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Only for the truly obsessed: a movie featuring gold nanocrystal vibrations

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

Folks at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (at the University College of London) have released a film made with a pioneering 3D imaging technique that shows how gold nanocrystals vibrate. From the May 23, 2013 news release on EurekAlert,

A billon-frames-per-second film has captured the vibrations of gold nanocrystals in stunning detail for the first time.

The film, which was made using 3D imaging pioneered at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) at UCL [University College of London], reveals important information about the composition of gold. The findings are published in the journal Science.

Jesse Clark, from the LCN and lead author of the paper said: “Just as the sound quality of a musical instrument can provide great detail about its construction, so too can the vibrations seen in materials provide important information about their composition and functions.”

“It is absolutely amazing that we are able to capture snapshots of these nanoscale motions and create movies of these processes. This information is crucial to understanding the response of materials after perturbation. “

Caption: The acoustic phonons can be visualized on the surface as regions of contraction (blue) and expansion (red). Also shown are two-dimensional images comparing the experimental results with theory and molecular dynamics simulation. The scale bar is 100 nanometers. Credit: Jesse Clark/UCL

Caption: The acoustic phonons can be visualized on the surface as regions of contraction (blue) and expansion (red). Also shown are two-dimensional images comparing the experimental results with theory and molecular dynamics simulation. The scale bar is 100 nanometers. Credit: Jesse Clark/UCL

Here are more details from the news release,

Scientists found that the vibrations were unusual because they start off at exactly the same moment everywhere inside the crystal. It was previously expected that the effects of the excitation would travel across the gold nanocrystal at the speed of sound, but they were found to be much faster, i.e., supersonic.

The new images support theoretical models for light interaction with metals, where energy is first transferred to electrons, which are able to short-circuit the much slower motion of the atoms.

The team carried out the experiments at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory using a revolutionary X-ray laser called the “Linac Coherent Light Source”. The pulses of X-rays are extremely short (measured in femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second), meaning they are able to freeze all motion of the atoms in any sample, leaving only the electrons still moving.

However, the X-ray pulses are intense enough that the team was able to take single snapshots of the vibrations of the gold nanocrystals they were examining. The vibration was started with a short pulse of infrared light.

The real keeners can watch the movie if they click on the link to the May 23, 2013 news release on EurekAlert.

The team developing this movie was international in scope (from the news release),

The research team included contributors from UCL, University of Oxford, SLAC, Argonne National Laboratory [US] and LaTrobe University, Australia.

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NanoRosetta; a Kickstarter archiving project for the human genome

Thursday, May 23rd, 2013

The NanoRosetta Kickstarter project needs to raise $100,000 by June 2, 2013 if the organizers are to shrink the human genome to the nanoscale and archive it by printing  it on five nickel discs which will be good for 10,000 years. From the NanoRosetta campaign page,

NanoRosetta is seeking to bring the archival industry into the modern age by using nanotechnology to print analog information onto nickel discs. With a life-span of 10,000 years, no other technology can match the durability and longevity of these discs, and because of the microscopic size of the images printed on the discs, we are able to print high volumes of data that were once thought to be unprintable.

To showcase this paradigm-shifting technology, we are seeking to print multiple sets of all 3.2 BILLION characters of the Human genome on five nickel discs about the size of CDs. Previously, this task would have required a room of books to archive the information as analog data.

Storing this information digitally may be effective in the short term, but for the purposes of long-term archiving, the computer, the operating system and the software would also need to be archived equally well. This is the Achilles heel of digital archiving, and the reason why an analog system is the only way to properly archive important data.

Such passion for archiving warms my heart and I love this notion which reminds me of certain types of science fiction novels (from NanoRosetta campaign page),

No matter how well something is stored, it is always susceptible to a single point of failure.

This is where you come in.

With 80 custodians of the Human genome, with at least one custodian located on each continent, we can avoid the problem of a single point of failure and give you a unique piece to hang on your wall.

After the campaign started in early April, the team partnered with the Moon Arts Project with a plan to send the discs into outer space,

This Kickstarter has just gone from a 10,000 year archiving project to a 1 Billion year archiving project! Thanks to the vision of Lowry Burgess, the former dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University and head of the mission’s Moon Arts Project, the university’s engineers and artists have made room for the Human genome discs on their lunar lander.

“One of these days, one of these days…” 

Launching in 2015.

More information on the university’s mission, their status, and the Moon Arts Project can be found at: http://www.cmu.edu/google-lunar-x/
http://moonarts.org/

As for the original Rosetta Stone which provides the inspiration for this project, here’s a little information from its Wikipedia essay (Note: Links have been removed),

Originally displayed within a temple, the stone was probably moved during the early Christian or medieval period and eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta. It was rediscovered there in 1799 by a soldier, Pierre-François Bouchard, of the French expedition to Egypt. As the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times, the Rosetta Stone aroused widespread public interest with its potential to decipher this hitherto untranslated ancient language. Lithographic copies and plaster casts began circulating among European museums and scholars. Meanwhile, British troops defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, and the original stone came into British possession under the Capitulation of Alexandria. Transported to London, it has been on public display at the British Museum since 1802. It is the most-visited object in the British Museum.

The NanoRosetta team has created a campaign video,

For those who like to know something about the people behind a project, this team doesn’t provide much information (from the campaign page),

Bruce Ha, John Bishop, and Jakub Svec make up the NanoRosetta team bringing technical expertise and the archiving industry together.

Websites

The team (also known as Norsam Technologies) notes on its campaign page that it has worked with the Long Now Foundation on that organization’s, The Rosetta Project.

I wish them the best of luck with NanoRosetta.

There are other pieces about archives on the blog but this Mar. 8, 2012 posting, Digital disasters, probably provides the best justifications for this NanoRosetta project.

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When your kinks and your defects are your strength: the truth about copper’s coherent twin boundaries

Monday, May 20th, 2013

There’s perfection and then there’s imperfection in this story about the nanoscale. From the May 19, 2013 news release on EurekAlert,

One of the basic principles of nanotechnology is that when you make things extremely small—one nanometer is about five atoms wide, 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair—they are going to become more perfect.

“Perfect in the sense that their arrangement of atoms in the real world will become more like an idealized model,” says University of Vermont engineer Frederic Sansoz, “with smaller crystals—in for example, gold or copper—it’s easier to have fewer defects in them.”

And eliminating the defects at the interface separating two crystals, or grains, has been shown by nanotechnology experts to be a powerful strategy for making materials stronger, more easily molded, and less electrically resistant—or a host of other qualities sought by designers and manufacturers.

Scientists thought they’d found perfection in 2004 (from the news release),

Since 2004, when a seminal paper came out in Science, materials scientists have been excited about one special of arrangement of atoms in metals and other materials called a “coherent twin boundary” or CTB.

Based on theory and experiment, these coherent twin boundaries are often described as “perfect,” appearing like a perfectly flat, one-atom-thick plane in computer models and electron microscope images.

Over the last decade, a body of literature has shown these coherent twin boundaries—found at the nanoscale within the crystalline structure of common metals like gold, silver and copper—are highly effective at making materials much stronger while maintaining their ability to undergo permanent change in shape without breaking and still allowing easy transmission of electrons—an important fact for computer manufacturing and other electronics applications.

It turns out that not all coherent twin boundaries are ‘perfect’ (from the news release),

A team of scientists, including Sansoz, a professor in UVM’s College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, and colleagues from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere, write in the May 19 edition of Nature Materials that coherent twin boundaries found in copper “are inherently defective.”

With a high-resolution electron microscope, using a more powerful technique than has ever been used to examine these boundaries, they found tiny kink-like steps and curvatures in what had previously been observed as perfect.

Even more surprising, these kinks and other defects appear to be the cause of the coherent twin boundary’s strength and other desirable qualities.

“Everything we have learned on these materials in the past 10 years will have to be revisited with this new information,” Sansoz says

The work was performed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (from the news release),

The experiment, led by Morris Wang at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, applied a newly developed mapping technique to study the crystal orientation of CTBs in so-called nanotwinned copper and “boom—it revealed these defects,” says Sansoz.

This real-world discovery conformed to earlier intriguing theoretical findings that Sansoz had been making with “atomistic simulations” on a computer. The lab results sent Sansoz back to his computer models where he introduced the newly discovered “kink” defects into his calculations. Using UVM’s Vermont Advanced Computing Center, he theoretically confirmed that the kink defects observed by the Livermore team lead to “rather rich deformation processes at the atomic scale,” he says, that do not exist with perfect twin boundaries.

With the computer model, “we found a series of completely new mechanisms,” he says, for explaining why coherent twin boundaries simultaneously add strength and yet also allow stretching (what scientists call “tensile ductility”)— properties that are usually mutually exclusive in conventional materials.

It seems to me that scientists keep discovering that it’s the imperfections and defects which give rise to strength and, often, beauty. I hope this time they remember what they’ve discovered.

For those who need to know more, here’s a citation for and link to the paper,

Defective twin boundaries in nanotwinned metals by Y. Morris Wang, Frederic Sansoz, Thomas LaGrange, Ryan T. Ott, Jaime Marian, Troy W. Barbee Jr, & Alex V. Hamza. Nature Materials (2013) doi:10.1038/nmat3646 Published online 19 May 2013

This paper is behind a paywall.

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Bend it, twist it, any way you want to—a foldable lithium-ion battery

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

A Feb. 26, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily features an extraordinary lithium-ion battery,

Northwestern University’s Yonggang Huang and the University of Illinois’ John A. Rogers are the first to demonstrate a stretchable lithium-ion battery — a flexible device capable of powering their innovative stretchable electronics.

No longer needing to be connected by a cord to an electrical outlet, the stretchable electronic devices now could be used anywhere, including inside the human body. The implantable electronics could monitor anything from brain waves to heart activity, succeeding where flat, rigid batteries would fail.

Huang and Rogers have demonstrated a battery that continues to work — powering a commercial light-emitting diode (LED) — even when stretched, folded, twisted and mounted on a human elbow. The battery can work for eight to nine hours before it needs recharging, which can be done wirelessly.

The researchers at Northwestern have produced a video where they demonstrate the battery’s ‘stretchability’,

The Northwestern University Feb. 26, 2013 news release by Megan Fellman, which originated the news item, offers this detail,

“We start with a lot of battery components side by side in a very small space, and we connect them with tightly packed, long wavy lines,” said Huang, a corresponding author of the paper. “These wires provide the flexibility. When we stretch the battery, the wavy interconnecting lines unfurl, much like yarn unspooling. And we can stretch the device a great deal and still have a working battery.”

…

The power and voltage of the stretchable battery are similar to a conventional lithium-ion battery of the same size, but the flexible battery can stretch up to 300 percent of its original size and still function.

…

Huang and Rogers have been working together for the last six years on stretchable electronics, and designing a cordless power supply has been a major challenge. Now they have solved the problem with their clever “space filling technique,” which delivers a small, high-powered battery.

For their stretchable electronic circuits, the two developed “pop-up” technology that allows circuits to bend, stretch and twist. They created an array of tiny circuit elements connected by metal wire “pop-up bridges.” When the array is stretched, the wires — not the rigid circuits — pop up.

This approach works for circuits but not for a stretchable battery. A lot of space is needed in between components for the “pop-up” interconnect to work. Circuits can be spaced out enough in an array, but battery components must be packed tightly to produce a powerful but small battery. There is not enough space between battery components for the “pop-up” technology to work.

Huang’s design solution is to use metal wire interconnects that are long, wavy lines, filling the small space between battery components. (The power travels through the interconnects.)

The unique mechanism is a “spring within a spring”: The line connecting the components is a large “S” shape and within that “S” are many smaller “S’s.” When the battery is stretched, the large “S” first stretches out and disappears, leaving a line of small squiggles. The stretching continues, with the small squiggles disappearing as the interconnect between electrodes becomes taut.

“We call this ordered unraveling,” Huang said. “And this is how we can produce a battery that stretches up to 300 percent of its original size.”

The stretching process is reversible, and the battery can be recharged wirelessly. The battery’s design allows for the integration of stretchable, inductive coils to enable charging through an external source but without the need for a physical connection.

Huang, Rogers and their teams found the battery capable of 20 cycles of recharging with little loss in capacity. The system they report in the paper consists of a square array of 100 electrode disks, electrically connected in parallel.

I’d like to see this battery actually powering a device even though the stretching is quite alluring in its way. For those who are interested here’s a citation and a link to the research paper,

Stretchable batteries with self-similar serpentine interconnects and integrated wireless recharging systems by Sheng Xu, Yihui Zhang, Jiung Cho, Juhwan Lee, Xian Huang, Lin Jia, Jonathan A. Fan, Yewang Su, Jessica Su, Huigang Zhang, Huanyu Cheng, Bingwei Lu,           Cunjiang Yu, Chi Chuang, Tae-il Kim, Taeseup Song, Kazuyo Shigeta, Sen Kang, Canan Dagdeviren, Ivan Petrov  et al.   Nature Communications 4, Article number: 1543 doi: 10.1038/ncomms2553  Published 26 February 2013

The article is behind a paywall.

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Bacterial cellulose could suck up pollutants from oil spills

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

Who doesn’t love a cellulose story, especially when it could involve cleaning up oil spills? The Feb. 26, 2013 news item on phys.org titled, Airy but thirsty: Ultralight, flexible, fire-resistant carbon nanotube aerogels from bacterial cellulose, highlights some work being done in China,

They can absorb vast amounts of oil or organic compounds, yet they are nearly as light as air: highly porous solids made of a three-dimensional network of carbon nanotubes. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, Chinese scientists have now introduced a simple technique for the production of these ultralight, flexible, fire-resistant aerogels. Their method begins with bacterial cellulose as an inexpensive starting material. Their fibrous lightweights can “suck” organic contaminants from polluted water and could possibly be used as pressure sensors.

…

The researchers [led by Shu-Hong Yu at the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Micrscale (HFNL), Univeristy of Science and Technology of China] trimmed off small pieces of the tangled cellulose nanofibers. These were freeze-dried and then pyrolyzed at 1300 °C under argon. This converts the cellulose into graphitic carbon. The density decreases but the network structure remains intact. The result is a black, ultralight, mechanically stable aerogel. Because it is porous and highly hydrophobic, it can adsorb organic solvents and oils—up to 106 to 312 times its own weight. It draws oil out of an oil/water mixture with high efficiency and selectivity, leaving behind pure water. This makes the new aerogel an ideal candidate for cleaning up oil spills or sucking up nonpolar industrial pollutants. The absorbed substances can easily be removed from the gel through distillation or combustion, allowing the gel to be used again.

There’s more about the work and its possible applications at physorg.com or, if you have access behind the paywall, here’s a citation and a link to the research article,

Ultralight, Flexible, and Fire-Resistant Carbon Nanofiber Aerogels from Bacterial Cellulose by Zhen-Yu Wu, Chao Li, Dr. Hai-Wei Liang, Prof. Dr. Jia-Fu Chen, Prof. Dr. Shu-Hong Yu. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Volume 52, Issue 10, pages 2925–2929, March 4, 2013.

Here’s an image which illustrates the aerogels’ ability to suck up an organic solvent and explains some of the excitement,

Thirsty fibers: The aerogels described in the title can be fabricated in large scale by using a low-cost biomass, bacterial cellulose, as a precursor, which can be produced at industrial level in a microbial fermentation process. The carbon nanofiber aerogels (black pieces in picture) exhibit superior absorption capacity for organic solvents (red solution) and high potential for pressure sensing. [downloaded from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201209676/abstract;jsessionid=3EFB4241C0083135A6E657808F5410E5.d03t04]

Thirsty fibers: The aerogels described in the title can be fabricated in large scale by using a low-cost biomass, bacterial cellulose, as a precursor, which can be produced at industrial level in a microbial fermentation process. The carbon nanofiber aerogels (black pieces in picture) exhibit superior absorption capacity for organic solvents (red solution) and high potential for pressure sensing. [downloaded from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201209676/abstract;jsessionid=3EFB4241C0083135A6E657808F5410E5.d03t04]

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Call for nominations: US National Academies Communication Awards

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

The Jan. 16, 2013 press release from US National Academies announced a call for nominations for communication in various media including books, film/radio/tv, magazine/newspaper, and online materials that have been published in the US,

The Keck Futures Initiative—a program of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, with the support of the W. M. Keck Foundation—will award $20,000 prizes to individuals or teams who have developed creative, original work that addresses issues and advances in science, engineering and/or medicine for the general public. Nominations are accepted in four categories: Book; Film/Radio/TV; Magazine/Newspaper; and Online.

ELIGIBILITY
To be considered for a 2013 Communication Award, the work should:

  • be accessible and appeal to a broad, public audience;
  • demonstrate clarity, creativity, originality, and accuracy;
  • address issues and/or advances in science, engineering, and/or medicine;
  • cover topics that have an impact on society; and
  • have been published, broadcast, or released in 2012, in the United States and in English.

Call For Nominations Now Being Accepted
Nominations will be accepted through February 8, 2013.  For more information about the process, please visit: http://www.keckfutures.org/awards/nominate.html.

NOMINATION FORM
Nominations must be submitted on the online nomination form at http://www.keckfutures.org/awards/nominate.html. Copies of the nominated work must be submitted as described for each category.  Self nominations are permitted. Please submit a nomination in the category that most closely fits the work(s) being nominated.  Supporting materials will not be returned. There is no nomination fee.

BOOK
Books must have been published in the U.S. in 2012 to be considered. Please submit two copies of the book. The publisher and year of publication must be printed on the book. Advance publication dates must include verification from the publisher.

FILM/RADIO/TV
Submissions must have aired on a U.S. station or have been released in U.S. theaters or on DVD in 2012 and may include a single story or movie, a series, or as many as six brief, unrelated stories. Please submit three CDs or DVDs labeled with the nominee’s name(s), the title(s) included on the DVD or CD, and the original airdate (with the name of the U.S. station and the program on which the stories aired) or release date. These must be submitted in protective cases and include authorization allowing the Keck Futures Initiative to reproduce the CD or DVD for review purposes (copyright release). Submission of copies of the program transcript is also encouraged. If you are not able to provide copyright release, please submit an additional 20 copies of the CD or DVD.

MAGAZINE/NEWSPAPER
Work in this category must have been published in the U.S. in 2012, and may comprise a single article or as many as four articles that are unrelated or that constitute a formal series. Please submit three original copies of each article clearly showing the byline and the name and date of the publication and authorization allowing the Keck Futures Initiative to reproduce the article for review purposes (copyright release). If you are not able to provide copyright release, please send an additional 20 copies of the article(s), or a PDF file of the article(s).

ONLINE
Work created specifically for the Web must have been posted online in 2012. Entries may include as many as six online articles, hypertext documents, podcasts, commentaries, etc., or any combination thereof. Preference will be given to nominations that make the best use of the medium, including multi-media presentations that incorporate a combination of videos, blog entries, interactive features, and/or other capabilities unique to this communication medium. Include links to the unique URLs for each work(s). Links, must be active through October 31, 2013.

2013 TIMELINE

  • February 8 – Nomination process closes.
  • Fall 2013 – Winners honored at a ceremony to be held in Washington D.C. Date TBD.

All nominations must be submitted online by February 8, and all supporting materials must be received by February 15, 2013.

For More Information
Visit www.keckfutures.org/awards for a complete listing of this year’s Selection Committee, information about the awards and to nominate.

I wonder if I could self-nominate, despite the fact that I self-identify as a Canadian science blogger; this blog is hosted by a US company. Does that constitute publication in the US? That $20,000 prize is tempting. Good luck to all who enter the competition.

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Nano Nails and fashion at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show

Monday, January 14th, 2013

The ‘Nano Nails’ from Tech Tips (based in Helena Montana) have more in common with the Tata Nano (a car), i.e., nano in name rather than a nanotechnology-enabled product but they did garner some attention at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES, Jan. 8 -11, 2013). Here’s more about Nano Nails and Tech Tips from the company’s About page,

Tech Tips, LLC was founded by Cleveland Clinic trained dermatologist, “Sri” Vellanki.  She wanted to be more accurate with her smartphone.  A mobile touchscreen device is not the same as a piece of paper.  Steve Jobs revolutionized the smartphone by creating the iPhone touch interface.  Panning, pinching, and scrolling multi-touch gestures are all needed to work with touchscreens.   Instead of trying to replicate a fingerpad on a writing utensil, Tech Tips brand styluses were developed to work with your hand on a touchscreen.  Multi-touch gestures are unimpeded.  Selections are accurate since the touchscreen display is more fully visualized.  Frustration and errors are reduced for individuals that find touchscreens difficult to use.

There are 2 products that Tech Tips, LLC has developed.  The first is the Tech Tips brand precision stylus, the other is a [sic] an artificial fingernail stylus branded as Nano Nails that replicates the motion of tapping on an object with your fingernails.  As many women are aware, longer fingernails do not work on most currently available touchscreens.  This makes it difficult to be quick and accurate.  Nano Nails solve this problem in an aesthetic and ergonomic way.

Both will be introduced at Eureka Park at the Consumer Electronic Show 2013.

Here’s a video which was taken at the 2013 CES demonstrating how one of Tech Tips’ stylus products can be used for drawing,

Over at the Scientific American website, Larry Greenemeir has posted (Jan. 14, 2013) a CES 2013 slide show of various interesting gadgets including the Nano Nails stylus (slide no. 9 of 10).

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nano tech 2013 in Tokyo

Thursday, January 10th, 2013

I usually mention International Nanotechnology Exhibition and Conference held in Tokyo as it is one of the larger nanotechnology shows in the world. Last year, over they recorded over 45,000 visits, 649 exhibitors, and 802 booths during the three day show which was held Feb. 14 – 17, 2012 according to the report on 2012 show.

This year’s nano tech 2013 will run from Jan. 30 – Feb. 2, 2013 and thanks to the folks at NanoInk for reminding me of the show in their Jan. 10,2013 news release,

NanoInk, Inc.® is pleased to announce that its NanoFabrication Systems and NanoProfessor® Divisions will be exhibiting and making presentations at the 12th International Nanotechnology Exhibition and Conference, from Wednesday, January 30 through Friday, February 1 in Tokyo, Japan. The conference will be held at the East Exhibition Hall 4, 5, 6 & Conference Tower at Tokyo Big Sight. NanoInk’s NanoFabrication Systems and NanoProfessor Divisions will be at booth number 5F-15. Technical staff will be available to provide demonstrations of the NLP 2000 System, and answer questions about NanoInk’s Dip Pen Nanolithography® (DPN®) technology, applications, and products for both research and education.

On Friday, February 1, at 11:30, Dean Hart, chief commercial officer for NanoInk, will be making a presentation in the Main Theater (East Hall 5) titled, “Meeting the Nanotech Workforce Needs Through Hands-On Education.” Following that, Saju Nettikadan, applications director for NanoInk, will be making a presentation at 13:00 in the same location titled, “New Advances in Applications Using Dip-Pen Nanolithography.”

…

The NLP 2000 is also the cornerstone of NanoInk’s NanoProfessor Division, which is the global leader in handson undergraduate nanotechnology education. In just over 24 months, the NanoProfessor Nanoscience Education Program has been chosen to serve as the foundation for hands-on undergraduate nanotechnology education by over 20 institutions in five countries. It alternates between classroom lectures and engaging, handson nanoscale lab work. The NanoProfessor curriculum includes a textbook authored by leading nanotechnology experts, covering the topics of Nanotechnology Instrumentation, Imaging and Nanofabrication Techniques, Nanophysics, Nanochemistry, Nanobiology, and Perspectives on Environmental, Health, and Safety within Nanotechnology. In conducting the hands-on lab experiments, students work with state-of-the-art, nano-centric instrumentation including NanoInk’s NLP 2000 Desktop NanoFabrication System.

You can read the full news release here.  I did previously note that NanoInk’s NanoProfessor Nanoscience Education Program had come to the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada)  in an April 12, 2011 posting.

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Inventions Nanotech Middle East conference in 2013

Thursday, January 3rd, 2013

It’s a bit early to be talking about this conference since there isn’t much information, no speakers, no programme, etc. but there’s still time to pull that all together since the Inventions Nanotech Middle East Conference (aka, Inventions Nanotech ME) is scheduled for Nov. 3-5, 2013. From the Conference Overview page,

The Conference will host top notch industry experts from all over the world who will address the following crucial topics through live demonstrations and case studies:

Water
Energy / Oil & Gas
Environment
Health
Consumer Products

The event will be held at the Qatar National Convention Center.

There are two main sources of nanotech news items in that region. Iran or INIC  (Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council [my Dec. 27, 2012 posting]), which continuously publicizes its nanotechnology research, and Saudi Arabia (KAUST or King Abdullah University of Science and Technology), which publicizes its work on solar energy (my July 30, 2012 posting), for the most part.

Good luck to the conference organizers.

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Santa gets a greener, smarter sleigh thanks to GE (General Electric) scientists

Tuesday, December 25th, 2012

Santa's greener, smarter sleigh [downloaded from http://technabob.com/blog/2012/12/24/ge-santa-sleigh/]

Santa’s greener, smarter sleigh [downloaded from http://technabob.com/blog/2012/12/24/ge-santa-sleigh/]

Shauna McGlaun’s Dec. 24, 2012 posting on Technabob highlights the technical details.Thanks to @Cientifica for the pointer to this posting.

I wish you all a Merry and Joyous Christmas!

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