The Wall Street Journal discusses plans by the FDA to expedite vaccine approval. Expedited approval processes and enhancing the overall speed and efficiency of validating the safety and effectiveness of new drugs and technology would be useful and critical in accelerate the adoption of new technology like molecular manufacturing with medical applications. The FDA would …
MIT’s new McGovern Institute for Brain Research hopes to connect the dots between brain cell activity and behavior changes. When fully staffed, the Institute will house 16 principal investigators. One group of scientists will work to develop more sensitive and accurate imaging technologies, which can probe the activities of single neurons. Another team will investigate …
MIT researchers, led by Professor Sidney Yip, have proposed a new theory that might eliminate one obstacle to more capable robots – the limited speed and control of the “artificial muscles” that perform such tasks. Currently, robotic muscles move 100 times slower than ours. But engineers using the Yip lab’s new theory could boost those …
A online Wired magazine article discussing the use of nanoparticles and nanoscale sensors for detecting and treating cancer The National Cancer Institute, which recently announced two waves of funding for nanotech training and research, sees nanotechnology as vital to its stated goal of “eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015.” Nanotech gives us the …
A new HIV test the size of a credit card promises to diagnose the disease in minutes rather than weeks, and could be deployed in sub-Saharan Africa as early as next year. In tests, it has detected the amount of CD4 cells in the blood in as little as 10 minutes. The CD4 count indicates …
Recent advances in nanotech devices, point to new ways for developing inexpensive and effective cancer-screening devices. One of the most promising of these new detectors is being built by Charles Lieber, a chemist at Harvard University. In an article this month in Nature Biotechnology, he announced a highly-sensitive detector that can simultaneously find multiple cancer …
Membranes composed of manmade carbon nanotubes permit a fluid flow nearly 10,000 to 100,000 times faster than conventional fluid flow theory would predict because of the nanotubes’ nearly friction-free surface, researchers at the University of Kentucky report in the Nov. 3 issue of Nature. In their study, Mainak Majumder, Nitin Chopra and Bruce J. Hinds …
What are called nanosaws, nanocombs and nanowires can be grown (self-assembled) from cadmium selenium. A study of the temperature and pressure conditions were systematically varied and the impact on the growth was determined. The nanosaws and combs seem to be 2 microns wide. I think the nanowires are a few nanometers thick. While this is …
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have potentially opened up a new avenue toward room temperature quantum information processing. By demonstrating the ability to image and control single isolated electron spins in diamond, they unexpectedly discovered a new channel for transferring information to other surrounding spins — an initial step towards spin-based information processing. A team …
Richard Smalley, a Rice University professor who discovered fullerenes, died Friday after a long bout with cancer
