Tag Archives: University of South Carolina

Public relations (PR) and nanotechnology

Shannon Bowen of the University of South Carolina has written an March 18, 2016 essay about public relations (PR) and nanotechnology for PR Week,

As a responsible public relations professional, you try to be proactive, keeping up with changes in technology and the resulting demands from your organization or clients. More companies are becoming involved in nanotechnology, and PR pros should not treat the subject as some black hole from which to run. Issues surrounding nanotechnology will have to be dealt with, from media relations to issues management to ethics. Like neurotechnology, the field of nanotechnology is growing at an exponential rate. It is so new that no one is really sure what development will come next — nanotech researchers are currently developing specialty areas such as nanobiology, nanopharmacology, and nanorobots.

Maybe your organization or client has no interest in nanotechnology yet, but as an up-to-date PR pro, you should be able to help separate myth or fear from fact if needed. The implications of nanotechnology in the medical field alone are numerous. In the book The Future of the Mind, physicist Michio Kaku writes of nanobots:

“On the surface, the nanobot is simple: an atomic machine with arms and clippers that grabs molecules, cuts them at specific points, and then splices them back together. By cutting and pasting various atoms, the nanobot can create almost any know molecule, like a magician pulling something out of a hat. It can also self-reproduce, so it is necessary to build only one nanobot. This nanobot will then take raw materials, digest them, and create millions of other nanobots.”

Bowen seems to have discovered nanotechnology relatively recently and seems not to realize how prevalent nanotechnology-enabled products are already,

Soon, nanotech will be unavoidable. It will cut across vast sectors of industry, from computing to defense to mechanical engineering of consumer products. All these business sectors will need communication about safety protocols, privacy concerns, public policy, regulation and lobbying, and the pros and cons of using nanotech. Public relations for the nano world will become huge — figuratively speaking.

It’s an interesting essay with some good points but Bowen is not very well informed about nanotechnology. For example, there’s this from her list of ethical and social issues,

Research ethics
Are some research projects, such as military projects, too dangerous to pursue?

Nano medications
In addition to safety, this also raises privacy concerns about tracking. Human trials of such drugs begin in about two years.

The ship has sailed with regard to military research. So, the question turns from “Should we be doing this?” to “Should we continue doing this? and, possibly, Can we get everyone (all countries) to agree to stop?”

And, there are already human trials of nanotechnology-enabled drug delivery and other biomedical applications. For example there’s this from a March 21, 2016 California Institute of Technology (CalTech) news release about nanoparticles for cancer therapy,

These nanoparticles are currently being tested in a number of phase-II clinical trials. (Information about trials of the nanoparticles, denoted CRLX101, is available at http://www.clinicaltrials.gov.

For anyone unfamiliar with the phases for clinical trials, there’s this from Patients at Heart website on the Clinical Trials Essentials webpage in the section on Research Phases,

Target Patient Population Average Number of Patients
Phase I Healthy patients 20 to 80 participants
Phase II First evaluation in patients with the target disease 100 to 300 participants
Phase III Patients with the target disease 300 to 3,000 participants
Health Canada approval for use in the general population
Phase IV Patients with the target disease Variable – large numbers

Getting back to the essay, as Bowen notes there is a field designated as nanoethics. I found this Nanoethics Group based at California Polytechnic State University and this NanoEthics journal. I’m sure there’s much more out there should you care to search.

Graphene and water (G20 Water commentary)

Tim Harper’s, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of G2O Water, July 13, 2015 commentary was published on Nanotechnology Now. Harper, a longtime figure in the nanotechnology community (formerly CEO of Cientifica, an emerging technologies consultancy and current member of the World Economic Forum, not unexpectedly focused on water,

In the 2015 World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report survey participants ranked Water Crises as the biggest of all risks, higher than Weapons of Mass Destruction, Interstate Conflict and the Spread of Infectious Diseases (pandemics). Our dependence on the availability of fresh water is well documented, and the United Nations World Water Development Report 2015 highlights a 40% global shortfall between forecast water demand and available supply within the next fifteen years. Agriculture accounts for much of the demand, up to 90% in most of the world’s least-developed countries, and there is a clear relationship between water availability, health, food production and the potential for civil unrest or interstate conflict.

The looming crisis is not limited to water for drinking or agriculture. Heavy metals from urban pollution are finding their way into the aquatic ecosystem, as are drug residues and nitrates from fertilizer use that can result in massive algal blooms. To date, there has been little to stop this accretion of pollutants and in closed systems such as lakes these pollutants are being concentrated with unknown long term effects.

Ten years ago, following discussions with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, I organised a conference in Amsterdam called Nanowater to look at how nanotechnology could address global water issues. [emphasis mine] While the meeting raised many interesting points, and many companies proposed potential solutions, there was little subsequent progress.

Rather than a simple mix of one or two contaminants, most real world water can contain hundreds of different materials, and pollutants like heavy metals may be in the form of metal ions that can be removed, but are equally likely to be bound to other larger pieces of organic matter which cannot be simply filtered through nanopores. In fact the biggest obstacle to using nanotechnology in water treatment is the simple fact that small holes are easily blocked, and susceptibility to fouling means that most nanopore membranes quickly become barriers instead of filters.

Fortunately some recent developments in the ‘wonder material’ graphene may change the economics of water. One of the major challenges in the commercialisation of graphene is the ability to create large areas of defect-free material that would be suitable for displays or electronics, and this is a major research topic in Europe where the European Commission is funding graphene research to the tune of a billion euros. …

Tim goes on to describe some graphene-based solutions including a technology developed at the University of South Carolina, which is also mentioned in a July 16, 2015 G20 Water press release,

Fouling of nano/ultrafiltration membranes in oil/water separation is a longstanding issue and a major economic barrier for their widespread adoption. Currently membranes typically show severe fouling, resulting from the strong adhesion of oil on the membrane surface and/or oil penetration inside the membranes. This greatly degrades their performance and shortens service lifetime as well as increasing the energy usage.

G2O™s bio inspired approach uses graphene oxide (GO) for the fabrication of fully-recoverable membranes for high flux, antifouling oil/water separation via functional and structural mimicking of fish scales. The ultra-thin, amphiphilic, water-locking GO coating mimics the thin mucus layer covering fish scales, while the combination of corrugated GO flakes and intrinsic roughness of the porous supports successfully reproduces the hierarchical roughness of fish scales. Cyclic membrane performance evaluation tests revealed circa 100% membrane recovery by facile surface water flushing, establishing their excellent easy-to-recover capability.

The pore sizes can be tuned to specific applications such as water desalination, oil/water separation, storm water treatment and industrial waste water recovery. By varying the GO concentration in water, GO membranes with different thickness can be easily fabricated via a one-time filtration process.
G2O™s patented graphene oxide technology acts as a functional coating for modifying the surface properties of existing filter media resulting in:
Higher pure water flux;
High fouling resistance;
Excellent mechanical strength;
High chemical stability;
Good thermal stability;
Low cost.

We’re going through a water shortage here in Vancouver, Canada after a long spring season which distinguished itself with a lack of rain and the introduction of a heatwave extending into summer. It is by no means equivalent to the situation in many parts of the world but it does give even those of us who are usually waterlogged some insight into what it means when there isn’t enough water.

For more insight into water crises with a special focus on the Middle East (notice Harper mentioned Israel’s former Prime Minister Shimon Peres in his commentary), I have a Feb. 24, 2014 posting (Water desalination to be researched at Oman’s newly opened Nanotechnology Laboratory at Sultan Qaboos University) and a June 25, 2013 post (Nanotechnology-enabled water resource collaboraton between Israel and Chicago).

You can check out the World Economic Forum’s Outlook on the Global Agenda 2015 here.

The Outlook on the Global Agenda 2015 features an analysis of the Top 10 trends which will preoccupy our experts for the next 12-18 months as well as the key challenges facing the world’s regions, an overview of global leadership and governance, and the emerging issues that will define our future.

G20 Water can be found here.

Memristors, memcapacitors, and meminductors for faster computers

While some call memristors a fourth fundamental component alongside resistors, capacitors, and inductors (as mentioned in my June 26, 2014 posting which featured an update of sorts on memristors [scroll down about 80% of the way]), others view memristors as members of an emerging periodic table of circuit elements (as per my April 7, 2010 posting).

It seems scientists, Fabio Traversa, and his colleagues fall into the ‘periodic table of circuit elements’ camp. From Traversa’s  June 27, 2014 posting on nanotechweb.org,

Memristors, memcapacitors and meminductors may retain information even without a power source. Several applications of these devices have already been proposed, yet arguably one of the most appealing is ‘memcomputing’ – a brain-inspired computing paradigm utilizing the ability of emergent nanoscale devices to store and process information on the same physical platform.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, the University of California San Diego and the University of South Carolina in the US, and the Polytechnic of Turin in Italy, suggest a realization of “memcomputing” based on nanoscale memcapacitors. They propose and analyse a major advancement in using memcapacitive systems (capacitors with memory), as central elements for Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits capable of storing and processing information on the same physical platform. They name this architecture Dynamic Computing Random Access Memory (DCRAM).

Using the standard configuration of a Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) where the capacitors have been substituted with solid-state based memcapacitive systems, they show the possibility of performing WRITE, READ and polymorphic logic operations by only applying modulated voltage pulses to the memory cells. Being based on memcapacitors, the DCRAM expands very little energy per operation. It is a realistic memcomputing machine that overcomes the von Neumann bottleneck and clearly exhibits intrinsic parallelism and functional polymorphism.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Dynamic computing random access memory by F L Traversa, F Bonani, Y V Pershin, and M Di Ventra. Nanotechnology Volume 25 Number 28  doi:10.1088/0957-4484/25/28/285201 Published 27 June 2014

This paper is behind a paywall.

Bake and shake your t-shirt to make a flexible electronic device

I don’t think you actually need to shake but you do need to bake your cotton t-shirt, albeit in a special way, to create a wearable battery  or so the University of South Carolina’s Xiaodong Li says. Excerpted from the June 29, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

Over the years, the telephone has gone mobile, from the house to the car to the pocket. The University of South Carolina’s Xiaodong Li envisions even further integration of the cell phone – and just about every electronic gadget, for that matter – into our lives.

“We wear fabric every day,” said Li, a professor of mechanical engineering at USC. “One day our cotton T-shirts could have more functions; for example, a flexible energy storage device that could charge your cell phone or your iPad.”

Li is helping make the vision a reality. He and post-doctoral associate Lihong Bao have just reported in the journal Advanced Materials (“Towards Textile Storage from Cotton T-Shirts”) how to turn the material in a cotton T-shirt into a source of electrical power.

I’ve been following the ‘wearable battery’ story for a while (the May 9, 2012 posting is the most recent) but Li’s approach is a little different.  Excerpted from the June 29, 2012 University of South Caroline news release by Steven Powell,

Starting with a T-shirt from a local discount store, Li’s team soaked it in a solution of fluoride, dried it and baked it at high temperature. They excluded oxygen in the oven to prevent the material from charring or simply combusting.

The surfaces of the resulting fibers in the fabric were shown by infrared spectroscopy to have been converted from cellulose to activated carbon. Yet the material retained flexibility; it could be folded without breaking.

“We will soon see roll-up cell phones and laptop computers on the market,” Li said. “But a flexible energy storage device is needed to make this possible.”

The once-cotton T-shirt proved to be a repository for electricity. By using small swatches of the fabric as an electrode, the researchers showed that the flexible material, which Li’s team terms activated carbon textile, acts as a capacitor. Capacitors are components of nearly every electronic device on the market, and they have the ability to store electrical charge.

Here’s what makes the approach different; it’s ‘green’ according to Powell’s news release,

Li is particularly pleased to have improved on the means by which activated carbon fibers are usually obtained. “Previous methods used oil or environmentally unfriendly chemicals as starting materials,” he said. “Those processes are complicated and produce harmful side products. Our method is a very inexpensive, green process.”

Somehow I’ve always seen ‘wearable batteries and/or electronics’ as opportunities for electrocution but I seem to be alone with this fear as there’s never any discussion about the safety issues might arise.

ETA July 3, 2012: Dexter Johnson in his June 29, 2012 posting on Nanoclast (a blog on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) notes that the simplicity of Li’s process may be specially exciting,

While Li makes mention of the environmentally friendly chemicals used to impart this capability to a t-shirt, it is perhaps the simplicity of the process that will likely be the most intriguing aspect to manufacturers.