Her group is looking into polymers made of natural products, such as sugar, that will dissolve into harmless components if left in the environment. 

So what of the small droplets of crude oil sit at the bottom of the ocean, occasionally washing up on Gulf beaches? In this Wooley is confident: "If there is crude oil contamination then we have the potential to clean it up."

The research was published in the journal ACS Nano.

This story was provided by Inside Science News Service. Jenna Bilbrey is a freelance writer based in Athens, GA. She tweets at @JennaBilbrey.

The enigmatic image is perhaps the most reproduced in art history, but it's never before been painted on such a small canvas.

Using a novel nanotechnique, researchers have made a miniature Mona Lisa that stretches 30 microns across, just a third of the width of a human hair.

A team from Georgia Tech created the molecular masterpiece using an atomic force microscope and a process dubbed ThermoChemical NanoLithography, or TCNL for short.

Each 125-nanometer pixel of the "Mini Lisa" represents a confined set of chemical reactions. The technique allowed the researchers to control the amount of heat applied over each pixel to vary the number of new molecules created in each spot. More heat resulted in more molecules and lighter shades of gray. In this way, the team made the tiny copy of Leonardo da Vinci's most famous work, pixel by pixel.

The microscopic art is essentially a demonstration of TCNL's ability to make variations in molecular concentrations on this extremely small scale, and the researchers think this technique could have applications for nanoscale manufacturing.

"We envision TCNL will be capable of patterning gradients of other physical or chemical properties, such as conductivity of graphene," study researcher Jennifer Curtis said in a statement. "This technique should enable a wide range of previously inaccessible experiments and applications in fields as diverse as nanoelectronics, optoelectronics and bioengineering."

The process is described online in the journal Langmuir, and it isn't the first time the iconic image has been used to demonstrate a feat of science. NASA researchers recently beamed the Mona Lisa to the moon with a powerful, well-timed laser.

Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

(ISNS) – A group of physicists and biologists has developed a nanotechnology-based technique that promises to increase the speed and sensitivity of diagnosing Lyme disease, a bacterial condition that infects more than 30,000 Americans each year.

The method, still in the research stage, uses nanotubes – tiny threads of carbon barely visible to the human eye – attached to antibodies that react with particular proteins carried by the bacteria responsible for the disease.

"We're looking directly for the Lyme organisms," said physicist A. T. Charlie Johnson, who led the multidisciplinary group at the University of Pennsylvania with bacteriologist Dustin Brisson. "This could be very useful in detecting early-stage infection."

In general, earlier treatment, typically with antibiotics, produces better results. "Treatment is likely to be complicated if you don't catch it early on," said Paul Lantos, M.D., a specialist in Lyme disease at Duke University.

Currently used blood tests catch Lyme disease in later stages, because they detect an infected person's antibodies in response to Lyme bacteria. The new test directly identifies the Lyme bacteria proteins, known as antigens because they are the actual substances that trigger the immune response.

The research "shows the basic premise that one can detect an antigen effectively," said Tarek Fahmy, professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Yale University, who did not take part in the research. 

However, Fahmy cautioned that full diagnosis depends on other factors. These include the eventual production of antibodies to the disease.

First identified in the mid-1970s in the Connecticut towns of Lyme and Old Lyme, the disease is spread to humans by ticks that have fed on deer or other animals. Left undiagnosed and untreated, the disease can cause intermittent arthritis and neurological problems.

In areas such as the northeastern United States where the disease is common, a bull's-eye-shaped pattern at the site of the tick bite is often sufficient to diagnose it. "But in places where the disease is less common, it is sometimes useful to have a test to check whether what you're seeing is Lyme disease or not," Lantos said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend a two-step procedure to test the blood for Lyme disease. First comes a test known as ELISA, which can indicate the presence of antibodies to Lyme and similar bacteria. If this is positive or questionable, clinicians apply a Western blot test, which focuses on detecting specific antibodies to the Lyme bacteria.

This process has two disadvantages. Since the body takes time to develop antibodies to combat the bacteria, it fails to diagnose the disease for several days or even weeks after the initial infection. And it can't distinguish between antibodies caused by an old, treated infection and those created by a fresh exposure.

"We want to look directly for infection in the current moment rather than for evidence of infection in the past," Johnson said.

Team member Jennifer Dailey, an undergraduate who had suffered from Lyme disease, inspired the project. She put Johnson in touch with Brisson, the bacteriologist, who suggested detecting the Lyme bacteria directly, using carbon nanotubes adapted into sensors.

The researchers needed two steps to create the sensors.

First, they used the nanotubes to make tiny electronic devices known as field-effect transistors. That involved growing the nanotubes on the silicon wafers routinely used to produce computer chips.

Then, Johnson said, "we created a covalent bond between the nanotubes and the antibodies." Covalent bonds allow different molecules to link up tightly with each other by sharing electrons.

Johnson's team applied a chemical process that gave them "quite a bit of control" over the bonding, he explained.

The researchers used an ultra-sensitive microscope to confirm that the nanotubes and antibodies had joined together. 

Whenever an antibody linked up with a Lyme bacterium's protein, it changed the electrical properties of the nanotubes to which they were attached. The team measured the electrical activity of the tiny transistor devices after removing them from the solutions.

"The more protein there was in the solution, the bigger was the change in the electrical signal," Brisson said.

The studies revealed that the method's sensitivity at least equals that achieved with the current ELISA test.

"It is more than sufficient to detect the Lyme disease bacterium in the blood of recently infected patients and may be sufficient to detect the bacterium in fluids of patients who have received inadequate treatment," Brisson said.

To reach that stage, the team is adapting its technology to detect Lyme bacteria in natural samples such as human blood. According to Johnson, several commercial firms have already expressed interest in joining the effort and taking the method through animal tests and clinical trials involving humans.

He added that the technology of "nano-enabled diagnostics" has application beyond Lyme disease, "to any ailment for which we can come up with an antibody, or even engineer an antibody," Johnson said.

The team reports its development in the July 13 issue of the publication Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics. A former science editor of Newsweek, Peter Gwynne is a freelance science writer based in Sandwich, Massachusetts.

(ISNS) -- A Canadian company is fighting counterfeiters by employing one of the most sophisticated structures in nature: a butterfly wing. 

To be precise, Nanotech Security Corp. in Vancouver is using the natural structure of the wings of a Morpho butterfly, a South American insect famous for its bright, iridescent blue or green wings, to create a visual image that would be practically impossible to counterfeit. The technology was developed at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University, and licensed to the company.

The phenomenon Nanotech employs is similar to the way some animals, including male peacocks, produce iridescent colors: instead of using proteins and other chemicals to produce a hue, the creature’s feathers or scales play with light, using very tiny holes that reflect different colors or wavelengths. The Morpho does this with complicated scales on its wing that produce shimmering blues and greens.

Nanotech’s printed security image can be embossed on virtually any surface, including plastics, metals, solar cells, fabrics, and paper, according to Clint Landrock, Nanotech’s chief technical officer. They even could be embedded on pills and capsules to ensure they are genuine pharmaceuticals, instead of fakes.

“It lends itself to anything your imagination can come up with,” he said, “even brake pads.”

The work is another example of what scientists call biomimicry, which adapts nature’s solutions for innovative human devices, in this instance, nano-optics, a burgeoning new technology.

Researchers at the University of Michigan, for example, use nano-optics to print pictures and images without ink or dyes.  

Landrock, one of the inventors, said the Simon Fraser researchers actually studied the shingled, patterned plates of a Morpho wing to see how it handled incoming light. The trick was to make artificial “nano-hole arrays,” which produce similar iridescent efforts with simpler structures. That way, the company can mass-produce billions of nano-holes. 

“We can tune the colors by changing the geometry of those hole arrays,” he said. 

They used a method similar to the manufacturing of computer chips, known as electron beam lithography, to produce master nano-hole patterns embossed on silicon or quartz.

They worked at the scale of nanometers. A single nanometer is hundreds of times smaller than even the tiniest bacterial cell. The holes in the template ranged from 50 to 300 nanometers in diameter, spaced 300-600 nanometers apart. The process takes from a few hours to a couple of days to produce a master pattern, or mask, depending on the size of the mask and the number of structures. After the mastering, a second process grows the image on nickel. From there it can be transferred to any material.

The entire image could be large enough to be seen from a distance, and, if embossed on high-priced items like designer handbags, would make it easy to spot the phonies, said Doug Blakeway, Nanotech’s CEO.

“If you had a hand bag and the clasp on it had the company’s logo on it you would see it and it would turn on and off in very bright colors.” Simply moving the item or the observer would make the color flicker.

There shouldn’t be any issue with putting the image on a capsule or pill, he said. You could see the brand on it to be sure the medicine was authentic. It would not require Food and Drug Administration approval because the image would not involve dyes or pigments so medicine would not be altered in any way.

Counterfeiting this technology is unlikely, Landrock said. The image would be very difficult to reverse engineer, and expensive because of the equipment needed. The image is much brighter than any created by any other technology, he explained, including holograms.  

“I like to say it is similar to describing how an old CRT television display looks compared to a new Ultra HD LED TV,” he said “They may be showing the same thing but you would never mistake one for the other.”

Landrock said the most logical use for the technology would be an anti-counterfeiting device on bank notes.

A nano-optics image can be embossed on coated paper, but many countries, including Canada and Australia, have switched to polymer plastics for its bank notes, which are even more receptive to nano-optics images. Those bills last much longer than U.S. paper currency and are much harder to counterfeit.

Since the company has only begun commercializing the technology, no country has yet signed up.

Even so, it is unlikely the U.S. dollar will see nano-optics any time soon. U.S. bank notes do not even use holograms, common in other currencies, or coated or polymer paper, according to Darlene Anderson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. 

The reason for the conservative bills, is that most American currency is held overseas, where it is often used as the reserve currency for the undeveloped world, said Owen Linzmayer, publisher of Banknote News, an industry observer. A radical change to U.S. bills could upset international economies and flood the country with the old bills.

The same restraints do not apply for Gucci handbags.

Joel Shurkin is a freelance writer based in Baltimore. He is the author of nine books on science and the history of science, and has taught science journalism at Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics.

NEW YORK — Imagine if your shirt could track your heart rate as you run, or if it could charge your cellphone on the go. Innovative fashion designers and engineers, who are pushing the envelope with "smart textiles," dream of designing garments that are not just embedded with devices, but actually are the devices. Welcome to the world of wearable computing.

The development of smart textiles is a true fusion of fashion and technology. From manipulating nanoparticles in cotton, to incorporating knit antennas and transistors into garments, the computational fashion industry is reimagining how we use clothing in our everyday lives.

"Can garments become the actual device?" said Genevieve Dion, assistant professor and director of the Shima Seiki Haute Technology Laboratory at Drexel University in Philadelphia. "My dream is to have nothing hard on [clothing], and no batteries that need to be put into the garment, no small pods that need to go into the pocket. Is it possible? Maybe." [Gallery: Futuristic 'Smart Textiles' Merge Fashion with Tech]

Dion was one of four speakers at an event on computational fashion held May 1 here at the Eyebeam Art+Technology Center in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

Dion and her colleagues are developing a "belly band" to monitor fetal growth for women facing high-risk pregnancies. The band, knit with conductive yarn and outfitted with a fabric antenna, can transmit radio signals to a pregnant woman's physician, providing around-the-clock, real-time data on the health of the mother and unborn baby.

The band is much more comfortable than current fetal-monitoring devices and can be worn throughout a woman's pregnancy, Dion added.

At the Shima Seiki Haute Technology Lab, engineers and designers are also investigating new ways to digitally fabricate knit garments. The researchers use special software to design pieces of clothing, which are then manufactured by state-of-the-art computerized knitting machines. The process, Dion said, is essentially the fashion industry's take on 3D printing.

Already, the digital models and the resulting prototypes are "remarkably close," she said.

At Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., scientists and fashion designers are working at the intersection of textiles and nanoscience, essentially creating new materials or reworking existing ones.

"We like to create materials that perform a function," said Juan Hinestroza, an associate professor of fiber science and the director of the Textiles Nanotechnology Lab at Cornell University.

To do this, Hinestroza and his colleagues work with fibers, such as cotton, on very small scales — controlling one atom at a time.

"I want to force cotton to do what cotton normally does not do," Hinestroza said.

At this molecular level, scientists can coat cotton fibers with nanoparticles — gold ones, for instance — and then manipulate the interactions between matter and light in the spaces between the particles. To demonstrate, Hinestroza displayed pictures of a brown and blue dress that had not been produced with any pigments or dyes. Instead, the colors on the dress were created by controlling characteristics of individual particles that had been added onto the fibers.

And that's just the beginning. Hinestroza's students are working on a variety of innovative projects, ranging from garments embedded with solar cells that can charge electronic devices to fabrics that can release insecticides to protect against malaria outbreaks in mosquito-infested countries.

And as technologies improve, the sky is seemingly the limit.

"It's the wave of the moment, so we'll see how we can all take it and make what we can of it all," Dion said.

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

The Future of Fashion

Fashion designers and engineers are collaborating to develop innovative "smart textiles," or garments that merge fashion and technology.These dresses were created in the Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. The brown and blue dress on the left was produced without any pigments or dyes. The colors were created by coating cotton fibers with nanoparticles and manipulating the way matter and light interacts between the particles.

Wearable Charging Station

Abbey Liebman, a design student at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., created a dress made with conductive cotton that can charge an iPhone via solar panels.

Up Close and Personal with Nylon

Nylon nanofibers coated with gold nanoparticles (left) and crystal formations (right). Researchers at the Textile Nanotechnology Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. are using nanoscience to create garments that can filter hazardous gases and industrial toxic chemicals.

Fashion with a Cause

A wearable anti-malaria mosquito net capable of storing and releasing insecticides. The prototype was created at the Textile Nanotechnology Laboratory at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Fiber Science and Nanotechnology

These two dresses, designed by Olivia Ong, were colored with nanoparticles and are capable of killing 99.9999% of bacteria. The dresses were created at the Textile Nanotechnology Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Transforming Cotton

An image of cotton fibers coated with gold (left) and palladium (right) nanoparticles. Researchers are merging nanoscience and fashion design to color garments without using any dyes, and to add antibacterial properties to clothing.

A water purification system that uses nanotechnology to remove bacteria, viruses and other contaminants may be able to deliver clean drinking water to rural communities for less than $3 a year per family, according to a new study.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai, India, developed a purification device that filters water through a specially crafted mixture of nanoparticles to remove harmful contaminants. Their study was published today (May 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The device, which is currently being tested in communities in India, could offer an affordable way to provide small families with at least 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of safe drinking water per day, said study co-author Thalappil Pradeep, a professor in the department of chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. [10 of the Most Polluted Places on Earth]

Silver ions to the rescue

To develop this system, scientists first had to figure out how to remove impurities from water retrieved from wells and other local sources.

"We had to look at several problems with water: One is microbes. Another is bacteria and viruses, and then chemicals, like arsenic, lead and pesticides," Pradeep told LiveScience.

The researchers designed a water filter composed of a grainy mix of nanoparticles — so-called composite nanomaterials — that release a continuous stream of silver ions to destroy microbes in the water.

Silver ions, which flow from nanoparticles when oxidized (a conversion process in which an element or molecule becomes more positively charged), have long been known for their ability to effectively kill bacteria.

Other composite materials in the filter cartridge were added to remove arsenic, pesticides, lead and other heavy metals from the water.

"By combining several materials together, we can have an all-inclusive purifier," Pradeep said. "Everything goes through the filter, passes through these materials, and you finally get clean water."

Will it work?

The filtration process takes approximately an hour, and the researchers' current prototype containers can hold up to 10 liters of water.

"For a family of five in a rural Indian village, you probably need some water in the morning for cooking and some water for drinking," Pradeep explained. "We figure 9 to 10 liters is good enough for those purposes. Then, you can fill it up again, and you now have 20 liters for the day."

Eleven percent of the global population, or 783 million people, lack access to improved sources of drinking water, according to the World Health Organization and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation.

The water purifiers are currently being tested in communities in India, but Pradeep sees potential for them to be used in other rural locations around the world. 

"We're implementing this already on a community scale, looking at regional water problems," Pradeep said. "But arsenic is a big problem in Africa and other places, and we are interacting with people about it."

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

A tiny sponge camouflaged as a red blood cell could soak up toxins ranging from anthrax to snake venom, new research suggests.

The new "nanosponge," described April 14 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, takes advantage of the fact that many threats, from superbugs to E. coli, use the same strategies to damage cells.

The nanoparticles, also called nanosponges, act as decoys that lure and inactivate the deadly compounds. When injected into mice, the tiny decoys protect mice against lethal doses of a toxin produced by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

Follow-up studies need to be done in humans. But if those are positive, the tiny red-blood cell mimics could become a "universal platform that can be used to treat a lot of different toxins, said study co-author Che-Ming Hu, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Diego.

Tiny robots

One of the mainstay strategies of bacteria and poison is to poke holes in cells, disrupting their internal chemical balance and causing them to burst, Hu told LiveScience.

But so far, researchers haven't had much success creating all-purpose treatments to exploit this vulnerability.

So the researchers created a tiny spherical core of a lactic acid byproduct, which forms naturally during metabolism in the human body. They then wrapped the cores in the outer surface of red blood cells. (To get the outer skin of red blood cells, they used a difference in particle concentration inside and outside the cells to cause them to burst, and then collected their outer membranes)

The entire ensemble became a tiny nanosponge, which was about 85 nanometers in diameter, or 100 times smaller than a human hair, Hu said.

In cell cultures, the camouflaged sponges act as decoys, luring the toxins from MRSA, Streptococcus (the bacteria that causes strep throat) and bee venom to their surface, then binding to the structure the "poisons" normally use to poke through cells. [In Photos: Top 10 Deadliest Animals]

"When they stick onto the nanosponge, that particular damaging structure gets preoccupied, and then the body can digest the entire particle," Hu told LiveScience, referring to the toxin and the nanosponge together.

Next, the team injected 18 mice with a lethal dose of a MRSA toxin. Half the mice then got a dose of the nanosponges.

Whereas all the mice in the control group died, all but one that received the treatment survived.

Widespread treatment

Because so many bacteria use the same pore-forming strategy, the nanosponges could be used as a universal treatment option when doctors don't know exactly what is causing an illness.

The sponges' tiny size means a small amount of blood, for camouflage, can be used to make an effective dose. Their small size also allows them to circulate freely through blood vessels, lure enough of the toxins to have an impact and still be degraded safely, Hu said.

As a follow-up, the researchers want to see whether the method works in human blood, and against other toxic chemicals, such as scorpion venom and anthrax, which use similar attack strategies.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

(ISNS) – An army of microscopic sponges may someday save your life. Scientists have created tiny, spherical particles -- called nanosponges -- that can soak up harmful toxins found in some venoms and bacteria.

The nanosponges can sop up a particular variety of toxins that injure red blood cells, researchers from the University of California, San Diego reported earlier this month in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.  

Nanosponges target toxins that "can essentially organize themselves to poke a hole inside [red blood] cell membranes," said Jack Che-Ming Hu, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego and the lead author on the study. "That leads to cell damage and cell death."

These toxins create punctures, causing red blood cells to pop. Bits of toxin-loaded membrane from the busted-open cell can float off into the bloodstream to assault more cells, making the infected person sick and, in serious conditions, can cause death.

Many bacteria that pose major health concerns, like E. coli, MRSA, and some bacteria that cause pneumonia, release toxins that use this tactic. Also venom from animals including bees, snakes, and sea anemones can riddle a red blood cell with pores.

"The biggest challenge with toxin detoxification is that there are simply so many types of toxins out there," said Hu.

By focusing on toxins that use the pore-forming strategy, a single type of nanosponge is able to capture many kinds of these poisons, instead of being tailored for different varieties. To pull this off, nanosponges masquerade as red blood cells. 

Hu's team uses the outer membrane of red blood cells to coat the outside of the nanosponge. This allows the cloaked nanosponges to go undercover, posing as red blood cells. 

The toxins attack the nanosponges just as they would a red blood cell. But the center of this particle is made of a ball of lactic acid, an organic material commonly found in the body. It acts like a scaffold and helps prevent the membrane from falling apart, trapping the toxins. 

The researchers added nanosponges and two types of pore-forming toxins – one from a strain of bacteria and the other from bee venom – to mice red blood cells in petri dishes. The nanosponges were able to capture over 90 percent of the toxins.

"The toxins -- once they interact with the membrane of these particles -- they are preoccupied or detained," said Hu. 

The toxin-soaked nanosponge eventually makes its way to the liver and is removed by the body, said Hu.

One red blood cell can provide enough membrane to coat 3,000 microscopic nanosponges. Scientists would have to line up one hundred of these tiny particles, side-by-side, to reach the width of a typical human hair. Researchers can create an army of nanosponges to far outnumber red blood cells, making it more likely a toxin will bump into the decoy than a true red blood cell.  

In another experiment, the team injected live mice with a lethal dose of a fast-acting toxin. If the fleet of nanosponges was deployed two minutes before the toxin, 89 percent of the mice survived. If the nanosponges were given to the mouse two minutes after the toxin, 44 percent survived.

"It's a matter of how fast the toxin acts in your body," said Hu, who expects to see higher levels of survival if a toxin is slower to attack red blood cells. 

Hu thinks that nanosponges hold a lot of promise for treating bacterial infections. 

The team is hoping to begin work on nanosponges for human use. But long-term risks need to be studied before the absorbent particles make it from laboratory mice to doctor's offices or pharmacies. 

The researchers don't yet know if nanosponges will work in people. 

"It truly is a foreign body that you're going to be putting in the human body," said Dave Rasko, an assistant professor at Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, in Baltimore, who was not involved in the study. "You always have opportunity for there to be some kind of an immune response to that." 

Hu and his colleagues have not found any evidence of damaging effects from the nanosponges in mice. He believes that the human immune system will also treat these particles as normal red blood cells.

If the technology is safe, it could become a viable alternative to or used in combination with antibiotics.

"I can see it being a huge thing for people [in] the military or first responders," said Rasko. He thinks nanosponges could also be used against biological weapons like anthrax and ricin.

Ryder Diaz is a science writer based in Santa Cruz, Calif.

Inside Science News Service is supported by the American Institute of Physics.

A beautiful black-and-white image that looks like the pattern on a scarf isn't the work of an upscale French designer. It's the stuff that lines your lungs.

The snapshot is a microscopic image that used fluorescent dye to reveal the patterns made by lung surfactant, a soaplike material that covers the inside of the lungs. Without surfactant, the lungs would collapse.

"During the breathing cycle, as your lung is compressed, it will form this pattern," said Prajna Dhar, the creator of the striking microscopic image. Dhar and her colleagues published the picture in January 2012 in Biophysical Journal. This March, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences featured the image in their monthly newsletter, Biomedical Beat. [Tiny Grandeur: Stunning Photos of the Very Small]

The researchers took the patterned surfactant image as part of a study investigating how nanoparticles affect the body. Nanoparticles are particles so tiny they're measured in billionths of a meter. They're the subject of major scientific research right now, because engineering on a nano-scale allows scientists to literally build materials atom by atom, like this world map one-thousandth the size of a grain of salt. Nanotechnology is being used to develop everything from nano-scale solar cells to medicine delivery systems.   

The explosion in technology has led to concern that nanoparticles might harm human health, Dhar told LiveScience. The question is whether the tiny particles are toxic or not.

To find out, Dhar and her colleagues exposed lung surfactant molecules to nanoparticles made of carbon — "really tiny nano-diamonds," Dhar said. They found that in the short term, the particles don't affect how surfactant changes as lung tissue compresses and expands. But over time (the researchers looked at exposures up to 21 days), the nanoparticles changed the way the surfactant "packed" when compressed by exhaling lung tissue.

"If it changes the way the surfactant packs, it destabilizes the sufactant," Dhar said. "And if it destabilizes the surfactant, than you cannot lower the energy that is required to breathe."

The effect of the particles lodging in the lungs is similar to what happens after a long period of secondhand smoke exposure, Dhar said, or to black lung disease. This disease occurs in coal miners who have breathed coal dust (also made of carbon) for many years. The lungs can't rid themselves of fine dust particles, so they accumulate, causing inflammation, formation of excessive fibrous tissue, and even death of the lung tissue.

The effect of nanoparticles on lung tissue is different depending on the size, shape and material of the particles, Dhar said. She and her colleagues hope to use their lung-based surfactant system to test nanomaterials for safety, expanding to particles other than carbon. Testing the particles on animals is less effective, she said, because black lung-like symptoms may take an animal's entire life to develop. Exposing surfactant directly to the nanoparticles is far faster.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated how peptides, or short chains of amino acids, assemble by themselves into nano-sized structures on solid surfaces such as graphite and other layered minerals.

These findings are expected to help researchers harness the power of molecular self-assembly — the process by which molecules form a defined, well-organized arrangement without interference from external sources.

Molecular self-assembly " . . . gives a tremendous power to the scientist to make controlled nanostructures — the hallmark of nanotechnology," said Mehmet Sarikaya, professor of materials science and engineering at the university and director of the NSF-funded Genetically Engineered Materials Science & Engineering Center.

Controlling Self-Assembly

Sarikaya's research involved observing selected amino acids arrange themselves into a linear form, and then fold and coil into a 3-D protein. These observations were conducted at regular intervals ranging from 10 seconds to 15 hours in order to capture the progression of events.

This research was conducted with atomic force microscopy. AFM involves using high-resolution microscopes to produce images down to the molecular and atomic levels.

Analyses of the Sarikaya's observations revealed which amino acids apparently control surface and inter-molecular interactions of peptides that led to their self-assembly. Based on these insights, Sarikaya was able to control the self-assembly and formation of specific biomolecular nanostructures on graphite surfaces; these nanostructures were dubbed as self-assembled peptides.

The results of Sarikaya's research will advance efforts to use molecular self-assembly to engineer nanoscale machinery and microelectronics that are incorporated into:

• Biomolecular nanosensors, which may be used in molecular probing for cancer targets.
• Nanophotonics devices, such as self-assembled Light-Emitting Diodes, which are light sources used in many applications ranging from general lighting to aviation lighting
• Biofuel cells, which mimic bacterial interactions in nature that produce electrical currents
• Bioelectronics, which use electrical stimuli to manipulate various biological systems

Additional research of protein self-assembly and protein interactions that are related to this research may also aid in drug design. "Big Pharma companies cannot easily design drugs because many of these interactions and the resultant structures are not known," said Sarikaya. "Short peptides assembling on solid surfaces … may be a way to overcome some of the design and assembly problems encountered ..."

Editor's Note:The researchers depicted in Behind the Scenes articles have been supported by theNational Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the Behind the Scenes Archive.

If this Cupid hit you with an arrow, you'd never feel it — its weapon is a mere fraction of the width of a human hair.

But this tiny Valentine is an example of big technology. Just a few hundred nanometers from foot to bow (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter), Cupid here is made from carbon nanotubules in a process that has been used in fields as diverse as mining and health care.

To make the tiny Cupid, physics students at Brigham Young University (BYU) first created the bow-wielding cherub shape with microscopic iron beads. They then blasted the beads with a puff of heated gas, which triggers the microscopic beads to transform into carbon nanotubules only 20 atoms across.

The resulting structure is as delicate as new love.

"Blowing on it or touching it would destroy it," BYU physics professor Robert Davis said in a statement.

Davis and his colleagues have ways to take the technology past the realm of fragile Valentines, however. Along with BYU physicist Richard Vanfleet, Davis has developed methods to strengthen the nanotube structures with metals and other materials.

One application is building itsy-bitsy nanofilters with great precision — these filters have holes about a tenth the circumference of a human hair, each perfectly spaced. Such nano-filters can be used in compressed gas systems in mining, health care and scuba diving, Davis said.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas or LiveScience @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

Mimicking silk-spinning spiders, scientists have created a type of nanotube fiber with an unmatched combination of strength, conductivity and flexibility.

These light, versatile fibers could find uses in the aerospace, automotive, medical industries, as well as the smart-clothing markets, researchers say.

Carbon nanotubes arehollow tubes of pure carbon just nanometers or billionths of a meter in diameter. Although they are only about the width of a strand of DNA, they are about 100 times stronger than steel and only one-sixth as heavy, and their conductive properties for both electricity and heat rival the best metal conductors ―enthralling qualities that have attracted much interest from researchers since they were discovered in 1991.

With all their vast potential, however, carbon nanotubes are extremely difficult to work with, and creating carbon fibers that retain the startling qualities of the nanotubes themselves has proved highly challenging.

There are two strategies researchers have pursued to make carbon nanotube fibers. One route, known as the solid-state processes, involves taking the dry, hairball-like clumps that nanotubes typically form and spinning threads from them much as one would from balls of cotton. The other, known as wet-spinning, involves taking a stream of fluid containing the nanotubes and coagulating it to create a solid fiber, much the same way spiders generate strands of silk.

[New Worms' Silk Has Spider Strength]

The carbon fibers with the best mechanical and conductive properties are theoretically those with  tightly packed and perfectly aligned nanotubes, like pencils in a box. Since solid-state processes start with entangled masses of nanotubes, the resulting fibers are often relatively disorderly and loosely packed, and spinning fibers from these clumps can be awkward and cumbersome, making it hard to scale up to industrial levels.

Despite these shortcomings, solid-state carbon nanotube fibers have delivered the best properties so far, because they can use relatively long carbon nanotubes, measuring a millimeter or more.

In comparison, wet-spinning is relatively simple, making it easy to scale to industrial levels. It also has the benefit of forming the most highly ordered and dense carbon nanotube fibers. However, wet-spinning has long worked only with carbon nanotubes about a half-micron long — that is, half a thousandth of a millimeter long, or about 200 times smaller than the thickness of the average human hair. These have disappointing mechanical and conductive properties compared with their longer brethren.

"Nanotubes really like each other, and tend to entangle and stick, and as they get longer and longer, their surface interactions get stronger and stronger, and if you want the benefits that come with using carbon nanotubes, you want them ordered, not entangled," researcher Matteo Pasquali, a chemical engineer at Rice University in Houston, told TechNewsDaily.

Now Pasquali and his colleagues have discovered a way to wet-spin fibers using carbon nanotubes 10 times longer than before.

"We finally have a nanotube fiber with properties that don't exist in any other material," Pasquali said.

The secret of the new technique is dissolving the nanotubes in a very strong acid, chlorosulfonic acid. This tames the surface properties of carbon nanotubes, helping keep relatively long carbon nanotubes from entangling.

"A graduate student in my lab, Natnael Bahabtu, found simple ways to show that carbon nanotube fibers could be spun from chlorosulfonic acid solutions," Pasquali said. "That was critical for this new process."

The new fiber, which is about 10 to 50 microns wide, contains tens of millions of nanotubes packed side by side.

"It looks like black cotton thread but behaves like both metal wires and strong carbon fibers," Pasquali said.

The new fibers have about 10 times the tensile strength and electrical conductivity of the best previously reported wet-spun carbon nanotube fibers, and 30 times the thermal conductivity. When compared with the best solid-state fibers, they are about a match in terms of tensile strength, three to five times better in electrical conductivity, and 10 times more thermally conductive.

"The new carbon nanotube fibers have a thermal conductivity approaching that of the best graphite fibers but with 10 times greater electrical conductivity," said researcher Marcin Otto, business development manager at the Dutch firm Teijin Aramid. "Graphite fibers are also brittle, while the new carbon nanotube fibers are as flexible and tough as a textile thread."

The electrical conductivity of the new fibers is on par with copper, gold and aluminum wires, but the new material is stronger and lighter.

"Metal wires will break in rollers and other production machinery if they are too thin," Pasquali said. "In many cases, people use metal wires that are far [thicker] than required for the electrical needs, simply because it's not feasible to produce a thinner wire. Data cables are a particularly good example of this."

"In theory, we should be able to increase strength up to a factor of 10 to 30 times; electrical conductivity by a factor of 10 to 20 times; thermal conductivity by a factor of five to eight times," Pasquali said. "We hope to improve properties by using longer, more perfect carbon nanotubes, potentially ones that are all identical to each other and have the same atomic configuration along their length and have only a single wall of carbon. We also hope to improve properties by improving several steps of our spinning process and post-processing."

The scientists detailed their findings in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal Science.

This story was provided by TechNewsDaily, sister site to LiveScience.

Carbon nanotubes — a manmade material many times thinner than a wavelength of visible light — can be used to create highly detailed holograms, researchers say.

These carbon tubes are hollow pipes only nanometers, or billionths of a meter, wide. They possess a range of extraordinary physical and electrical properties, such as being about 100 times stronger than steel at one-sixth the weight.

Industrial giants, government agencies and academic institutes worldwide are investigating carbon nanotubes as key ingredients for tomorrow's devices. This work includes researching a variety of applications regarding light — holograms, for instance.

[New Device Uses Nanotubes to Catch Cancer Cells]

Holograms are a special kind of 2D photograph that, when lit up, seem like windows onto 3D scenes. The pixels making up each hologram scatter light falling onto them in very specific ways, causing these light waves to interact with each other to generate images with depth.

The smaller the pixels making up the holograms are, the higher the resolution of the holograms and the more angles one can view them from.

"The size of pixels is one of the key limiting features in the state-of-the-art of holographic displays systems," said researcher Haider Butt, an optical scientist at the University of Cambridge in England.

Now scientists have created holograms using the smallest pixels yet — carbon nanotubes.

"Due to the nanoscale dimensions of the carbon nanotube array, the image presented a wide field of view and high resolution," Butt told InnovationNewsDaily.

[Where Is My Holodeck?]

The researchers used multi-walled carbon nanotubes — tubes within tubes — that were on average 140 nanometers across, or about 700 times thinner than a human hair. These were grown on silicon surfaces like pillars rising from the ground, each reaching about 1,500 nanometers high. Their calculations let them know where these nanotubes should be placed and how wide they should be in order to generate a holographic image of the word "CAMBRIDGE."

These holographic displays and their pixels are very sensitive to changes in material properties and incoming light. As such, "a new class of highly sensitive holographic sensors can be developed that could sense distance, motion, tilt, density of biological materials," and features of light falling onto them, Butt said.

While promising, carbon nanotubes are still expensive to fabricate, so the team is investigating other materials that could generate holograms in similar ways. "Alternative materials should be explored and researched,” Butt said. “As a next step, we are going to try zinc oxide nanowires to achieve the same effects."

Also, these holograms are static, much like photographs are. In the future, the researchers hope to make the adjustable pixels that could perhaps lead to changeable pictures or even video displays. This might be possible by integrating these pixels with the kind of liquid crystals often seen in modern flat-screen displays. The liquid crystals might be able to shuffle around the location and other features of the pixels, thus altering the holographic image they create.

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 31 in the journal Advanced Materials.

This story was provided by InnovationNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

A new ultra-thin flat lens could allow cameras to one day take distortion-free photos, researchers say.

Unlike typical camera lenses, which are made from curved glass, the new flat lens is made using a very thin wafer of silicon that is only 60 nanometers thick.

“Our flat lens opens up a new type of technology,” Federico Capasso, a physicist at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said in a statement.

“We’re presenting a new way of making lenses … It’s extremely exciting.”

[Shapeshifting Mobile Camera Lens Inspired by Human Eye]

Curved glass lens can capture light from any angle and focus it into a single point, but they can also produce distortions such as the “fish-eye” effect that is common in photos taken with conventional wide-angle lenses.

To get around such problems, the new flat lens created by Capasso's team uses a series of small nano sensors – which the researchers dubbed "nanoantennas" – that refract incoming light so that it ends up on the same focal plane.

“What we’ve done is create an artificial refraction process,” Capasso said.

[Compact Digital Cameras Explained]

For now, the nanoantennas can only focus one wavelength of light, but the team is looking into antennas that can handle normal white light, which is made up of multiple wavelengths.

This story was provided by Innovationnewsdaily, a sister site to LiveScience.

To create new alloys, metallurgists for centuries have relied on trial and error. That could change.

A group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has come up with a mathematical model that lets them predict what kinds of alloys will be stable, without having to go through the laborious process of making them and trying them out.

Most metals consist of tiny crystals at the nanometer scale. This is what gives metals their varying properties – their hardness or ductility, for example. In many high-tech metals, building an alloy with lots of nanocrystals can boost hardness. But these structures aren't stable; as the temperature goes up or the metal is stressed, the crystals merge and get bigger (they essentially melt), and the properties that made them special are lost.

Tongjai Chookajorn, Heather Murdoch and Christopher A. Schuh came up with a way to make a map of a given element's stability at a certain temperature, using a mathematical model. It lets metallurgistssee what other elements they can add to the base metal (known as a matrix or solvent) to get stable structures and keep them intact at high temperatures.

[Shortage of Rare Metals Could Threaten High-Tech Innovation]

The team tested tungsten, which is one of the strongest metals known and has the highest melting temperature. Schuh told InnovationNews Daily that the high melting temperature means it needs to be hot in order to be processed, so keeping the nanocrystal structures stable is a lot harder to do. The mathematical model, developed by Murdoch, suggested a few candidates that would allow the structures to stay stable, such as titanium, zinc, chromium and gold. It also showed that copper, cadmium and strontium would not work.

After deciding to use titanium (which also is strong and has a high melting point), Chookajorn tackled making the actual alloy. The alloy worked as the model said it would: At 2,012 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius), the nanocrysals stayed stable for a week.

Another thing the new model does is indirectly show how the alloying material mixes with the base. To maximize strength, the secondary metal – in this case titanium – has to gather near the boundaries of the nanocrystal structures. When that happens, the nanocrystals are more likely to remain stable. Chookajorn said they are working on another model to look into the actual structure of alloys.

The group has tried its technique with other metals, though it hasn't tried making the actual alloys yet. "We do expect that when experiments are done, it will lead to new nanostructured alloys with high stability and which were not previously made," Schuh wrote in an email.

The research is detailed in the Aug. 24 issue of the journal Science.

South Korean researchers have found a way to make electronics stretch and flex like rubber, by combining a three-dimensional polymer structure with metal.

The new work brings wearable electronics and flexible displays closer to reality. Flexible computers and LED displays already exist, but they are more like paper or thin sheets of plastic. Making a device that retains its electrical conductivity after repeatedly being stretched has been more elusive.

['Super Skin' Can Stretch and Sense for Bionic Humans]

Seokwoo Jeon, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, led the research, which appears in the June 26 issue of Nature Communications.

He said the idea grew from his lab's work in three-dimensional nanostructures. "Our group has the capability to build large 3D nanostructure with perfect symmetry," he said. "We thought to show some hands-on examples that prove the usefulness of such large 3D nanostructures. Recent interest in stretchable electronics seemed the best one."

To make the stretchable electronics, the team took a polymer called a photoresist and exposed it to ultraviolet light. This is similar to the process used to make computer chips, but in this case they passed the light through a mask that diffracted it, forming an interference pattern. Such patterns are familiar to anyone who has ever passed light through a screen or a slit – one sees a pattern of light and dark areas projected on a surface. Those interference patterns, though, also exist in three dimensions.

The photoresist is "developed" in a way similar to film by exposing it to other chemicals. After that, it has a three-dimensional structure that the interference pattern leaves behind. That structure functions as a mold for the elastic substance, called PDMS (for polydimethylsiloxane).

[Quiz: Sci-Fi vs. Real Technology]

PDMS stretches well but it isn't conductive. So two layers of nano-structured PDMS are pieced together in a sandwich-like configuration and filled with a mix of the metals gallium and indium. The result is a netlike structure that stretches and keeps on conducting electricity no matter how many times it's pulled and released. The material is also transparent.

The piece of the conductor made by the lab is only about an inch on a side. But Jeon noted that it is relatively cheap to make and scalable. Beyond electronics, he noted, there are other applications that might require building nanostructures, but his method shows it can be done efficiently and cheaply.

To demonstrate the material, Jeon and his colleagues built a simple circuit of two light-emitting diodes that stayed lit even when the conductor was stretched to twice its normal length. They also showed the material stretched over the surface of a cigarette lighter and on a small sphere.

An electrically conductive material that stretches like that could be used in simple switches similar to touch panels on lights. It could be made into touch-panel displays that aren't panels. Its additional flexibility and elasticity means that in clothing, one isn't limited by the fact that metal wires don't stretch.

This story was provided by InnovationNewsDaily, a sister site to LiveScience. Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.

Engineers at Stanford University have found a way to add these delicate, bulbous decorations to nanowires that are about 1/1000th the width of a human hair. The decorations are could be important to creating more efficient batteries, solar cells and other nanotechnology-enabled inventions in the future. Several research groups have come up with different ways to add tiny hairs, branches, bumps and folds to nanowires. But the new Stanford method is simple, works for wires made of many different materials and loads up the wires with an extra dose of decorations, according to a paper the researchers published April 11 in the journal Nano Letters. 

Many research groups are studying nano-size wires and tubes to go in microchips, water filters, batteries and more. One major goal for nanowire researchers is finding easy ways to stably stick nano-size particles on the wires. The particles increase the surface area over which a chemical reaction can happen, making the wires more efficient. In one lithium-ion battery study, for example, decorated nanowires created six times more energy than undecorated wires. In another study of solar power tech, decorated nano-size rods absorbed more visible light and created 29 times more current than undecorated rods. 

To make their decorated wires, the Stanford researchers dipped plain, undecorated nanowires in a solution of metal salts. After the wires dried, either in air or in nitrogen gas, the researchers gave them the crème brulée treatment by blasting them with a flame for up to a minute. The flame, which must be at least 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit), quickly evaporates and burns any liquid left in the metal-salt coating. As the coating burns, it creates gases that flow outward from the nanowire, depositing tiny nanoparticles in chains that radiate from the wire like branches. "It created these intricate, hair-like tendrils filled with lots of nooks and crannies," Xiaoli Zheng, who led the study, said in a statement.

The researchers tried the method with several combinations of nanowires and dip solution, showing the new technique works with wires and dip made of different materials.  By changing the proportions of ingredients in the dip solution and the number of dips the wires undergo, the researchers found they could control how dense the decorations are. That level of control is helpful to researchers and may make the technique popular, Zheng said.   

Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

As he works to develop new, efficient energy technologies, Georgia Institute of Technology assistant professor of mechanical engineering Baratunde Cola devotes time to developing future scientists. Cola teaches and directs graduate students, postdocs and research scientists who work in Georgia Tech's NanoEngineered Systems and Transport lab.

He also uses art to excite and teach high school students about the possibilities of nanotechnology and sustainability. The 31-year-old's honors include the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Cola's laboratory research, funded by the National Science Foundation as well, focuses on flexible, thermo-electrochemical cells that can be used to cost effectively convert waste heat to electricity. He also has worked at the forefront of research on carbon nanotube thermal interface materials for over five years.

Along with collaborators at Purdue University and Georgia Tech, he has several patent applications related to these materials. Here, he answers the ten ScienceLives questions.

Name: Baratunde Cola Age: 31 Institution: Georgia Institute of Technology Field of Study: Mechanical engineering with a focus on nanoengineering of thermal systems

What inspired you to choose this field of study? My dad is a mechanical engineer, which was very influential in my choosing to major in mechanical engineering. However, I had a great appreciation in adolescence for football, which I ended up playing in college, so I can't say that I saw my future as a mechanical engineering researcher at the time.

I give credit to a great mentor for introducing me to the exciting possibilities of nanotechnology. I was hooked once I learned that diamond nanostructures can be heated to a point at which they will emit electrons and produce electrical power — I'm still fascinated by this today!

What is the best piece of advice you ever received? There is so much to choose from!

I wanted to get the best education I could, and I wanted to play football in the Southeastern Conference. I joined the football team at Vanderbilt University as a freshman. I eventually became a starter at fullback and was awarded a scholarship. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, I had one more year of eligibility to play college football.

Consequently, I enrolled in the masters of mechanical engineering degree program at Vanderbilt, which did not have a thesis requirement. A mentor advised me to consider switching to a thesis degree program after the season, because it would open additional doors to me in the future, including the pursuit of a Ph.D. with fellowship support. He was right!

What was your first scientific experiment as a child? I can't recall my first scientific experiment. I was always curious about how things worked as a child, so I would often take things apart to study them. I was probably more of an engineer looking to invent new things, even at an early age.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher? I can't say enough about how much I enjoy the freedom to develop my own ideas and answer questions that interest me. I also enjoy the many opportunities I have to interact with the brightest students and researchers around the world.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher? I've encountered effective researchers with a variety of personality types. However, I would say a balance of being creative, process-focused and organized is a good start.

What are the societal benefits of your research? Our nanoengineering research is developing cost-effective means to generate electricity from heat that is freely available in our environment or as a wasted byproduct in industry. This work will hopefully lead to new jobs and help our country to become more energy independent. Our work also helps to increase the functionality and reliability of electronic devices.

Introducing nanoscience to high-school environmental science and art students may help to increase interest in careers as scientist and engineers, which is a national need at the moment. The nano-inspired art produced by the students enables them to see and feel energy as well as communicate the potential benefits of nanotechnology and sustainability to the general public.

A few of the student's art pieces will be showcased at the 2012 U.S. Science and Engineering Festival and Expo in Washington, D.C.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher? I have been fortunate to have many great mentors. My parents are not researchers by profession, but I give them, and my general experiences growing up in Pensacola, Fla., a lot of credit for shaping how I think about research.

My dad engaged me in critical thinking at a very early age, and often, which gave me confidence in the strength of my own ideas. My mom made sure I gained diverse experiences in my youth, including sports, camps and the journey to becoming an Eagle Scout, which I now draw from in my creative research process.

My graduate advisors were very inspirational to me as well.

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most? High school students I meet often tell me that they would have never thought instruments used in nanoscience research could be so expensive. I imagine that others outside of the field might have similar thoughts. Some high-end electron microscopes can have a sticker price well over 5 million dollars!

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be? I would save a very interesting work of art a Georgia Tech undergraduate mechanical engineering student produced for me. I invited this student to join my lab for research after his very impressive performance in my heat transfer class. He didn't miss a single point all semester! The student's artwork was inspired by scanned electron microscope images of nanostructures that are made in my lab, and the application of these nanostructures to help keep computer chips cool.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car? My life is filled with music from a mix of genres. My current office rotation includes songs by JayZ, Drake, and Coldplay. JayZ is definitely on the dial before I teach or give a seminar because the energy in his lyrics gets me ready to perform. I usually listen to the CINEMIX radio station on iTunes or classical music when I'm writing a paper or proposal. I listen to the news on national public radio during my commute to and from work.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.