e.g. 3M announced the on-time completion of its manufacturing expansion for its 3M™ Ultra Barrier Solar Film in Columbia, Missouri. As the leader in transparent ultra barrier film technology, this expansion will support the growing demand for high efficiency flexible photovoltaic (PV) modules.

The newest development of ALIO Industries are very compact Mini-Tripods, which are actuated by linear motors and counterbalanced pneumatically after the same principle of their bigger predecessors. This allows the user again to achieve highest precision as well as dynamic combined with a very long lifetime even under harsh conditions in 24/7 mode.

Applied Nanotech Holdings, Inc. (APNT) has received a $275,642 contract from the US Army to develop glass fiber-reinforced composite (GFRP) panels to improve the protection of facilities from ballistic and blast threats, as well as from electromagnetic interference (EMI), seismic events and degradation. Applied Nanotech is also developing the supplemental functionalities of surface self-decontamination, to protect against bio-chemical attacks, and novel and efficient self-healing properties, to its carbon nanotube-reinforced panels. Fuji Xerox Co Ltd showed an e-paper that realizes color display without using a color filter during SID 2012 in Boston, US.

Kopin Corporation (NASDAQ: KOPN) announced a breakthrough in shrinking the size of its color displays. By reducing the color dots to a mere 2.25 x 6.75µm, Kopin has achieved a full-color VGA display (640 x 480 resolution) in a 0.21" diagonal size, which is by far the smallest VGA color-filter liquid crystal display (LCD) in the world. Kopin showed an ultra-compact electronic viewfinder (EVF) containing the VGA display at the Society for Information Display 2012 Exhibition, in Boston, USA.

Liquidmetal Technologies Inc. (OTCBB: LQMT) has reached an agreement with Visser Precision Cast, LLC (VPC), a subsidiary of Furniture Row, LLC to provide manufacturing services to Liquidmetal. VPC is based in Colorado, USA.

MagForce AG (Frankfurt, XETRA: MF6), a leading German medical device company in the field of nanomedicine with focus on oncology, and Tek Grup Inc., a Turkish medical product distribution company, signed an exclusive distribution agreement. Moreover, MagForce has entered into a pre-clinical research agreement with Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN, USA), a leading US medical center. Under the terms of the agreement, Mayo Clinic will start a research program applying MagForce's NanoTherm® therapy to investigate the preclinical efficacy of the therapy in pancreatic and liver cancer.

Merck, Germany (Bloomberg: MRK), announced that within the scope of a capital increase by the Israeli start-up company QLight Nanotech, it is acquiring an interest in the Jerusalem-based company.

Namib Beetle Design won $10,000 during the Boston College Venture Competition (BCVC). The company uses a technology in order to optimize water harvesting techniques. The founders based their design on the namib desert beetle, that uses nanotechnology to trap water from condensation. The company is currently seeking venture financing.

Nanocomp Technologies, Inc., a developer of performance materials and component products from carbon nanotubes (CNTs), has entered into a financial and strategic development relationship with DuPont (NYSE: DD).

NanoFocus AG, German developer and manufacturer of optical 3D surface measurement systems and software for the characterization of technical surfaces, presented nanometer-accurate inspection solutions during the Control 2012 in Stuttgart, Germany. With the non-contact optical surface measurement technology, relevant 3D surface texture characteristics for quality assurance can be determined easily and quickly. The accurate and precise assessment of surfaces is decisive in improving functional properties of materials and components. Non-destructive production-supporting measurement technologies are, therefore, becoming increasingly important in research and industry. Moreover, on May 23, 2012 NanoFocus AG has decided to increase capital by using the existing approved capital with the consent of the management board a couple of days later.

Nanostart Asia Pacific (Nanostart, OTCQX: NASRY) is increasing its share in the Singaporean company Membrane Instruments and Technologies Pte Ltd (MINT) from 18% to 28%. The investment in MINT will take place through the Nanostart Early Stage Venture Fund I, which is managed by Nanostart Asia Pacific. The funds will flow in particular to additional marketing of the Membrane Integrity Sensor and its international rollout.

Nanosys Inc. and the Optical Systems Division of 3M Company (NYSE: MMM) are joining technologies to provide wide color gamut technology for consumer electronic displays, allowing Liquid Crystal Displays to display 50% more color.

Novaled AG, a German company specializing in OLED technologies and materials, and New York artist and designer Marcus Tremonto have designed PAD, a new transparent OLED suspension light. This ultra slim light, which was conceived and developed by Tremonto entirely from an organic perspective. Based on the pad-like fingers of the red-eyed tree frog, PAD uses transparent OLED panels to create three types of illumination.

Tegal Corporation (NASDAQ:TGAL) announced financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2012, which ended March 31, 2012. The Company's net (loss) per share decreased to ($0.85) for the year from a comparable ($1.85) from the prior fiscal year. The Company ended the fiscal year with $7.8 million in cash, an increase over the prior year of approximately $0.2 million.

Engineers from Stanford and the University of Southern California (USA) have found a way to design circuits containing carbon nanotubes that should work even when many of the nanotubes are twisted or misaligned.

Over the last few years, a team of Stanford engineering professors, doctoral students, undergraduates, and high-school interns, led by Professors Subhasish Mitra and H.-S. Philip Wong, took on the challenge and has produced a series of breakthroughs that represent the most advanced computing and storage elements yet created using CNTs. These high-quality, robust nanotube circuits are immune to the stubborn and crippling material flaws that have stumped researchers for over a decade, a difficult hurdle that has prevented the wider adoption of nanotube circuits in industry. The advance represents a major milestone toward Very-large Scale Integrated (VLSI) systems based on nanotubes.

 

Ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD) displays biological and mechanical properties that make it a promising choice for promoting epidermal cell migration on percutaneous implant surfaces. Percutaneous implants are commonly used for treatment of medical and dental conditions. Biocompatibility of the implant material plays a crucial role in preventing infections that cause premature failure. Recent studies have shown that microporous membranes can facilitate migration of epidermal cells, enabling the development of a seal that resists movement of fluid and microorganisms and therefore improving the implant life. 

A team of CNM users from the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University, working with the Nanofabrication & Devices Group, devised a simple but innovative approach that combines both of these aspects simply by coating silicon nitride microporous membranes with a conformal coating of ultrathin (about 150nm) UNCD films. The resulting membrane not only provides the required porous structure, but also offers exceptional mechanical and biocompatible properties. The team demonstrated that their method also works on nanoporous anodized aluminum oxide (AAO) membranes that are coated with UNCD to reduce the pore size down to 30 to 50nm.

 

Researchers from North Carolina State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA, have found a way to create much slimmer thin-film solar cells without sacrificing the cells' ability to absorb solar energy. Making the cells thinner should significantly decrease manufacturing costs for the technology.

 

Using light-harvesting nanoparticles to convert laser energy into "plasmonic nanobubbles," researchers at Rice University, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM, USA) are developing new methods to inject drugs and genetic payloads directly into cancer cells. In tests on drug-resistant cancer cells, the researchers found that delivering chemotherapy drugs with nanobubbles was up to 30 times more deadly to cancer cells than traditional drug treatment and required less than one-tenth the clinical dose.

As the field of nanomedicine matures, an emerging point of contention has been what shape nanoparticles should be to deliver their drug or DNA payloads most effectively. A pair of new papers by scientists at The Methodist Hospital Research Institute (TMHRI, US) and six other institutions suggests these microscopic workhorses ought to be disc-shaped, not spherical or rod-shaped, when targeting cancers at or near blood vessels.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (US) developed a highly efficient, small-scale solid oxide fuel cell system that features PNNL-developed microchannel technology and two unusual processes, called external steam reforming and fuel recycling.The smaller system uses methane, the primary component of natural gas, as its fuel. The entire system was streamlined to make it more efficient and scalable by using PNNL-developed microchannel technology in combination with processes called external steam reforming and fuel recycling.

The key to the efficiency of this small SOFC system is the use of a PNNL-developed microchannel technology in the system's multiple heat exchangers. Instead of having just one wall that separates the two gases, PNNL's microchannel heat exchangers have multiple walls created by a series of tiny looping channels that are narrower than a paper clip.

Scientists at the US Naval Research Laboratory, Electronics Science and Technology Division, dive into underwater photovoltaic research to develop high bandgap solar cells capable of producing sufficient power to operate electronic sensor systems at depths of 9 meters.

"The use of autonomous systems to provide situational awareness and long-term environment monitoring underwater is increasing," said Phillip Jenkins, head, NRL Imagers and Detectors Section. "Although water absorbs sunlight, the technical challenge is to develop a solar cell that can efficiently convert these underwater photons to electricity."

A relentless move toward smaller and more precisely defined semiconductors has prompted researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory to develop a new technique that can dramatically improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of preparing different classes of semiconducting materials.

The new discovery meets certain requirements of the international semiconductor "roadmap" all the way out to 2022-leapfrogging an anticipated ten years of progress with a single set of experiments.

Taking their inspiration from cellular membranes, researchers from the Institut Européen des Membranes (CNRS / ENSCM / Université Montpellier 2) in collaboration with the Institut de Chimie Radicalaire (CNRS / Aix-Marseille Université) have developed the first dynamic membrane for water filtrationwhich, depending on the water pressure, can adjust the size of its pores in an autonomous manner. In addition, it is capable of repairing itself if it breaks, thereby prolonging its lifetime and ensuring greater safety of the filtered product.

The dynamic membrane is made of a combination of three polymers with different solubilities that form micelles, nanoparticles in constant interaction with each other. Up to a certain pressure, when the force of water increases, these micelles have a tendency to flatten out and thus reduce the size of the pores within the membrane.

The world's smallest three-dimensional optical cavities with the potential to generate the world's most intense nanolaser beams have been created by a scientific team led by researchers with the Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. In addition to nanolasers, these unique optical cavities with their extraordinary electromagnetic properties should be applicable to a broad range of other technologies, including LEDs, optical sensing, nonlinear optics, quantum optics and photonic integrated circuits.

By alternating super-thin multiple layers of silver and germanium, the researchers fabricated an "indefinite metamaterial" from which they created their 3D optical cavities. In natural materials, light behaves the same no matter what direction it propagates.

At the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR, Germany), confirmation of a magnetic instability - the Tayler instability -was successfully achieved for the first time in collaboration with the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP). The findings should be able to facilitate construction of large liquid-metal batteries.

 

By systematically investigating a large number of single-and double-gated bilayer graphene (BLG) devices, US researcher observed a bimodal distribution of minimum conductivities at the charge neutrality point.

Researchers at School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University (US), propose in PNAS a Flexure-FET (flexure sensitive Field Effect Transistor) ultrasensitive biosensor that utilizes the nonlinear electromechanical coupling to overcome the fundamental sensitivity limits of classical electrical or mechanical nanoscale biosensors.

Researcher at Nanjing University (China), and Stanford University (US) report in PNAS a scalable and versatile synthesis of multifunctional polyaniline (PAni) hydrogel with excellent electronic conductivity and electrochemical properties.

Dmitry Turchinovich (DTU Fotonik, Denmark, and Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Germany), Jørn M. Hvam (DTU), and Matthias C. Hoffmann (SLAC Linear Accelerator Laboratory, USA) have recently reported on the direct observation of a nonlinear-optical effect, occurring in the regime of single-cycle pulse of light at terahertz (THz) frequencies. They used a doped semiconductor as an efficient nonlinear medium, where the THz-range optical nonlinearity arises from the response of free-electron plasma to THz electric fields. One of the discoveries in this work was the coexistence of both positive and negative refractive index nonlinearity within the broad spectrum of a single-cycle THz pulse.

Researchers at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain, thought about the possibility of combining graphene with quantum dots to see if they couldn't overcome graphene's shortcomings. Instead of absorbing just 3% of the light that hits it, the graphene/quantum dot hybrid material is capable of absorbing 25% of the light falling on it.

A new tracer, 300 times more sensitive than those currently available, has been developed by researchers at the CEA, CNRS and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon to detect and locate zinc using imaging methods.

The Organic Electronics Research Group at Linköping University (LiU) in Sweden, led by Professor Magnus Berggren, attracted great attention a year ago when Lars Herlogsson showed in his doctoral thesis that it was possible to construct fully functional field-effect transistors out of plastic. Kergoat, a post-doc in the same research group, now shows that transistors made of plastic can be controlled with great precision.

A RIKEN-led research team in Japan has now demonstrated the origin of magnetism in organic molecules.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, USA, have developed a technique that enables metallic nanocrystals to self-assemble into larger, complex materials for next-generation antennas and lenses. The metal nanocrystals are cube-shaped and, like bricks or Tetris blocks, spontaneously organize themselves into larger-scale structures with precise orientations relative to one another.

University of Utah (US) physicists developed an inexpensive, highly accurate magnetic field sensor for scientific and possibly consumer uses based on a "spintronic" organic thin-film semiconductor that basically is "plastic paint."

In Physical Review Letters, Kwanpyo Kim and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, have cataloged the experimental Raman spectra of a series of graphene double layers where the top layer is rotated with respect to the bottom layer in one degree increments, up to a 30 degree mismatch.

Scientists and engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) have discovered an entirely new carbon-based material that is synthesized from graphene. The discovery, which the researchers are calling "Graphene Monoxide (GMO)," pushes carbon materials closer to ushering in next-generation electronics.

Researchers have found a condition that creates hydrogen faster without a loss in efficiency.

Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women's Hospital have designed a cell-sorting microchip that takes advantage of this natural cell-rolling mechanism. The device takes in mixtures of cells, which flow through tiny channels coated with sticky molecules. Cells with specific receptors bind weakly to these molecules, rolling away from the rest of the flow, and out into a separate receptacle.

Researcher at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (Korea), and Columbia University (US) report on a three-terminal active device, a graphene variable-barrier "barristor" (GB), where the key is an atomically sharp interface between graphene and hydrogenated silicon.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University (US) published their research on bioinspired nanofibers support chondrogenesis for articular cartilage repair in an article in PNAS.

Researchers at the NanoScience Center of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and at Harvard University, US, have discovered a novel way to make nanomaterials.

A new online, searchable database for materials used in nanotechnology is now available.

Dr. Lasse Makkonen, Principal Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, presented an explanation for the origin of sliding friction between solid objects. According to his theory, the amount of friction depends on the surface energy of the materials in question.

Researchers in Ireland have developed a new technology using materials called Bulk Metallic Glasses (BMG) to produce high-precision molds for making tiny plastic components.

The Institute for Print and Media Technology at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, presents printed loudspeakers on paper substrate.

Researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Lille developed a low cost method for manufacturing multilayered graphene sheets. The new method does not require any specialized equipment and can be implemented in any laboratory.

Researcher at University of Michigan (US) and Instituto de Ciencia y Tecnologia de Polimeros (Spain) present in Advanced Materials versatile all-nanocomposite capped microcontainers.

Researchers at Ruhr-University Bochum (Germany), Stanford University (US), and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) demonstrate the novel concept of a "desalination battery", which operates by performing cycles in reverse on their previously reported mixing entropy battery. The desalination battery is comprised by a Na2-xMn5O10 nanorod positive electrode and Ag/AgCl negative electrode.

Researchers at Rice's Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology (US) have come up with a set of facts and figures about carbon nanotubes that appear to collapse during the growth process; they found that these unique configurations have properties of both nanotubes and graphene nanoribbons. The researchers at Rice University found that nanotubes of a large diameter can spontaneously collapse into closed-edge graphene nanoribbons when atoms on the inside wall get close enough to attract each other.

Yoshiyuki Miyamoto, Dynamic Process Simulation Group, the Nanosystem Research Institute of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), has performed the first-principles simulations to show that an ultra-short laser pulse can induce electron excitation which activates synchronized rotational motion of two acetylene molecules encapsulated in a semiconducting carbon nanotube using the Earth Simulator of Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

A new class of unconventional superconductors: Researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and at the universities of Kent, Bristol and Huddersfield, in UK, have discovered a new class of very exotic unconventional superconductors, namely LaNiGa2.

 

 

 

 

 

 

PDF: http://www.nano-times.com/files/nanotimes_10_04.pdf

Best Regards  

 

IVCON-Team  

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