all nanotechnology stories

NHGRI/NIH awards team $6.5M to advance DNA sequencing using Nanopores

404132862 — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:27:03 -0400

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health
(NIH), awarded a $6.5 (over 4 years) grant to a team of Harvard University researchers to further develop electronic sequencing in nanopores. The grant is part of more than $20 million in total funding
given by NHGRI/NIH to spur innovative sequencing technologies inexpensive and efficient enough to sequence a person's DNA as a routine part of biomedical research and health care.

Researchers develop new technique for fabricating nanowire circuits

404132862 — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:11:39 -0400

Scientists at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), collaborating collaborating with researchers from the German universities of Jena, Gottingen, and Bremen, have developed a new technique for fabricating nanowire photonic and electronic integrated circuits that may one day be suitable for high-volume commercial production.

Pioneer in spintronics celebrates birthday

404132862 — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:09:26 -0500

What might be Harvard’s oddest birthday party unfolded last over Feb. 29 and March 1. In a lecture hall at Maxwell Dworkin, 50 physicists gathered to share the latest research in spintronics, an emerging branch of their science concerned with the quantum spin states of electrons, and to honor one-time Soviet scientist Emmanuel I. Rashba who turned 80 last October.

Compact, wavelength-on-demand Quantum Cascade Laser chip created

404132862 — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:10:50 -0500

Engineers at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have demonstrated a highly versatile, compact and portable Quantum Cascade Laser sensor for the fast detection of a large number of chemicals, ranging from infinitesimal traces of gases to liquids, by broad tuning of the emission wavelength. The potential range of applications is huge, including homeland security, medical diagnostics such as breadth analysis, pollution monitoring, and environmental sensing of the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

Microchip-based device can detect rare tumor cells in bloodstream

404132862 — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:37:41 -0500

A team of investigators from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) BioMicroElectroMechanical Systems (BioMEMS) Resource Center and the MGH Cancer Center has developed a microchip-based device that can isolate, enumerate and analyze circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from a blood sample.

Nanowire makes own electricity

jake — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 13:41:55 -0400

Harvard chemists have built a new wire out of photosensitive materials that is hundreds of times smaller than a human hair. The wire not only carries electricity to be used in vanishingly small circuits, but generates power as well.

Charles M. Lieber, the Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry, and colleagues created the nanowire out of three different kinds of silicon with different electrical properties. The silicon is wrapped in layers to create the wire. When light falls on the outer material, a process begins due to the interaction of the core with the shell layers, leading to the creation of electrical charges.

The work was described in the Oct. 18 issue of the journal Nature.

Nanowire generates its own electricity

404132862 — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:04:24 -0400

The work was described in the Oct. 18 issue of the journal Nature.

Collaboration yields first citywide network of wireless sensors

50443248 — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:13:39 -0400

Harvard University, BBN Technologies, and the city of Cambridge have begun a four-year project to install 100 wireless sensors atop streetlights in Cambridge, Mass., creating the world’s first citywide network of wireless sensors.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the project is open-source, meaning it could eventually be accessible to researchers worldwide for everything from gathering meteorological data to monitoring traffic conditions and noise pollution.

Called CitySense, the wireless sensor network developed by computer scientists at Harvard and BBN Technologies, a technology solutions firm in Cambridge, will focus initially on monitoring air pollution and weather conditions, collecting data on a scale never before attempted.

Nanowire arrays can detect signals along individual neurons

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:58:22 -0400

Opening a whole new interface between nanotechnology and neuroscience, scientists at Harvard University have used slender silicon nanowires to detect, stimulate, and inhibit nerve signals along the axons and dendrites of live mammalian neurons.

Harvard chemist Charles M. Lieber and colleagues report on this marriage of nanowires and neurons this week in the journal Science.

Making the world's smallest gadgets even smaller

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:23:33 -0400

You may not have noticed, but the smallest revolution in world history is under way. Laboratories and factories have begun to make medical sensors and computer-chip components smaller than a single blood cell or the periods on this page.

Charles Lieber, Hyman Professor of Chemistry, has been making such diminishingly small things for years. He and his colleagues at Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences have fabricated detectors for viruses and prostate cancer that measure about 10 nanometers (50 atoms) in size.

The race to the bottom of matter involves not only constructing smaller, more efficient devices but also finding better ways to make the tools needed to produce these things. In the Nov. 25, 2005 issue of the journal Science, Lieber, along with graduate students Chen Yang and Zhaohui Zhong, announced a unique way to fabricate nanodevices.

Instead of using conventional methods to make wires that connect together nanotransistors and other circuit components, this team built the components right into the wires. Rather than constructing a device that is later programmed to contain information and to perform a function, they built the information and function right into the wires.

Here's the way Lieber puts it: "We have demonstrated the controlled synthesis of nanostructures at levels of complexity significantly beyond any work yet reported. What we have done is the most challenging synthetic problem in these structures, and one with huge potential payoffs from both the standpoint of fundamental scientific impact and producing novel devices and applications."

Implantable chips bear promise, but privacy standards needed

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 07:10:43 -0400

Writing in the July 28, 2005 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, John Halamka, M.D., chief information officer at BIDMC and Harvard Medical School and an emergency room physician, says the chip implanted in his arm would allow anyone with a handheld reader to scan his arm and obtain his 16-digit medical identifier. Any authorized health care worker can visit a secure Web site hosted by the chip manufacturer and retrieve information about his identity and that of his primary care physician, who could provide medical history details.

Halamka noted, however, that current technology and lack of specific privacy policy could enable spammers to track him in a manner similar to computer "spyware" that infests computers after visits to certain Internet sites. Also, each chip costs $200, and a reader $650, raising the question of whether it is a practical investment for caregivers.

Halamka says, "It is clear there are philosophical consequences to having a lifelong implanted identifier. Friends and associates have commented that I am now 'marked' and lost my anonymity."

Although the system clearly needs to be perfected before being put into use, Halamka says, there may be positive uses for the technology in the future.

Radcliffe conference looks at biological systems

50443248 — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 13:00:41 -0400

With the rapid advance of technology opening new frontiers of knowledge, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study looked at the increasingly detailed understanding of biological systems last week (May 6) as well as the potential of that knowledge for future applications.
The Radcliffe Institute's "Designing Biology" conference drew about 300 to a daylong program of talks, panel discussions, and poster sessions about the cutting edge of biology and how our increasingly detailed understanding of biological systems can be used to influence how they operate.

Student makes cableless cable

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:18:02 -0400

Matthew DePetro '05 earned top honors for his senior design project, "Wireless Cable Television." The first-prize entry "untethers" standard cable TV and even eliminates the need for a wall outlet.

"All of the rooms that I have lived in at Harvard have such crummy standard TV reception that something as simple as watching the 11 o'clock news is an unfulfilling experience," says DePetro. "Unfortunately, cable television service suffers from the inherent shackles of a cable for signal distribution. In a typical dorm residence that means television sets must be located near a cable outlet in the wall."

Moreover, setting up cable for multiple sets in separate rooms requires adding extra wiring infrastructure within a building itself - no easy feat in older structures.

Scientists create high-speed nanowire circuits

50443248 — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:15:22 -0400

Chemists and engineers at Harvard University have made robust circuits from minuscule nanowires that align themselves on a chip of glass during low-temperature fabrication, creating rudimentary electronic devices that offer solid performance without high-temperature production or high-priced silicon.
The researchers, led by chemist Charles M. Lieber and engineer Donhee Ham, produced circuits at low temperature by running a nanowire-laced solution over a glass substrate, followed by regular photolithography to etch the pattern of a circuit. Their merging of low-temperature fabrication and nanowires in a high-performance electronic device is described this week in the journal Nature.

A giant step toward miniaturization

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:35:38 -0400

Incredibly tiny integrated circuits could have applications well beyond faster, smaller computers and cell phones with features only fantasized about today. For example, nanocircuits might make possible sensors that can detect a single virus in your blood. "It could turn manufacturing of high-end technology upside down," says Charles Lieber, Mark Hyman Jr. Professor of Chemistry. "It could affect all electronic circuits in the world. And that's really cool." This is the first time that bridging two different types of materials has been done at the nanometer level. The implications for more efficient electronics and sensing devices are obvious. Lieber is already working with Intel Corp., the world's largest producer of electronic chips.