The House Science and Technology Committee introduced a bill Jan. 15 about the need to strengthen federal efforts to better comprehend the potential environmental, health and safety effects of nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology receives $1.5 billion annually in federal research funding, said representatives of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, an initiative launched by the Woodrow Wilson International Center and the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2005.
The new bill, H.R. 554, is nearly identical to legislation that passed the House last year. The Senate was expected to come up with similar legislation, but lawmakers ran out of time.
The introduction of the bill comes a few months after former Environmental Protection Agency official J. Clarence "Terry" Davies wrote a report that made a series of recommendations for improving federal risk research and oversight of engineered nanomaterials at EPA, the Food and Drug Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The report, titled "Nanotechnology Oversight: An Agenda for the Next Administration," makes proposals for how Congress, federal agencies and the White House can improve oversight of engineered nanomaterials. The report was sponsored by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies.
"We know that when materials are developed at the nanoscale that they pose potential risks that do not appear at the macroscale," said David Rejeski, PEN's director. "This new bill shows that lawmakers recognize both nanotechnology's enormous promise and possible problems. The legislation reflects mounting Congressional interest in understanding potential risks in order to protect the public and to encourage safe commercial development and investment."
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Engineer designs self-powered nanoscale devices that never need new batteries
February 7, 2013 by Adam Piore
http://phys.org/news/2013-02-self-powered-nanoscale-devices-batteri...
An image of a nanoscale chip engineered by Peter Kinget's lab. He is attempting to build self-powered sensors that run on tiny bits of ambient solar energy, using so little power that their batteries never need replacing.
(Phys.org)—It's relatively simple to build a device capable of detecting wireless signals if you don't mind making one that consumes lots of power. It's not so easy to design energy-efficient devices that function as well as the components they replace, or to do it at the nano scale.
That's what Peter Kinget, a professor of electrical engineering, works on. He and his colleagues at the Engineering School are attempting to build self-powered systems using nanoscale devices that can transmit and receive wireless signals using so little power that their batteries never need replacing. Rather, they rely on tiny bits of ambient solar energy to recharge themselves. Such energy efficiencies could dramatically cut down on the cost to operate a variety of these devices at once, while eliminating the need for maintenance. These sensors would only need to be installed once, and could remain in place functioning autonomously—practically until they wear out or disintegrate on their own. Kinget's work is made possible by recent advances in nanotechnology—in general, he explains, the smaller the components of the tiny devices, the less energy is required to allow them to operate. "We are using and exploiting the fact that power consumption—and the energy you need to do things—becomes very, very low as you pack more and more functionality into smaller and smaller spaces," he says. "The bad news," he adds, "is that as the transistors become smaller, there are also clear disadvantages—nanoscale transistors are not as reliable, they cannot sustain large signal levels. The only way to deal with them is to come up with new design concepts." Kinget's chips—some of them 100 times more energy efficient than most standard technologies—could be deployed for many different uses in future. Embedded in clothing, they could transmit the location of victims during disasters. They could be affixed to the walls of apartments across New York City and monitor heating or energy consumption patterns, which could then be analyzed to manage the heating systems or the power grid better. They could even collect and transmit data about humidity and temperature to computers designed to recognize and predict weather patterns.
google_protectAndRun("render_ads.js::google_render_ad", google_handleError, google_render_ad);Ads by GoogleNano-C, Inc. - Fullerenes, Carbon Nanotubes, PCBM and Other Derivatives - www.nano-c.com While the tiny size of the components allows them to operate on far less energy, they are so fragile that they can tolerate only low voltages. One solution is to create a device that is less accurate at detecting individual signals but far better at detecting more of them in parallel or more of them per second—"oversampling" the signals and then averaging them out. To save power, Kinget's chips also are designed to network. Instead of passing wireless signals from their origin to destination in one giant leap, the chips use a relay system, passing signaling information from one chip to the next, like a line of citizens in a flood zone "bucket brigade" passing sandbags down a human chain to a river bank. This network relay system means that each chip only has to transmit short distances, consuming less power than large chips transmitting over a far longer range. The chips also have a learning phase when they go online, in which they detect the intervals at which the chips in their vicinity are transmitting data and then "self-synchronize." This allows them to remain idle—consuming no power—when they are unlikely to receive transmissions from neighboring chips and switch on when they are. "It's much simpler to build something that listens all the time," Kinget says. "But nanotechnology allows us to integrate much more sophisticated systems in tiny chips, so we can save energy." Kinget grew up and studied in Belgium. After completing his electrical engineering Ph.D. in 1996, he worked at the famed Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. He joined the faculty of Columbia's Department of Electrical Engineering in 2002. Kinget and his team don't fabricate chips themselves. After designing their chips, they send their specifications to industrial factories known as silicon foundries, and then install the factory-made chips in their systems when they arrive. Provided by Columbia University
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-02-self-powered-nanoscale-devices-batteri...
TARGETED SMART DUST HOW IT WORKS:
http://sailorgroup.ucsd.edu/research/smartdust.html
In order to spontaneously assemble and orient the micron-sized porous Si "smart dust," we couple chemical modification with the electrochemical machining process used to prepare the nanostructures. The process involves two steps, see the scheme below. In the first step, a porous photonic structure is produced by etching silicon with an electrochemical machining process. This step imparts a highly reflective and specific color-code to the material, that acts like an address, or identifying bar-code for the particles. The second step involves chemically modifying the porous silicon photonic structure so that it will find and stick to the desired target. In the present case, we use chemistry that will target the interface between a drop of oil in water, but we hope to be able to apply the methodology to pollution particles, pathogenic bacteria, and cancer cells. The two steps (etch and modify) are repeated with a different color and a different chemistry, yielding two-sided films. The films are broken up into particles about the size of a human hair. With the chemistry shown below, the particles seek out and attach themselves to an oil drop, presenting their red surface to the outside world and their green surface towards the inside of the drop.
Once they find the interface for which they were programmed, the individual mirrored particles begin to line up, or "tile" themselves on the surface of the target. As an individual, each particle is too small for one to observe the color code. However, when they tile at the interface, the optical properties of the ensemble combine to give a mirror whose characteristic color is easily observed. This collective behavior provides a means of amplifying the molecular recognition event that occurs at the surface of each individual particle. As a means of signalling their presence at the interface, the particles change color. As the nanostructure comes in contact with the oil drop, some of the liquid from the target is absorbed into it. The liquid only wicks into the regions of the nanostructure that have been modified with the appropriate chemistry. The presence of the liquid in the nanostructure causes a predictable change in the color code, signalling to the outside observer that the correct target has been located. This work was first reported in J. R. Link, and M. J. Sailor, Proc. Nat Acad. Sci. 2003 100, 10607-10610
NANOSTRUCTURED "SMART DUST" CHEMICAL SENSORS.
HOW IT WORKS: http://sailorgroup.ucsd.edu/research/smartdust.html
Nano implants seem to be a reality. How will we ever prove this? I supplied the link. Peter
ICRI-K.U.Leuven-IBBT
Diana M. Bowman
affiliation not provided to SSRN
Law & Policy, Vol. 33, Issue 2, pp. 256-275, 2011
The increasing commercialisation of human ICT implants has generated debate over the ethical, legal, and social implications of their use. The convergence of nanotechnologies with ICT is likely to further challenge the current legal frameworks that regulate them. The aim of this article is to examine the effectiveness of the European data protection legal framework for regulating this next generation- of nano-enabled ICT human implantable devices. The article highlights the potential regulatory challenges posed by the applications and makes a series of recommendations as to how the current European legal framework on data protection will respond to them. --
November 9, 2010
http://www.electronicsweb.com/article.mvc/Energy-Harvesting-Nanogen...
Blinking numbers on a liquid-crystal display (LCD) often indicate that a device's clock needs resetting. But in the laboratory of Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech, the blinking number on a small LCD signals the success of a five-year effort to power conventional electronic devices with nanoscale generators that harvest mechanical energy from the environment using an array of tiny nanowires.
In this case, the mechanical energy comes from compressing a nanogenerator between two fingers, but it could also come from a heartbeat, the pounding of a hiker's shoe on a trail, the rustling of a shirt, or the vibration of a heavy machine. While these nanogenerators will never produce large amounts of electricity for conventional purposes, they could be used to power nanoscale and microscale devices – and even to recharge pacemakers or iPods.
Wang's nanogenerators rely on the piezoelectric effect seen in crystalline materials such as zinc oxide, in which an electric charge potential is created when structures made from the material are flexed or compressed. By capturing and combining the charges from millions of these nanoscale zinc oxide wires, Wang and his research team can produce as much as three volts – and up to 300 nanoamps.
"By simplifying our design, making it more robust and integrating the contributions from many more nanowires, we have successfully boosted the output of our nanogenerator enough to drive devices such as commercial liquid-crystal displays, light-emitting diodes and laser diodes," said Wang, a Regents' professor in Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering. "If we can sustain this rate of improvement, we will reach some true applications in healthcare devices, personal electronics, or environmental monitoring."
Professor Zhong Lin Wang holds an earlier version of the nanogenerators developed using zinc oxide nanowires. (Click image for high-resolution version. Credit: Gary Meek)
Recent improvements in the nanogenerators, including a simpler fabrication technique, were reported online last week in the journal Nano Letters. Earlier papers in the same journal and in Nature Communications reported other advances for the work, which has been supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and the National Science Foundation.
"We are interested in very small devices that can be used in applications such as health care, environmental monitoring and personal electronics," said Wang. "How to power these devices is a critical issue."
The earliest zinc oxide nanogenerators used arrays of nanowires grown on a rigid substrate and topped with a metal electrode. Later versions embedded both ends of the nanowires in polymer and produced power by simple flexing. Regardless of the configuration, the devices required careful growth of the nanowire arrays and painstaking assembly.
In the latest paper, Wang and his group members Youfan Hu, Yan Zhang, Chen Xu, Guang Zhu and Zetang Li reported on much simpler fabrication techniques. First, they grew arrays of a new type of nanowire that has a conical shape. These wires were cut from their growth substrate and placed into an alcohol solution.
In a new technique for producing nanogenerators, researchers transfer vertically-aligned nanowires to a flexible substrate. (Courtesy of Zhong Lin Wang)
The solution containing the nanowires was then dripped onto a thin metal electrode and a sheet of flexible polymer film. After the alcohol was allowed to dry, another layer was created. Multiple nanowire/polymer layers were built up into a kind of composite, using a process that Wang believes could be scaled up to industrial production.
When flexed, these nanowire sandwiches – which are about two centimeters by 1.5 centimeters – generated enough power to drive a commercial display borrowed from a pocket calculator.
Wang says the nanogenerators are now close to producing enough current for a self-powered system that might monitor the environment for a toxic gas, for instance, then broadcast a warning. The system would include capacitors able to store up the small charges until enough power was available to send out a burst of data.
While even the current nanogenerator output remains below the level required for such devices as iPods or cardiac pacemakers, Wang believes those levels will be reached within three to five years. The current nanogenerator, he notes, is nearly 100 times more powerful than what his group had developed just a year ago.
Writing in a separate paper published in October in the journal Nature Communications, group members Sheng Xu, Benjamin J. Hansen and Wang reported on a new technique for fabricating piezoelectric nanowires from lead zirconate titanate – also known as PZT. The material is already used industrially, but is difficult to grow because it requires temperatures of 650 degrees Celsius.
In the paper, Wang's team reported the first chemical epitaxial growth of vertically-aligned single-crystal nanowire arrays of PZT on a variety of conductive and non-conductive substrates. They used a process known as hydrothermal decomposition, which took place at just 230 degrees Celsius.
In an improved technique for fabricating nanogenerators, researchers transfer vertical arrays of nanowires to a flexible substrate. (Credit: Inertia Films)
With a rectifying circuit to convert alternating current to direct current, the researchers used the PZT nanogenerators to power a commercial laser diode, demonstrating an alternative materials system for Wang's nanogenerator family. "This allows us the flexibility of choosing the best material and process for the given need, although the performance of PZT is not as good as zinc oxide for power generation," he explained.
And in another paper published in Nano Letters, Wang and group members Guang Zhu, Rusen Yang and Sihong Wang reported on yet another advance boosting nanogenerator output. Their approach, called "scalable sweeping printing," includes a two-step process of (1) transferring vertically-aligned zinc oxide nanowires to a polymer receiving substrate to form horizontal arrays and (2) applying parallel strip electrodes to connect all of the nanowires together.
Using a single layer of this structure, the researchers produced an open-circuit voltage of 2.03 volts and a peak output power density of approximately 11 milliwatts per cubic centimeter.
"From when we got started in 2005 until today, we have dramatically improved the output of our nanogenerators," Wang noted. "We are within the range of what's needed. If we can drive these small components, I believe we will be able to power small systems in the near future. In the next five years, I hope to see this move into application."
SOURCE: Georgia Institute of Technology Research News
Submitted by George Overmeire on Mon, 04/26/2010 - 09:47
http://www.transhumanisme.nl/node/84
Via NanoWerk:
(Nanowerk Spotlight) If you think that building an artificial human brain is science fiction, you are probably right – for now. But don't think for a moment that researchers are not working hard on laying the foundations for what is called neuromorphic engineering – a new interdisciplinary discipline that includes nanotechnologies and whose goal is to design artificial neural systems with physical architectures similar to biological nervous systems.
One of the key components of any neuromorphic effort is the design of artificial synapses. The human brain contains vastly more synapses than neurons – by a factor of about 10,000 – and therefore it is necessary to develop a nanoscale, low power, synapse-like device if scientists want to scale neuromorphic circuits towards the human brain level.
Bron: Scientists use nanotechnology to try building computers modeled after the brain.
Maar nu blijkt dat ook de zgn "memristor" de werking van biologische synapsen kan emuleren.
A memristor is a two-terminal electronic device whose conductance can be precisely modulated by charge or flux through it. Here we experimentally demonstrate a nanoscale silicon-based memristor device and show that a hybrid system composed of complementary metal−oxide semiconductor neurons and memristor synapses can support important synaptic functions such as spike timing dependent plasticity. Using memristors as synapses in neuromorphic circuits can potentially offer both high connectivity and high density required for efficient computing.)
Bron: Nanoscale Memristor Device as Synapse in Neuromorphic System.
These findings show that it is now possible to build a brain-like computer using electronic components, namely, transistors and memristors. The key is to realize the similarity between synapses and memristors.
Supposedly, smart dust was developed for military application to be able to locate where soldiers were. BOLDING MINE. kg
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/79572/Smart_Dust?taxon...
Smart Dust
Mighty motes for medicine, manufacturing, the military and more
Thomas Hoffman
March 24, 2003 (Computerworld) Picture being able to scatter hundreds of tiny sensors around a building to monitor temperature or humidity. Or deploying, like pixie dust, a network of minuscule, remote sensor chips to track enemy movements in a military operation.
"Smart dust" devices are tiny wireless microelectromechanical sensors (MEMS) that can detect everything from light to vibrations. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in silicon and fabrication techniques, these "motes" could eventually be the size of a grain of sand, though each would contain sensors, computing circuits, bidirectional wireless communications technology and a power supply. Motes would gather scads of data, run computations and communicate that information using two-way band radio between motes at distances approaching 1,000 feet.
Potential commercial applications are varied, ranging from catching manufacturing defects by sensing out-of-range vibrations in industrial equipment to tracking patient movements in a hospital room.
Design Impasse
Still, for all the promise, there are a number of technical obstacles to widespread commercial adoption. For instance, researchers are wrestling with design challenges in fusing MEMS and electronics onto a single chip, says Gary Fedder, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Fedder, a co-founder of Carnegie Mellon's MEMS Laboratory, has been trying to tackle these development issues through new fabrication and design techniques, but he acknowledges that the lab has quite a bit of work ahead of it.
"The paradigm has been to have a single engineer be the champion of these systems and fuse it all together to make a [single] chip. That requires a superhuman effort," says Fedder. The lab has been developing design tool technology to aid the engineers who may ultimately design these kinds of systems, he says.
What makes all this effort worthwhile is a growing feeling among researchers that these technologies may eventually have a huge impact on society. That also helps explain why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency began funding aspects of this work at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998.
The goal for researchers is to get these chips down to 1mm on a side. Current motes are about 5mm, says Kristofer Pister, professor of electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, who's been working with smart dust since 1997.
Pister is on sabbatical from the university until early 2004 at Dust Inc., a Berkeley-based developer of peer-to-peer wireless sensor networks. Dust's charter is to give developers hardware and software interfaces "that are stable, reliable and low cost," he says.
The cost of motes has been dropping steadily. Prices range from $50 to $100 each today, and Pister anticipates that they will fall to $1 within five years.
He sees a plethora of potential commercial applications for smart dust, including serving as traffic sensors in congested urban areas and monitoring the power consumption of household appliances to determine whether they're operating at peak efficiency.
Pister and others are quick to point out that the size of these micromachines presents thorny power supply challenges. Ideally, researchers and commercial contractors want to be able to deploy wireless motes that aren't tethered to power sources, and many of the systems being tested or in use today rely on miniature battery power.
"You've got this limited pile of energy in your battery, and you need to distribute that out and make it last," says Mike Horton, CEO of Crossbow Technology Inc., a San Jose-based maker of MEMS technologies whose customers include a cosmetics company that uses wireless sensors to gauge humidity levels in its warehouses for moisture-sensitive products. "You can plug it into the wall, but that kind of defeats the purpose of these autonomous sensors."
Breakthroughs Expected
Researchers are attacking the problem in part by focusing on so-called low-power ad hoc routing protocols, which figure out how to get a message from one mote to another using the least amount of energy. Research on this kind of power has been emerging over the past two years at UC Berkeley, MIT and the University of California, Los Angeles.
"We haven't found a one-size-fits-all approach yet," Horton says. Still, he believes two near-term technical breakthroughs for these wireless sensors in the areas of power and size are poised to occur. The first involves paring the several semiconductors needed today to operate these motes down to a single semiconductor, a development Horton foresees occurring about two years from now.
On the power side, Horton points to research by UC Berkeley's Shad Roundy on fuel cells that can "scavenge" energy to make smart-dust devices run longer. This includes drawing off the ambient vibration energy generated by an industrial machine or gathering energy from low levels of light. These scavenger energy technologies might be five years off, Horton says.
While researchers and commercial developers are agog over the potential applications for smart dust, they're also careful to point out the design and power issues that still need to be resolved. Says Fedder, "There are a lot of people champing at the bit to commercialize this technology, but the technology still has to mature, and widespread use is still several years off."
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl0723634
Carbon nanotubes are a nanomaterial that is extensively used in industry. The potential health risk of chronic carbon nanotubes exposure has been raised as of great public concern. In the present study, we have demonstrated that intratracheal instillation of 0.5 mg of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) into male ICR mice (8 weeks old) induced alveolar macrophage activation, various chronic inflammatory responses, and severe pulmonary granuloma formation. We then used Affymetrix microarrays to investigate the molecular effects on the macrophages when exposed to SWCNT. A biological pathway analysis, a literature survey, and experimental validation suggest that the uptake of SWCNT into the macrophages is able to activate various transcription factors such as nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) and activator protein 1 (AP-1), and this leads to oxidative stress, the release of proinflammatory cytokines, the recruitment of leukocytes, the induction of protective and antiapoptotic gene expression, and the activation of T cells. The resulting innate and adaptive immune responses may explain the chronic pulmonary inflammation and granuloma formation in vivo caused by SWCNT.
This is what everybody fears. Nanotech has the potential to create truly awful new weapons: weapons that can replicate, attack anything on the molecular scale, penetrate any macroscopic defense.
Fortunately, so far their development has been slow since current nanotech still has trouble with the things that could create truly devastating weapons. But most people in the know expect that this will change; the field advances every day and sooner or later nanotech weaponry will become a major danger.
The simplest form of nanoweapon is nanofactured ordinary weapons. With a MC it is trivial to build a knife or a gun. They can even be improved slightly by better materials, but they remain knives and guns. Of course, anybody who has encountered the Tessin Fractal Special may disagree.
The next level is radical improvements on old systems. Nanoexplosives are an example: by building explosives from the bottom up it is possible to create truly powerful explosives that no sniffers (yet) recognize. D4 from N Conspiracy is the only nanoexplosive whose recipe is sold on the Market. It looks like an ordinary plastic explosive,
but is close to the theoretical limits of what a chemical explosive can do. However, making explosives is usually extremely energy intensive, and most MCs fail at that unless given specialized feedstocks.
Trillicon Arms is an endless source for more or less bizarre designs for nanotech improved weapons, ranging from diamondoid bullets to knives with active edges. Few have been used in practice; they aren't worth the trouble, and nobody would like the police or public to find them. But that doesn't deter the intrepid designers, who regularly
announce yet another bizarre weapon on SubNet.
The cutting edge is nanite weapons. Since nanites currently do not survive well in the environment or the body they are limited, but the potential is awesome, especially if they can be made to replicate.
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/InfoWar/nano.html