Monthly Archives: March 2016

Public relations (PR) and nanotechnology

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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.

3D microtopographic scaffolds for transplantation and generation of reprogrammed human neurons

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Should this technology prove successful once they start testing on people, the stated goal is to use it for the treatment of human neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.  But, I can’t help wondering if they might also consider constructing an artificial brain.

Getting back to the 3D scaffolds for neurons, a March 17, 2016 US National Institutes of Health (NIH) news release (also on EurekAlert), makes the announcement,

National Institutes of Health-funded scientists have developed a 3D micro-scaffold technology that promotes reprogramming of stem cells into neurons, and supports growth of neuronal connections capable of transmitting electrical signals. The injection of these networks of functioning human neural cells — compared to injecting individual cells — dramatically improved their survival following transplantation into mouse brains. This is a promising new platform that could make transplantation of neurons a viable treatment for a broad range of human neurodegenerative disorders.

Previously, transplantation of neurons to treat neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, had very limited success due to poor survival of neurons that were injected as a solution of individual cells. The new research is supported by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), part of NIH.

“Working together, the stem cell biologists and the biomaterials experts developed a system capable of shuttling neural cells through the demanding journey of transplantation and engraftment into host brain tissue,” said Rosemarie Hunziker, Ph.D., director of the NIBIB Program in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine. “This exciting work was made possible by the close collaboration of experts in a wide range of disciplines.”

The research was performed by researchers from Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, departments of Biomedical Engineering, Neuroscience and Cell Biology, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, and the Child Health Institute; Stanford University School of Medicine’s Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Stanford, California; the Human Genetics Institute of New Jersey, Piscataway; and the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, Piscataway. The results are reported in the March 17, 2016 issue of Nature Communications.

The researchers experimented in creating scaffolds made of different types of polymer fibers, and of varying thickness and density. They ultimately created a web of relatively thick fibers using a polymer that stem cells successfully adhered to. The stem cells used were human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), which can be readily generated from adult cell types such as skin cells. The iPSCs were induced to differentiate into neural cells by introducing the protein NeuroD1 into the cells.

The space between the polymer fibers turned out to be critical. “If the scaffolds were too dense, the stem cell-derived neurons were unable to integrate into the scaffold, whereas if they are too sparse then the network organization tends to be poor,” explained Prabhas Moghe, Ph.D., distinguished professor of biomedical engineering & chemical engineering at Rutgers University and co-senior author of the paper. “The optimal pore size was one that was large enough for the cells to populate the scaffold but small enough that the differentiating neurons sensed the presence of their neighbors and produced outgrowths resulting in cell-to-cell contact. This contact enhances cell survival and development into functional neurons able to transmit an electrical signal across the developing neural network.”

To test the viability of neuron-seeded scaffolds when transplanted, the researchers created micro-scaffolds that were small enough for injection into mouse brain tissue using a standard hypodermic needle. They injected scaffolds carrying the human neurons into brain slices from mice and compared them to human neurons injected as individual, dissociated cells.

The neurons on the scaffolds had dramatically increased cell-survival compared with the individual cell suspensions. The scaffolds also promoted improved neuronal outgrowth and electrical activity. Neurons injected individually in suspension resulted in very few cells surviving the transplant procedure.

Human neurons on scaffolds compared to neurons in solution were then tested when injected into the brains of live mice. Similar to the results in the brain slices, the survival rate of neurons on the scaffold network was increased nearly 40-fold compared to injected isolated cells. A critical finding was that the neurons on the micro-scaffolds expressed proteins that are involved in the growth and maturation of neural synapses–a good indication that the transplanted neurons were capable of functionally integrating into the host brain tissue.

The success of the study gives this interdisciplinary group reason to believe that their combined areas of expertise have resulted in a system with much promise for eventual treatment of human neurodegenerative disorders. In fact, they are now refining their system for specific use as an eventual transplant therapy for Parkinson’s disease. The plan is to develop methods to differentiate the stem cells into neurons that produce dopamine, the specific neuron type that degenerates in individuals with Parkinson’s disease. The work also will include fine-tuning the scaffold materials, mechanics and dimensions to optimize the survival and function of dopamine-producing neurons, and finding the best mouse models of the disease to test this Parkinson’s-specific therapy.

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

Generation and transplantation of reprogrammed human neurons in the brain using 3D microtopographic scaffolds by Aaron L. Carlson, Neal K. Bennett, Nicola L. Francis, Apoorva Halikere, Stephen Clarke, Jennifer C. Moore, Ronald P. Hart, Kenneth Paradiso, Marius Wernig, Joachim Kohn, Zhiping P. Pang, & Prabhas V. Moghe. Nature Communications 7, Article number: 10862  doi:10.1038/ncomms10862 Published 17 March 2016

This paper is open access.

Direct observations at atomic-scale of chemical ordering and its atomic movements

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This work comes from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) according to March 18, 2016 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

Even if two crystalline systems have an identical crystal structure with the same overall composition, their physical properties can remarkably vary relative to each other, strongly depending upon whether the composed atoms are arranged in an orderly manner or not.

The identification and subsequent control of the chemical ordering in multi-component crystalline systems have, thus, been among the central issues in structural chemistry over the past several decades. A number of binary metallic alloys serve as prototypical examples that straightforwardly demonstrate how the degree of chemical order affects the resultant physical properties, such as the electrical resistivity, magnetic susceptibility, and plastic deformation behavior of crystals.

In addition, many notable studies have been extended even to the elucidation of local chemical ordering and visualization of atomic-scale antisite exchange disordering for better catalytic performance and energy conversion/storage efficiency.

Prof. Sung-Yoon Chung’s group in the Graduate School of EEWS (Energy, Environment, Water, and Sustainability) at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has successfully demonstrated how the cation ordering occurs in Li(Mn1.5Ni0.5)O4 spinel, which is a promising cathode material for high-voltage Li-ion batteries (“Frenkel-Defect-Mediated Chemical Ordering Transition in a Li–Mn–Ni Spinel Oxide”).

A March ??, 2016 KAIST news release, which originated the news item, provides more detail,

To consistently provide an integrated body of experimental and theoretical evidence, combined techniques were utilized, including high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) for atomic-scale direct observations, in situ image capturing in STEM and high-temperature X-ray powder diffraction for real-time investigations, and density-functional theory (DFT) calculations for quantitative estimation of the energy barrier during ordering. In particular, atomic movements during the ordering transition were clearly captured in real time in STEM.

An electron beam accelerated with high voltage in TEM can transfer sufficient energy to a specimen, and on this basis, this approach has been properly utilized in recent in situ studies for real-time observations regarding the phase transformation, crystal coarsening, and diffusion of atoms. In the present study, to induce the atomic displacement process and to subsequently examine the formation of point defects in Li(Mn1.5Ni0.5)O4, an intensified convergent electron beam was applied on narrow regions in a disordered crystal in STEM. While no structure variation was observed during scanning with electrons in normal imaging mode, dynamic fluctuation in the column intensity between the octahedral sites could be identified when an electron beam with a higher current (>50 pA) scanned a confined region of 3×3 nm2.

The findings in this study illustrate that the rate at which the ordering transition takes place strongly depends on how readily the point defects can be induced in the lattice. In addition to elucidating the kinetic pathway for ordering transformation, the present study emphasizes that the role of point defects in crystals is not confined merely to mass and charge transport in general but extends even to phase transitions, where these defects act as a critical mediator between two phases.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper (which was published a while back),

Frenkel-Defect-Mediated Chemical Ordering Transition in a Li–Mn–Ni Spinel Oxide by Hyewon Ryoo, Hyung Bin Bae, Dr. Young-Min Kim, Dr. Jin-Gyu Kim, Dr. Seongsu Lee, and Prof. Sung-Yoon Chung. Angewandte Chemie Volume 127, Issue 27, pages 8074–8078, June 26, 2015 DOI: 10.1002/ange.201502320 Article first published online: 26 MAY 2015

© 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

This paper is behind a paywall.

Watching paint dry at the nanoscale

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When paint dries it separates itself into two layers and according to scientists this may have implications for improving performance in products ranging from paints to beauty and cosmetics. From a March 18, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

New research published today in the journal Physical Review Letters has described a new physical mechanism that separates particles according to their size during the drying of wet coatings. The discovery could help improve the performance of a wide variety of everyday goods, from paint to sunscreen.

A March 18, 2016 University of Surrey (England) press release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more details,

Researchers from the University of Surrey [England, UK] in collaboration with the Université Claude Bernard, Lyon [France] used computer simulation and materials experiments to show how when coatings with different sized particles, such as paints dry, the coating spontaneously forms two layers.

This mechanism can be used to control the properties at the top and bottom of coatings independently, which could help increase performance of coatings across industries as diverse as beauty and pharmaceuticals.

Dr Andrea Fortini, of the University of Surrey and lead author explained:

“When coatings such as paint, ink or even outer layers on tablets are made, they work by spreading a liquid containing solid particles onto a surface, and allowing the liquid to evaporate. This is nothing new, but what is exciting is that we’ve shown that during evaporation, the small particles push away the larger ones, remaining at the top surface whilst the larger are pushed to bottom. This happens naturally.”

Dr Fortini continued, “This type of ‘self-layering’ in a coating could be very useful. For example, in a sun screen, most of the sunlight-blocking particles could be designed to push their way to the top, leaving particles that can adhere to the skin near the bottom of the coating. Typically the particles used in coatings have sizes that are 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair so engineering these coatings takes place at a microscopic level. ”

The team is continuing to work on such research to understand how to control the width of the layer by changing the type and amount of small particles in the coating and explore their use in industrial products such as paints, inks, and adhesives

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

Dynamic Stratification in Drying Films of Colloidal Mixtures by Andrea Fortini, Ignacio Martín-Fabiani, Jennifer Lesage De La Haye, Pierre-Yves Dugas, Muriel Lansalot, Franck D’Agosto, Elodie Bourgeat-Lami, Joseph L. Keddie, and Richard P. Sear. Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 118301 – Published 18 March 2016 DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.118301

© 2016 American Physical Society

This article is behind a paywall.

Citizen science cyborgs: the wave of the future?

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If you’re thinking of a human who’s been implanted with sort of computer chip, that’s not the kind of cyborg citizen scientist that Kevin Schawinski who developed the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project is writing about in his March 17, 2016 essay for The Conversation. Schawinski introduces the concept of citizen science and his premise,

Millions of citizen scientists have been flocking to projects that pool their time and brainpower to tackle big scientific problems, from astronomy to zoology. Projects such as those hosted by the Zooniverse get people across the globe to donate some part of their cognitive surplus, pool it with others’ and apply it to scientific research.

But the way in which citizen scientists contribute to the scientific enterprise may be about to change radically: rather than trawling through mountains of data by themselves, they will teach computers how to analyze data. They will teach these intelligent machines how to act like a crowd of human beings.

We’re on the verge of a huge change – not just in how we do citizen science, but how we do science itself.

He also explains why people power (until recently) has been superior to algorithms,

The human mind is pretty amazing. A young child can tell one human face from another without any trouble, yet it took computer scientists and engineers over a decade to build software that could do the same. And that’s not human beings’ only advantage: we are far more flexible than computers. Give a person some example images of galaxies instead of human faces, and she’ll soon outperform any computer running a neural net in classifying galaxies.

I hit on that reality when I was trying to classify about 50,000 galaxy images for my Ph.D. research in 2007. I took a brief overview of what computers could do and decided that none of the state-of-the-art solutions available was really good enough for what I wanted. So I went ahead and sorted nearly 50,000 galaxies “by eye.” This endeavor led to the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project, in which we invited the public to help astronomers classify a million galaxies by shape and discover the “weird things” out there that nobody knew are out there, such as Hanny’s Voorwerp, the giant glowing cloud of gas next to a massive galaxy.

But the people power advantage has changed somewhat with deep brains (deep neural networks), which can learn and develop intuition the way humans do. One of these deep neural networks has made recent news,

Recently, the team behind Google’s DeepMind has thrown down the gauntlet to the world’s best Go players, claiming that their deep mind can beat them. Go has remained an intractable challenge to computers, with good human players still routinely beating the most powerful computers – until now. Just this March AlphaGo, Google’s Go-playing deep mind, beat Go champion Lee Sedol 4-1.

Schawinski goes on to make his case for this new generation of machine intelligence,

We’re now entering an era in which machines are starting to become competitive with humans in terms of analyzing images, a task previously reserved for human citizen scientists clicking away at galaxies, climate records or snapshots from the Serengeti. This landscape is completely different from when I was a graduate student just a decade ago – then, the machines just weren’t quite up to scratch in many cases. Now they’re starting to outperform people in more and more tasks.

He then makes his case for citizen science cyborgs while explaining what he means by that,

But the machines still need help – our help! One of the biggest problems for deep neural nets is that they require large training sets, examples of data (say, images of galaxies) which have already been carefully and accurately classified. This is one way in which the citizen scientists will be able to contribute: train the machines by providing high-quality training sets so the machines can then go off and deal with the rest of the data.

There’s another way citizen scientists will be able to pitch in: by helping us identify the weird things out there we don’t know about yet, the proverbial Rumsfeldian [Donald Rumsfeld, a former US Secretary of Defense under both the Gerald Ford and George H. Bush administrations] “unknown unknowns.” Machines can struggle with noticing unusual or unexpected things, whereas humans excel at it.

So envision a future where a smart system for analyzing large data sets diverts some small percentage of the data to human citizen scientists to help train the machines. The machines then go through the data, occasionally spinning off some more objects to the humans to improve machine performance as time goes on. If the machines then encounter something odd or unexpected, they pass it on to the citizen scientists for evaluation.

Thus, humans and machines will form a true collaboration: citizen science cyborgs.

H/t March 17, 2016 phys.org news item.

I recommend reading Schwawinski’s article, which features an embedded video, in its entirety should you have the time.

Chemicals that slow biological aging in yeast might help humans too

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A March 15, 2016 Concordia University (Montréal, Canada) news release (also on EurekAlert) describes research that may slow the aging process (Note: Links have been removed),

Even though the search for the Fountain of Youth dates back to the ancient Greeks, the quest to live forever continues today. Indeed, it has been said that the ability to slow the aging process would be the most important medical discovery in the modern era.

A new study published in the journal Oncotarget by researchers from Concordia and the Quebec-based biotech company Idunn Technologies may have uncovered an important factor: plant extracts containing the six best groups of anti-aging molecules ever seen.

For the study, the research team combed through Idunn Technologies’ extensive biological library, conducting more than 10,000 trials to screen for plant extracts that would increase the chronological lifespan of yeast.

Why yeast? Cellularly speaking, aging progresses similarly in both yeast and humans. It’s the best cellular model to understand how the anti-aging process takes place.

“In total, we found six new groups of molecules that decelerate the chronological aging of yeast,” says Vladimir Titorenko, the study’s senior author and a professor in the Department of Biology at Concordia. He carried out the study with a group of Concordia students and Éric Simard, the founder of Idunn Technologies, which is named for the goddess of rejuvenation in Norse mythology.

This has important implications not only for slowing the aging process, but also for preventing certain diseases associated with aging, including cancer.

“Rather than focus on curing the individual disease, interventions on the molecular processes of aging can simultaneously delay the onset and progression of most age-related disorders. This kind of intervention is predicted to have a much larger effect on healthy aging and life expectancy than can be attained by treating individual diseases,” says Simard, who notes that these new molecules will soon be available in commercial products.

“These results also provide new insights into mechanisms through which chemicals extracted from certain plants can slow biological aging,” says Titorenko.

One of these groups of molecules is the most potent longevity-extending pharmacological intervention yet described in scientific literature: a specific extract of willow bark.

Willow bark was commonly used during the time of Hippocrates, when people were advised to chew on it to relieve pain and fever. The study showed that it increases the average and maximum chronological lifespan of yeast by 475 per cent and 369 per cent, respectively. This represents a much greater effect than rapamycin and metformin, the two best drugs known for their anti-aging effects.

“These six extracts have been recognized as non-toxic by Health Canada, and already exhibit recognized health benefits in humans,” says Simard.

“But first, more research must be done. That’s why Idunn Technologies is collaborating with four other universities for six research programs, to go beyond yeast, and work with an animal model of aging, as well as two cancer models.”

A rather interesting image was included with the news release,

The Fountain of Youth, a 1546 painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Courtesy: Concordia University

The Fountain of Youth, a 1546 painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Courtesy: Concordia University

There’s also this,

An extract of willow bark has shown to be one of the most potent longevity-extending pharmacological interventions yet described in scientific literature. Courtesy: Concordia University

An extract of willow bark has shown to be one of the most potent longevity-extending pharmacological interventions yet described in scientific literature. Courtesy: Concordia University

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

Discovery of plant extracts that greatly delay yeast chronological aging and have different effects on longevity-defining cellular processes by Vicky Lutchman, Younes Medkour, Eugenie Samson, Anthony Arlia-Ciommo, Pamela Dakik, Berly Cortes, Rachel Feldman, Sadaf Mohtashami, Mélissa McAuley, Marisa Chancharoen, Belise Rukundo, Éric Simard, Vladimir I. Titorenko. DOI: 10.18632/oncotarget.7665 Published: February 24, 2016

This appears to be an open access paper.

You can find out more about Idunn Technologies here but you will need French language reading skills as the English language version of the site is not yet available.

Islamic art inspires stretchy metamaterials

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A March 16, 2016 article by Jonathan Webb for BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) News Online describes research on metamaterials from McGill University (Montréal, Canada),

Metamaterials are engineered to have properties that don’t occur naturally, such as getting wider when stretched instead of just longer and thinner.

These perforated rubber sheets made by a Canadian team do just that – and then remain stable in their expanded state until they are squeezed back again.

Such designs could help make expandable stents or spacecraft components.

“In conventional materials, when you pull in one direction it will contract in other directions,” said Dr Ahmad Rafsanjani, from McGill University in Montreal.

“But with ‘auxetic’ materials, due to their internal architecture, when you pull in one direction they expand in the lateral direction.”

A March 16, 2016 article by Shannon Hall in the New Scientist provides more details,

This property comes from their geometric substructure, which when stationary looks like a series of connected squares. When the squares turn relative to each other, however, the material’s density lowers but its thickness increases, allowing it to grow when stretched.

But this twisting means that the materials lose their original shape as they expand. So Ahmad Rafsanjani and Damiano Pasini of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, set out to create a material that would grow when stretched yet keep its form.

To do this, they turned to a beautiful kind of geometry.

“There is a huge library of geometries when you look at Islamic architectures,” says Rafsanjani. The team picked their design from the walls of the Kharraqan towers, two mausoleums built in 1067 and 1093 in the plains in northern Iran.

Both Webb’s and Hall’s articles are embedded with images of the architecture. There’s also a New Scientist video demonstrating stretchability,

The researchers discussed this work in a presentation titled:  Multistable Compliant Auxetic Metamaterials Inspired by Geometric Patterns in Islamic Arts at the American Physical Society’s March 2016 meeting (March 14 – 18, 2016).

Tempest in a teapot or a sign of things to come? UK’s National Graphene Institute kerfuffle

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A scandal-in-the-offing, intellectual property, miffed academics, a chortling businessman, graphene, and much more make this a fascinating story.

Before launching into the main attractions, those unfamiliar with the UK graphene effort might find this background informal useful. Graphene, was first isolated at the University of Manchester in 2004 by scientists Andre Geim* and Konstantin Novoselov, Russian immigrants, both of whom have since become Nobel laureates and knights of the realm. The excitement in the UK and elsewhere is due to graphene’s extraordinary properties which could lead to transparent electronics, foldable/bendable electronics, better implants, efficient and inexpensive (they hope) water filters, and more. The UK government has invested a lot of money in graphene as has the European Union (1B Euros in the Graphene Flagship) in the hope that huge economic benefits will be reaped.

Dexter Johnson’s March 15, 2016 posting on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) provides details about the situation (Note: Links have been removed),

A technology that, a year ago, was being lauded as the “first commercially viable consumer product” using graphene now appears to be caught up in an imbroglio over who owns its intellectual property rights. The resulting controversy has left the research institute behind the technology in a bit of a public relations quagmire.

The venerable UK publication The Sunday Times reported this week on what appeared to be a mutiny occurring at the National Graphene Institute (NGI) located at the University of Manchester. Researchers at the NGI had reportedly stayed away from working at the institute’s gleaming new $71 million research facility over fears that their research was going to end up in the hands of foreign companies, in particular a Taiwan-based company called BGT Materials.

The “first commercially viable consumer product” noted in Dexter’s posting was a graphene-based lightbulb which was announced by the NGI to much loud crowing in March 2015 (see my March 30, 2015 posting). The company producing the lightbulb was announced as “… Graphene Lighting PLC is a spin-out based on a strategic partnership with the National Graphene Institute (NGI) at The University of Manchester to create graphene applications.” There was no mention of BGT.

Dexter describes the situation from the BGT perspective (from his March 15, 2016 posting), Note: Links have been removed,

… BGT did not demur when asked by  the Times whether it owned the technology. In fact, Chung Ping Lai, BGT’s CEO, claimed it was his company that had invented the technology for the light bulb and not the NGI. The Times report further stated that Lai controls all the key patents and claims to be delighted with his joint venture with the university. “I believe in luck and I have had luck in Manchester,” Lai told the Times.

With companies outside the UK holding majority stakes in the companies spun out of the NGI—allowing them to claim ownership of the technologies developed at the institute—one is left to wonder what was the purpose of the £50 million (US $79 million) earmarked for graphene research in the UK more than four years ago? Was it to develop a local economy based around graphene—a “Graphene Valley”, if you will? Or was it to prop up the local construction industry through the building of shiny new buildings that reportedly few people occupy? That’s the charge leveled by Andre Geim, Nobel laureate for his discovery of graphene, and NGI’s shining star. Geim reportedly described the new NGI building as: “Money put in the British building industry rather than science.”

Dexter ends his March 15, 2016 posting with an observation  that will seem familiar to Canadians,

Now, it seems the government’s eagerness to invest in graphene research—or at least, the facilities for conducting that research—might have ended up bringing it to the same place as its previous lack of investment: the science is done in the UK and the exploitation of the technology is done elsewhere.

The March 13, 2016 Sunday Times article [ETA on April 3, 2016: This article is now behind a paywall] by Tom Harper, Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Michael Sheridan, which seems to be the source of Dexter’s posting, takes a more partisan approach,

ACADEMICS are boycotting a top research facility after a company linked to China was given access to lucrative confidential material from one of Britain’s greatest scientific breakthroughs.

Some scientists at Manchester University working on graphene, a wonder substance 200 times stronger than steel, refuse to work at the new £61m national institution, set up to find ways to exploit the material, amid concerns over a deal struck between senior university management and BGT Materials.

The academics are concerned that the National Graphene Institute (NGI), which was opened last year by George Osborne, the chancellor, and forms one of the key planks of his “northern powerhouse” industrial strategy, does not have the necessary safeguards to protect their confidential research, which could revolutionise the electronics, energy, health and building industries.

BGT, which is controlled by a Taiwanese businessman, subsequently agreed to work with a Chinese manufacturing company and university to develop similar graphene technology.

BGT says its work in Manchester has been successful and it is “offensive” and “untrue” to suggest that it would unfairly use intellectual property. The university say there is no evidence “whatsoever” of unfair use of confidential information. Manchester says it is understandable that some scientists are cautious about the collaborative environment of the new institute. But one senior academic said the arrangement with BGT had caused the university’s graphene research to descend into “complete anarchy”.

The academic said: “The NGI is a national facility, and why should we use it for a company, which is not even an English [owned] company? How much [intellectual property] is staying in England and how much is going to Taiwan?”

The row highlights concerns that the UK has dawdled in developing one of its greatest discoveries. Nearly 50% of ­graphene-related patents have been filed in China, and just 1% in Britain.

Manchester signed a £5m “research collaboration agreement” with BGT Materials in October 2013. Although the company is controlled by a Taiwanese businessman, Chung-ping Lai, the university does have a 17.5% shareholding.

Manchester claimed that the commercial deal would “attract a significant number of jobs to the city” and “benefit the UK economy”.

However, an investigation by The Sunday Times has established:

Only four jobs have been created as a result of the deal and BGT has not paid the full £5m due under the agreement after two projects were cancelled.

…

Pictures sent to The Sunday Times by a source at the university last month show that the offices at the NGI [National Graphene Institute], which can accommodate 120 staff, were deserted.

British-based businessmen working with graphene have also told The Sunday Times of their concerns about the institute’s information security. Tim Harper, a Manchester-based graphene entrepreneur, said: “We looked at locating there [at the NGI] but we take intellectual property extremely seriously and it is a problem locating in such a facility.

“If you don’t have control over your computer systems or the keys to your lab, then you’ve got a problem.”

I recommend reading Dexter’s post and the Sunday Times article as they provide some compelling insight into the UK situation vis à vis nanotechnology, science, and innovation.

*’Gheim’ corrected to ‘Geim’ on March 30, 2016.

2-D melting and surfacing premelting of a single particle

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Scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and the University of Amsterdam (in the Netherlands) have measured surface premelting with single particle resolution. From a March 15, 2016 HKUST news release on EurekAlert,

The surface of a solid often melts into a thin layer of liquid even below its melting point. Such surface premelting is prevalent in all classes of solids; for instance, two pieces of ice can fuse below 0°C because the premelted surface water becomes embedded inside the bulk at the contact point and thus freeze. Premelting facilitates crystal growth and is critical in metallurgy, geology, and meteorology such as glacier movement, frost heave, snowflake growth and skating. However, the causative factors of various premelting scenarios, and the effect of dimensionality on premelting are poorly understood due to the lack of microscopic measurements.

To this end, researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and University of Amsterdam conducted a research where they were able to measure surface premelting with single-particle resolution for the first time by using novel colloidal crystals. They found that dimensionality is crucial to bulk melting and bulk solid-solid transitions, which strongly affect surface melting behaviors. To the surprise of the researchers, they found that a crystal with free surfaces (solid-vapor interface) melted homogenously from both surfaces and within the bulk, in contrast to the commonly assumed heterogeneous melting from surfaces. These observations would provide new challenges on premelting and melting theories.

The research team was led by associate professor of physics Yilong Han and graduate student Bo Li from HKUST. HKUST graduate students Feng Wang, Di Zhou, Yi Peng, and postdoctoral researcher Ran Ni from University of Amsterdam in Netherlands also participated in the research.

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Micrometer sized colloidal spheres in liquid suspensions have been used as powerful model systems for the studies of phase transitions because the thermal-motion trajectories of these “big atoms” can be directly visualized under an optical microscope. “Previous studies mainly used repulsive colloids, which cannot form stable solid-vapor interfaces,” said Han. “Here, we made a novel type colloid with temperature-sensitive attractions which can better mimic atoms, since all atoms have attractions, or otherwise they cannot condense into stable solid in air. We assembled these attractive spheres into large well-tunable two-dimensional colloidal crystals with free surfaces for the first time.

“This paves the way to study surface physics using colloidal model systems. Our first project along this direction is about surface premelting, which was poorly understood before. Surprisingly, we found that it is also related to bulk melting and solid-solid transitions,” Han added.

The team found that two-dimensional (2D) monolayer crystals premelted into a thin layer of liquid with a constant thickness, an exotic phenomenon known as incomplete blocked premelting. By contrast, the surface-liquid thickness of the two- or three-layer thin-film crystal increased to infinity as it approaches its melting point, i.e. a conventional complete premelting. Such blocked surface premelting has been occasionally observed, e.g. in ice and germanium, but lacks theoretical explanations.

“Here, we found that the premelting of the 2D crystal was triggered by an abrupt lattice dilation because the crystal can no longer provide enough attractions to surface particles after a drop in density.” Li said. “Before the surface liquid grew thick, the bulk crystal collapsed and melted due to mechanical instability. This provides a new simple mechanism for blocked premelting. The two-layer crystals are mechanically stable because particles have more neighbors. Thus they exhibit a conventional surface melting.”

As an abrupt dilation does not change the lattice symmetry, this is an isostructural solid-solid transition, which usually occurs in metallic and multiferroic materials. The colloidal system provides the first experimental observation of isostructural solid-solid transition at the single-particle level.

The mechanical instability induced a homogenous melting from within the crystal rather than heterogeneous melting from the surface. “We observed that the 2D melting is a first-order transition with a homogeneous proliferation of grain boundaries, which confirmed the grain-boundary-mediated 2D melting theory.” said Han. “First-order 2D melting has been observed in some molecular monolayers, but the theoretically predicted grain-boundary formation has not been observed before.”

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

Imaging the Homogeneous Nucleation During the Melting of Superheated Colloidal Crystals by Ziren Wang, Feng Wang, Yi Peng, Zhongyu Zheng, Yilong Han. Science  05 Oct 2012:
Vol. 338, Issue 6103, pp. 87-90 DOI: 10.1126/science.1224763

This paper is behind a paywall.

The Weyl fermion and new electronics

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This story concerns a quasiparticle (Weyl fermion) which is a different kind of particle than the nanoparticles usually mentioned here. A March 17, 2016 news item on Nanowerk profiles research that suggests the Weyl fermion may find applications in the field of electronics,

The Weyl fermion, just discovered in the past year, moves through materials practically without resistance. Now researchers are showing how it could be put to use in electronic components.

Today electronic devices consume a lot of energy and require elaborate cooling mechanisms. One approach for the development of future energy-saving electronics is to use special particles that exist only in the interior of materials but can move there practically undisturbed. Electronic components based on these so-called Weyl fermions would consume considerably less energy than present-day chips. That’s because up to now devices have relied on the movement of electrons, which is inhibited by resistance and thus wastes energy.

Evidence for Weyl fermions was discovered only in the past year, by several research teams including scientists from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). Now PSI researchers have shown — within the framework of an international collaboration with two research institutions in China and the two Swiss technical universities, ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne — that there are materials in which only one kind of Weyl fermion exists. That could prove decisive for applications in electronic components, because it makes it possible to guide the particles’ flow in the material.

A March 17, 2016 Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) press release by Paul Piwnicki, which originated the news item, describes the work in more detail (Note: There is some redundancy),

In the past year, researchers of the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI were among those who found experimental evidence for a particle whose existence had been predicted in the 1920s — the Weyl fermion. One of the particle’s peculiarities is that it can only exist in the interior of materials. Now the PSI researchers, together with colleagues at two Chinese research institutions as well as at ETH Zurich and EPF Lausanne, have made a subsequent discovery that opens the possibility of using the movement of Weyl fermions in future electronic devices. …

Today’s computer chips use the flow of electrons that move through the device’s conductive channels. Because, along the way, electrons are always colliding with each other or with other particles in the material, a relatively high amount of energy is needed to maintain the flow. That means not only that the device wastes a lot of energy, but also that it heats itself up enough to necessitate an elaborate cooling mechanism, which in turn requires additional space and energy.

In contrast, Weyl fermions move virtually undisturbed through the material and thus encounter practically no resistance. “You can compare it to driving on a highway where all of the cars are moving freely in the same direction,” explains Ming Shi, a senior scientist at the PSI. “The electron flow in present-day chips is more comparable to driving in congested city traffic, with cars coming from all directions and getting in each other’s way.”

Important for electronics: only one kind of particle

While in the materials examined last year there were always several kinds of Weyl fermions, all moving in different ways, the PSI researchers and their colleagues have now produced a material in which only one kind of Weyl fermion occurs. “This is important for applications in electronics, because here you must be able to precisely steer the particle flow,” explains Nan Xu, a postdoctoral researcher at the PSI.

Weyl fermions are named for the German mathematician Hermann Weyl, who predicted their existence in 1929. These particles have some striking characteristics, such as having no mass and moving at the speed of light. Weyl fermions were observed as quasiparticles in so-called Weyl semimetals. In contrast to “real” particles, quasiparticles can only exist inside materials. Weyl fermions are generated through the collective motion of electrons in suitable materials. In general, quasiparticles can be compared to waves on the surface of a body of water — without the water, the waves would not exist. At the same time, their movement is independent of the water’s motion.

The material that the researchers have now investigated is a compound of the chemical elements tantalum and phosphorus, with the chemical formula TaP. The crucial experiments were carried out with X-rays at the Swiss Light Source (SLS) of the Paul Scherrer Institute.

Studying novel materials with properties that could make them useful in future electronic devices is a central research area of the Paul Scherrer Institute. In the process, the researchers pursue a variety of approaches and use many different experimental methods.

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

Observation of Weyl nodes and Fermi arcs in tantalum phosphide by N. Xu, H. M. Weng, B. Q. Lv, C. E. Matt, J. Park, F. Bisti, V. N. Strocov, D. Gawryluk, E. Pomjakushina, K. Conder, N. C. Plumb, M. Radovic, G. Autès, O. V. Yazyev, Z. Fang, X. Dai, T. Qian, J. Mesot, H. Ding & M. Shi. Nature Communications 7, Article number: 11006  doi:10.1038/ncomms11006 Published 17 March 2016

This paper is open access.