Imagine this….credit cards have tiny super-secret chips inside them, just like the cool spy gadgets in movies. National mints print special marks on money to keep it safe, kind of like invisible ink. And places with super important stuff, like top-secret labs, use scanners that look at your eyes to make sure you’re supposed to be there. Brochosomes are 3D printed structures that can carry information Now, there are some sneaky people out there who try to steal this stuff. But don’t worry! Sheng Shen and his colleagues at Penn State University have come up with a super clever idea. They’re ma ..read more

The title is a Bob Dylan song.  But in this case we are talking about renewal energy and generating electricity by harnessing the wind.  Nanotechnology c Wind turbine an be used to create new materials with amazing functions.  Wind turbines are a fairly common sight these days, enormously wind mills with blades that turn slowly in the wind.  These blades need to be light and strong.  Light because the lighter the blade the less wind power it takes to move it.  Strong because it needs to work a long time and a wind turbine might face strong winds.  &nbs ..read more

It is Summer and time to be outside.  But there are those pesky mosquitoes that are attracted to us and bite sometimes also passing along viral diseases.  Nanotechnology to the rescue.  A team of researchers have invented a new self-powered generator that can zap mosquitoes.  These nanometer-sized “tribioelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) can produce t heir own energy and use that energy to zap mosquitoes sort of like those bug zappers that are so entertaining (until you get a giant moth and the whole thing almost catches on fire).  The scientists used a combination of n ..read more

Problems with your gastrointestinal tract are no laughing matter.  Some are serious and can cause a life-long struggle that impacts the foods we can eat.  And so no fun.  Taking medications is not new but new approaches to solving the problems with your gastrointestinal tract are on the way.  Nanotechnology offers the promise of better ways of diagnosing and treating gastrointestinal diseases.  Part of the problem is getting past the stomach (and being able to simply swallow something.  Researchers at the University of Maryland have created a digestible capsule th ..read more

Most food is perishable, and food that spoils before it is consumed is a waste.  Plus foods can sometimes contain dangerous microbes that can make us sick.  Enter nanotechnology.  There are a lot of compounds that can inhibit the growth of microorganisms in foods, but keeping them active is a challenge.  Scientists from China have been using nanotechnology to make little capsules that can carry compounds like nisin (a natural antibiotic) and rosemary oil.  Particles are about 200 nanometers in size and could reduce microbial numbers by 100 times or more without a yucky ..read more

We don’t often think about the toilet as a source of information, but scientists at Cambridge University are developing an ‘intelligent loo’ that is able to analyze your urine.  The toilet is engineered to contain optical sensors that detect different chemicals in your urine.  The data is then uploaded to your phone (but hopefully not your Facebook page) indicating potential problems or perhaps instructions to adjust the dosage of a medication.  The field of personalized medicine continues to explode and an one-size fits all approach to medicine is being replaced by treatments t ..read more

Nanotechnology offers new ways of diagnosing diseases.  Most tests require taking a sample, like blood, or urine and then sending them to a laboratory.  Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ha ve developed a sensor that you can swallow.  Inside of the sensor are bacteria which have been engineered to glow if they are exposed to a certain chemical.  The glowing bacteria then send out a radio signal which is detected using a smart phone.  The pill was engineered to detect blood in the gastrointestinal tract, a sign of ulcers.  The pill is part bi ..read more

Researchers at Georgia Tech have made the ‘World’s Smallest Ad’ created for Arby’s, the fast food restaurants.  The ad was printed on the side of a sesame seed, like the one you might find….wait for it….on a roast beef sandwich bun.  The size of the ad was about 800 square microns (less than the width of a hair in either dimension) which is pretty small but still almost a billion square nanometers.  If you were at the Arby’s in NYC apparently you got to ‘see’ one of these seeds using a scanning electron microscope.  What happened to this seed isn’t obvious, hopefully it did ..read more

Some medicines are more effective when they are delivered at the site where they are needed and when they are needed.  Think about taking an aspirin but it works only when you have a headache.  Scientists from  have developed a biodegradable material with nanometer-scale gold particles that help release medicines embedded in the material.  When you shine an infrared light on the material, the gold particles heat up the biodegradable material and release the medicine.  Near infrared-wavelength light is used because it can penetrate a lot deeper into the body than regula ..read more

Nanotechnology has contributed to the advances in our ability to see different things at the nanoscale.  Microscopy has advanced from the very early days of microscopes being a single glass lens to very advanced instruments with nanometer resolution.  We can see lots of stuff with high resolution and even in 3D.  And sometimes the picture is just neat.  Scientists at St. Judes Hospital used a confocal microscope to study the progression of a soft tissue cancer to understand the origins of these cancer cells.  It was once believed these cancer cells came from muscl ..read more