ADVANCES AT NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nanotechnology Highlights of 2017
Nanotechnology is delighted to announce its Highlights of 2017, available here. Our annual selection represents the breadth and excellence of the work published in the journal. These articles include outstanding new research in Papers, and well-received Topical Reviews and Focus Collection articles. The articles were selected for the high praise received from referees, presentation of outstanding research and popularity with our online readership.

Nanotechnology Young Researcher Award
Dr Stephan Wirths, currently working at IBM Zurich, is the winner of the 2016 Young Researcher Award. The Editorial Board were particularly impressed with Stephan's outstanding contributions to semiconductor nanoscience and nanoelectronics research. To read a full interview with Stephan, and also see the two competition runners-up, please click here.

Accepted manuscripts 
Nanotechnology offers an accepted manuscript service, meaning your research can be downloaded and cited within 24 hours of acceptance. All articles accepted for publication in Nanotechnology will benefit from this service, however, authors are able to opt-out during the submission process should they want to.

https://www.elsevier.com/authors/author-services/research-elements

Nanotech Meets Contact Lenses and Virtual Reality

Nanotech could end up providing a solution to the need for bulky headsets in virtual reality environments, and the answer involves contact lenses.

Bellevue, WA-based Innovega with its iOptik platform embedded a center filter and display lens at the center of a contact lens. The optical elements are smaller than the eye's pupil and therefore do not interfere with vision. A projector can hit those tiny optical elements, which guide images to the retina. But the retina is still getting the overall normal vision provided through the entire pupil, so the brain ends up viewing the projected images and the overall normal field of vision as one.

The company said its iOptik platform provides wearers a "virtual canvas" on which any media can be viewed or application run. The prototypes will feature up to six times the number of pixels and 46 times the screen size of mobile products that rely on designs limited by conventional optics. Those optics are said to deliver games, simulator environments, and movies that are truly "immersive" and "mimic IMAX performance," the company said.

Creating Biodegradable Electrodes

Carnegie Mellon University's Chris Bettinger and Jay Whitacre found that cuttlefish ink provides just the right chemistry and nanostructure to power tiny, ingested electronic devices.

Bettinger, an assistant professor of materials science and biomedical engineering, and Whitacre, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, have been pioneers when it comes to finding battery substances that could be digested, allowing for the powering of medical devices that might also be eaten. They reported some success creating edible power sources using materials found in a daily diet, but still needed to find the optimal pigment-based anodes to include in their edible sodium-ion batteries.

They ended up finding out that naturally occurring melanins derived from cuttlefish ink exhibit higher charge storage capacity compared to other synthetic melanin derivatives when used as anode materials.

But not everything swallowed by a patient needs to be digestible. "You know, anybody who's ever taken a drug in their life probably hasn't adhered exactly to what the prescription says, or what the doctor says, so adherence is a very big issue in the industry," Folk says. "Proteus Digital Health [Redwood City, CA] is a very interesting company. They've got a pill with a power supply, a sensor, and a transmitter. And when you swallow the pill, your stomach acid kicks off the battery and initiates a signal. That indicates that you've actually taken the drug."

NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nanotechnology: is a field of research and innovation concerned with building 'things' - generally, materials and devices - on the scale of atoms and molecules. A nanometre is one-billionth of a metre: ten times the diameter of a hydrogen atom. The diameter of a human hair is, on average, 80,000 nanometres.

The ideas and concepts behind nanoscience and nanotechnology started with a talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) on December 29, 1959, long before the term nanotechnology was used. In his talk, Feynman described a process in which scientists would be able to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules. Over a decade later, in his explorations of ultraprecision machining, Professor Norio Taniguchi coined the term nanotechnology. It wasn't until 1981, with the development of the scanning tunneling microscope that could "see" individual atoms, that modern nanotechnology began.

There's an unprecedented multidisciplinary convergence of scientists dedicated to the study of a world so small, we can't see it -- even with a light microscope. That world is the field of nanotechnology, the realm of atoms and nanostructures. Nanotechnology i­s so new, no one is really sure what will come of it. Even so, predictions range from the ability to reproduce things like diamonds and food to the world being devoured by self-replicating nanorobots.

In order to understand the unusual world of nanotechnology, we need to get an idea of the units of measure involved. A centimeter is one-hundredth of a meter, a millimeter is one-thousandth of a meter, and a micrometer is one-millionth of a meter, but all of these are still huge compared to the nanoscale. A nanometer (nm) is one-billionth of a meter, smaller than the wavelength of visible light and a hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair [source: Berkeley Lab].

ADVANCES IN BIOTECHNOLOGY

1. Food transformation. Products such as bread, yogurt or cheese are made for millennia with the help of different microorganisms. Today we continue to use these methods, but on a larger scale and with greater efficiency, which proves the great utility of biotechnology in our lives.

2. Vaccines. In the beginning, they were obtained from animal samples; currently, the majority is made synthetically to be injected. Today tests are carried out to manufacture edible vaccines that, when ingested, release the agents that protect us against certain diseases. In addition to avoiding punctures, these vaccines can present other advantages, such as a lower price and simpler transportation and storage, as they do not require refrigeration.

3. Ecological materials. Many products that we use every day are made with non-renewable resources, in addition to being highly polluting. To solve this problem, environmentally friendly materials are being developed, which are also made with renewable resources, such as plastics obtained from vegetable fibers. The textile industry uses enzymes in several of its processes, which means that the byproducts obtained from them are more friendly to the environment, and that their waste can be reused.

4. Water treatment. It is a fact that every day whole bodies of water are polluted around the world. In order to solve this problem, processes such as bioremediation have been developed, which consists of planting specific microorganisms in bodies of water and defined areas. The cultures of microorganisms feed and get rid of the residues that contaminate the water, and gradually, they clean the area in which they are. In Europe, different companies have already undertaken this process to rescue the River Thames and the Seine River, with very favorable results that have given them a second look at these emblematic rivers.

5. Transgenic crops. Some people have a misconception about transgenic foods, because they believe that it is "artificial" or negative in some way. The word refers to its genetic constitution has been modified, which is a process that humans carry out since the invention of agriculture, where they selected the best fruits and vegetables to continue cultivating them, in a process of artificial selection that continues to the present day.

Biotechnology makes it possible to count on crops such as golden rice, a grain fortified with vitamin A that helps many populations with food shortages, as it helps to combat malnutrition. In general, transgenic crops are developed to obtain foods that are more resistant to pests, are better nutritionally and have a minor impact on the environment through their cultivation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpOOJggHcbk

BIOTECHNOLOGY

The experiment of                             the miraculous rods                         


Haygarth was interested in this  phenomenon due to the curiosity that gave rise to a treatment that in his time was raging. The first patent granted by the US government once independence was achieved was for a device invented by Elisha Perkins called Tractor, which consisted of a metal rod made from a secret alloy that was able to absorb pain by rubbing on the area where the discomfort was felt. In the United States it devastated and its success was such that the son of Perkins abrió a delegation in Great Britain, where each unit sold by 5 guineas (currency that was manufactured with about seven grams of gold and whose original value was equivalent to a pound sterling) , a fortune for the time.

With this simple experiment he demonstrated both that the rods were a fraud and the powerful influence of the attitude and motivation of the patient in the disease.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRYuN9GaN7I

The wait for a cancer treatment varies according to the countries where the patient lives.

  
Ari did not see it, but he got it. He put on a Love of Lesbian concert, got into the Barça squad and put at his feet Joan Manel Serrat or Judith Mascó. What was needed to raise funds to take the CAR-T (Chimeric Antigen Receptor-T) treatment to the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona, ​​an experimental gene therapy to treat acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the hematological cancer that dragged the young woman from the 13 years and that took it with 18 in 2016. The CAR-T are T lymphocytes of the patient's immune system, reprogrammed genetically to attack only tumor cells. Experts argue that this treatment eliminates, in up to 85% of cases, ALL that is resistant to conventional therapies. The problem is that, despite the high expectations that accompany it, it is a treatment that is quite inaccessible due to its high price in the market. In the United States, where it was already marketed (in Europe it is only in the United Kingdom, Germany and France), its price amounted to nearly half a million euros per patient.price amounted to nearly half a million euros per patient.