Yarn woven from carbon nanotubes provides a thousand times more rotation than is obtained from other artificial muscles, and could be made into motors to provide propulsion for micrometer-sized medical nanorobots.

Varying the length of the DNA used to connect the nanoparticles provides for a wide variety of nanoparticle sizes and crystal symmetries.

This contribution has been forwarded by Ivo Rivetta. Researchers at UC Berkeley have taken a bioinspired approach to control the nanostructure of deposited thin films. In living organisms, the orientation of collagen in tissue determines its properties: For instance, a number of blue-skinned animals, including the mandrill monkey, derive their coloring not from pigment, but [...]

Tiles made from DNA helices have been made to self-assemble into a more complex structure, which then was used to seed the formation of a complementary structure. This second structure in turn seeded the formation of multiple copies of the first structure.

The Singularity University Executive Program recently took on the challenges of advanced nanotech: Nanotechnology: How should we evaluate the environmental impact of human-made machines that are too small to see? What limits should be placed on self-replicating nanodevices? What defenses should we institute against malevolent uses of such technology? These questions were asked by Marc [...]

A complex piece of DNA that acts as a biological computer when it is inserted into cells determines whether or not the cell is a specific type of cancer cell, and if so, initiates the suicide of that cell.

Nanotechnology has been applied to produce various types of nanoparticles that can deliver toxic agents specifically to the cancer cells. Many of these approaches have shown promise in animal studies. One approach using magnetic nanoparticles has now gone into trials in patients. From “Nano-therapy that cooks deadly brain tumors advances in Germany,” by Ryan McBride: [...]

In light of our continuing interest in the ways in which nanotechnology will interact with robotics and other emerging technologies, here is an update from IEEE Spectrum on the Boston Dynamics robot project. The earlier version called BigDog was cited here a few years ago, and was impressive enough. The update is a substantially improved [...]

Christopher William Ince Jr. writes about a new insight into how nanotubes grow, which may lead to even more useful technological applications for these nanostructures: Physicists Zhifeng Ren and Hengzhi Wang of Boston College have discovered two initial stages of carbon nanotube growth previously obscured during the growth process. What the researches found is that [...]