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Dengue Fever Dengue infection is usually associated with tropical countries and causes high fever, headache, rash, severe joint and muscle pain, haemorrhage, and death. Dengue infection is caused by any one of four related viruses that are transmitted to humans by the mosquitoes. There is no vaccine against dengue; nor have any specific antiviral medications shown to be effective to treat it. An effective vaccine would need to induce the immune system to produce antibodies against all four dengue virus serotypes, a task that so far has proven too difficult to accomplish and development and testing of antiviral medications is complicated and expensive. For dengue prevention and treatment the only existing ways are to control the mosquito populations responsible for transmitting the disease and to avoid being bitten by infected mosquitoes. Researchers of James Cook University use nanotechnology to monitor a small protein that binds to antibodies, enabling it to be used to identify the po

Diabetes is a chronic disease that affects global population. Diabetes mellitus is a commonly seen chronic disease, which seriously threatens the health of human beings. Diabetic patients control their blood-sugar levels via insulin introduced directly into the bloodstream using injections. However effective monitoring and treatment options are important. Nanotechnology offers some new solutions in treating diabetes mellitus. Nanotechnology, particularly nanoparticles show great promise in improving the treatment and management of diabetes. Insulin and blood sugar A new method uses nanotechnology to rapidly measure minute amounts of insulin and blood sugar level to assess the health of the body’s insulin-producing cells. As oral insulin consumption is useless a new system has been developed based on inhaling the insulin (instead of injecting it) and on a controlled release of insulin into the bloodstream (instead of manually controlling the amount of insulin injected). Further nanopart

Nanotechnology application will help in a more precise diagnosis of diseases and improve the efficacy of medical therapies for the benefit of society. Nanomedicine Nanomedicine is simply the application of nanotechnology in medical field to achieve breakthroughs in healthcare by suitably exploiting the novel physical, chemical and biological properties of materials at the nanometer scale. Early identification of diseases by improved medical imaging technologies using nanotechnology enables precise and effective intervention which results in lower costs for the healthcare system. Nano-enabled implants and regeneration of lost tissues and organs with regenerative medicines and vaccines are also potential possibilities. Diseases such as diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s which pose a tremendous challenge to modern medicine are being addressed. Nanotechnology can target drugs precisely to diseased organs and cells, reduce the side effects and improve the efficacy of the d

Nanotechnology to Fight Ebola Virus With the Ebola virus death toll now topping 1000 and even more, researchers at Northeastern University in Boston are attempting to use nanotechnology to cure the disease. They have focused attention on nanoparticles such as gold nanoparticles that could be attached chemically to the viruses and stop them from spreading in combination with near-infrared light to destroy the Ebola virus. Read more at: http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/biomedical/devices/nanotechnology-to-fight-ebola-virus Nanotechnology device aims to prevent malaria deaths through rapid diagnosis A pioneering mobile device using cutting-edge nanotechnology to rapidly detect malaria infection and drug resistance could revolutionise how the disease is diagnosed and treated. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-nanotechnology-device-aims-malaria-deaths.html#jCp How nanotechnology is shaping stem cell research Nanoscientists have developed a technique that allows them to transform

Bed bug Many cities across the world are experiencing a huge surge in the bed bugs; and pest control company Terminix reports a list of the 15 worst hit cities in US according to CBS news. Pest control leader ORKIN reports that Chicago tops the 2013 Bed Bug Cities List with the result the City Council passed an ordinance in July 2013 urging to have a formal management plan in place for the detection, inspection and treatment of these pests. Bed bugs are increasing in Europe, USA, Canada and Australia. The infestations have been occurring in a wide range of facilities in the developed world in recent years including: hotels (from backpacker to five star), overnight trains, private homes, cruise ships, schools, hospitals and homeless shelters. Bed bugs have been shown to be able to travel over 100 feet in a night but tend to live within eight feet of where people sleep. A bed bug bite affects each person differently. Bite responses can range from an absence of any physical signs of the b

Rechargeable batteries Consumer electronic devices such as laptop computers and cell phones, portable systems, health monitoring, infrastructure, environmental monitoring, defense technologies and many other micro and nano systems require small power in the range of micro to milli Watts. For operating these portable electronics devices the current technology mainly relies on rechargeable batteries. But the traditional batteries have their inherent drawbacks and may not meet or be the only choice as power sources and hence the reason for new ultra light weight, high power battery developments. Nanogenerator A new idea is to have self powered nanotechnology, aiming at powering these devices using the energy harvested from the environment in which the systems are supposed to operate. The answer is nanogenerator. Nanogenerator is a technology that converts mechanical or thermal energy produced on small-scale into electricity. Nanogenerator can be broadly three types: piezoelectric, triboel

Electronic circuits use silicon for the components but has a limitation in its further reduction of size. Also silicon supply is expected to reduce in few years. Hence researchers are working on replacing silicon in electronic circuits by carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes Carbon nanotubes are sheets of graphite rolled up to few nanometres in diameter. Because of their high-performance they are three times faster and consume only one-third the power than silicon devices. Single-walled carbon nanotubes can replace silicon in making thin-film transistors and high-performance logic devices due to their exceptional electronic and mechanical properties. Dense aligned arrays of carbon nanotubes can be made through techniques like chemical vapour deposition on crystalline substrates, however, they cannot compete with silicon-based devices for high-performance applications because of old fabrication techniques adopted. A recent report indicates that a team at IBM TJ Watson Research Centre in N

Nanorods nanorods are one morphology of nanoscale objects with dimensions ranging from 1–100 nm. produced by direct chemical synthesis from metals or semiconducting materials. A combination of ligands acts as shape control agents bonding to different facets of the nanorod growing at different rates to produce elongated objects with desired strengths. The nanorods find application in MEMS, in energy harvesting and light emitting devices, as tunable photoluminescence and particularly in display technologies due to property that the reflectivity of the rods can be changed by changing their orientation with an applied electric field. To make a new generation of optical devices such as light filters, sensors and other applications it is desirable to have a property by which it can be easily tuned with the interaction of light. Web-like structure Researchers at the Laboratory for Photonics and Nanostructures in Marcoussis, France have shown that a web-like structure made up of an array of ev

Targeted nanoparticles are used for treating cancer by controlling from outside of the body using near-infrared (NIR) light as stimulus.  NIR is used because it is minimally absorbed by skin and tissue, has the ability to penetrate deep tissue in a non-invasive way and the energy from NIR light can be converted to heat by gold nanomaterials for effective thermal ablation of diseased tissue. Development Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) researchers have used self assembled, multi-functional, NIR responsive gold nanorod to deliver a chemotherapy drug targeted to cancer cells for selective release of the drug. This is made possible in response to an external beam of light to create heat for synergistic thermo-chemo mediated anti-tumor efficacy. Researchers claim that the design of this gold nanorod and its self-assembly was inspired by nature and the ability of complimentary strands of DNA to hybridize on their own without imposing complicated chemical processes on t

Nanoparticles can be found in the environment due to natural processes and also from man-made sources. Metal nanoparticles occur in the environment due to the discharge of engineered nanoparticles and the natural transformation of metal ions into metal nanoparticles. The transformation mechanism, fates, behaviors, and effects of these nanoparticles in the environment are not clearly known. Finding Researchers at Chinese Academy of Sciences have found that sunlight induces reduction of Ionic Ag and Au to metallic nanoparticles and it is due to dissolved organic matter present in the aqueous environment. In rivers and other bodies of water, sunlight can help dissolved organic matter reduce silver and gold ions to form nanoparticles of the metals, according to researchers. Mechanism The dissolved organic matter (DOM) in environmental waters can mediate the reduction of ionic Ag and Au to their metallic nanoparticles under natural sunlight with the reduction mediated by super oxide from ph

The advances in nanotechnology continue to grow, with new findings every day. To cite one example, researchers are manipulating carbon nanotubes so that the way the tubes behave under stress can help solve problems that arise in the future of a building, a bridge, even an airplane. Nanomaterials have a lot of use in the construction industry.  Researchers at the University of Strathclyde, in Scotland have developed a paint containing carbon nanotubes that can spot microscopic faults in structures relying on the ability of the paint to carry an electrical current to record the development of minuscule faults which is difficult for visual inspection. Scientists at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have come up with a strain paint looking like clear varnish for spotting cracks using fluorescence manifested at the infrared end of the spectrum when deformed by tension or compression of nanotubes, which otherwise can not be spotted during a visual inspection. The fluorescence paint can be r

There has been a great progress in the field of packaging nanotechnology which impacts every field of science as well as in our daily life. The nanoscale materials play a very important role in the packaging of electronic and photonic devices to packaging of health products to food. Nanotechnology in packaging Nanotechnology is taking food and beverage packaging technologies to new heights. Applications in nano-enabled packaging include development of improved tastes, color, flavor, texture and consistency of foodstuffs, increased absorption and bio-availability of nutrients and health supplements, new food packaging materials with improved mechanical, barrier and antimicrobial properties, and nano-sensors for traceability and monitoring the condition of food during transport and storage. Among active technologies in the current market, oxygen scavenger, moisture absorbers and barrier packaging represent more than 80% of marketed technologies. Foe example, a “nano-film” that when appli

All creatures on earth survive by monitoring and transforming their environments with the help of small proteins made of thousands of atoms. But diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are caused by errors in proteins assembly. Hence it becomes important to understanding how a protein goes from being one thing to becoming another to form a unique assembled structure. In this context scientists of University of Montreal have visualized how a protein goes from a linear chain to a unique assembled structure. Protein self-assembly Proteins are made of long linear chains of amino acids which self-assemble extremely rapidly into a working nanomachine. Lipid bilayers which are the basic structural elements of biological membranes help self-assembly and provide environment for proteins to operate. Both DNA and protein molecules possess a number of intrinsic properties such as the site-specific molecular recognition among interacting protein molecules and template-directed self ass

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US have created a set of gold nanorods with electrostatically trapped rhodamine 6G molecules on their surfaces. These molecules were used as model “drugs”. Successive layers of charged polymers – negatively charged poly (acrylic acid, sodium salt) and positively charged poly (allylamine hydrochloride)  were wrapped around the nanorods so that polymers alter the surface charge of the rods and help trap the rhodamine 6G molecules. It was found that the number of molecules  released from the rods can be related to the number of polymer layers wrapped around the rods and that the number of molecules released could be tuned 100-fold. This makes them promising as drug-delivery vehicles because of small size and easy functionalization of these structures. Gold nanorods can easily be made to absorb near-infrared laser irradiation of the electromagnetic spectrum to trigger drug release. The heat generated due to absorption of

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have made high-performance integrated circuits on flexible substrates from thin-film transistors containing semiconductor-enriched carbon nanotubes. Flexible electronics Flexible electronics has made considerable progress in the last few years using various types of semiconductor materials such as organic semiconductors, silicon with a buckling structure, carbon nanotubes, inorganic nanowires and metal oxides. Carbon nanotubes The materials for the flexible circuits should be easy and cheap to process at room temperature and have high charge-carrier mobility. Thin films of carbon nanotubes are found to be ideal in this respect as researchers have already made sophisticated integrated flexible circuits, including flip-flops and decoders, using carbon nanotubes directly grown by chemical vapor deposition. Nanotube thin films Researchers used purified semi conducting-only carbon nanotube ink for fabricating integrated circuits on mec

Copper bottom cookware Copper bottom cookware is the best option available nowadays for those who are looking for a quality cookware. Copper Cookware has tin, aluminum, or stainless steel cookware with a copper core having a layer of metal in between other layers of non-copper or with a copper exterior. Copper bottom cook wares are used because copper disperses heat fast and help cook food fast and keep the surface heat even. This is because the heat conductivity of copper metal is double that of aluminum metal and is ten times more than the stainless steel. Many cookware products produced nowadays do not serve the purpose perfectly as these types of cookware are not ideal in the material they are made up of and because of pool boiling. Boiling In boiling, bubbles carry away large amounts of heat from solid surfaces, but the bubbles also act as an insulator, preventing the liquid from rewetting the surface and thereby interrupting heat transfer. Pool boiling is the most common and fam

Researchers at the universities of Massachusetts and Pittsburgh in the US have developed a new technique to repair surfaces using oil-based microcapsules filled with a nanoparticle solution. Nano capsules Using a polymer surfactant that stabilizes oil droplets in water, the researchers encapsulated cadmium selenide nanoparticles in nano size thin wall capsules in such a way that the particles could be released when desired. The capsules roll or glide over damaged substrates and selectively deposit their nanoparticle contents into the damaged or cracked regions due to hydrophobic–hydrophobic interactions between a nanoparticle and the cracked surface. The nanoparticles can easily be tracked too because cadmium selenide is fluorescent. Working If nanoparticles were held in a certain type of microcapsule, they could probe a surface and release the nanoparticles into certain specific regions of damaged surfaces, where the defective regions possess characteristics that are very different to

Nanotechnology plays an important role in biomedical and medical industry applications. Some of the applications are: tissue engineering, detection of protein, drug and gene delivery, probing of DNA structure, separation and purification of biological molecules and cells, etc. Nano particles are compatible in size to the protein dimensions making it appropriate for bio tagging or labeling. In addition, the biological tags, where the interaction with biological target happens by biological coating or layer of biopolymers and antibodies attached to nanoparticles. Nanomaterial is able to fluoresce or change optical properties. These behaviors result in biocompatible property for nanomaterials. Nano biomaterials are widely used in medicine and biological applications. Some recent developments for medicine applications are; tissue engineering, detection of protein and cancer therapy, medical imaging using quantum dots or chromophores synthesis for cancer diagnosis and drug delivery sy

See the super power of nanotechnology in this video.

See a video on NeverWet, a silicon-based spray-on coating that repels water and heavy oils.