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Nanotechnology researchers find reliable, mess-free way to grow graphene. from nanowerk “You can imagine trying to peel a piece of shrink wrap off a dish to put it on a new dish — it’s going to be messy,” said lead researcher Jiwoong Park, Cornell assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology. Inspired by previous work in which [...] Potential leap forward in electron microscopy. from Eurekalert. An interesting question was posed to my “Do the math” post of last week: What does this have to do with nanotechnology? A little history helps, as usual. Eniac plugboard: Hardware or software? Some interesting developments in memories: This Nanowerk story reports results out of Alex Zettl’s group at Berkeley on a memory cell that consists of an iron nanoparticle which can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. More information on this can be found at Zettl’s site here. If you connect a 12-volt battery to a 4-ohm lamp, 3 amps of current will flow through the circuit by Ohm’s Law, V=IR. Power = VI = 36 watts will be dissipated by the lamp. If you add a 2-ohm resistor in series with the lamp, the resistances add to 6 ohms, the current [...] In Arthur C. Clarke’s classic SF novel Against the Fall of Night, there is a description of the “moving ways”, the powered sidewalks on which people rode around the city, as being made of a material that would have baffled an engineer of our own times because it was solid in one direction and liquid [...] A major advance in molecular machine fabrication allows the construction of rotaxane molecular shuttles in which organic and inorganic components are mechanically linked in the same molecular structure. Canadian scientists have discovered how chemical structure can elicit a quantum state that permits the ultrafast movement of energy along an organic polymer. The synthesis and characterization of molecules called cycloparaphenylenes could provide nanotech with an efficient way of producing armchair carbon nanotubes of pre-determined diameter. Christian Joachim (who shared the Foresight Nanotech Institute Feynman Prize in the Experimental category in 1997 and won in the Theoretical category in 2005) is heading a group of researchers working to bring about atomic-scale computing. ScienceDaily led us to this European Commission ICT Results feature “Computing in a molecule“, which describes their on-going efforts: Over [...] A recent paper from Feynman Prize winner James Tour’s group at Rice Rice press release The recent demonstration of the ability to “fully engineer the electronic band gap of graphene” is a major advance in the top-down approach to nanotech applications that take advantage of the many marvelous properties of graphene. Two stories today in ScienceDaily point to different nanotech applications that could enable a solar solution to our energy problems. Nanotech has taken a major step along the road to molecular electronics with the demonstration that one molecule of benzene can form a highly conductive junction between two platinum electrodes. Researchers have demonstrated atomically precise cuts through a few graphene layers. A new concept for a very cheap plastic nanotech memory has been developed by combining the favorable properties of ferroelectrics and semiconductors. Very precise measurements confirmed many of the unusual effects theoretically predicted for graphene, but they also revealed effects of unanticipated additional interactions, which are not yet understood. Nanotechnology has provided a fourth fundamental two-terminal passive element for electronic circuits. Graphene has now been shown to retain essential properties when used to make transistors at the one-nanometer-scale. Nanotechnology using a molecular-scale switch could enable storing half a petabyte on one square inch. |
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