CNST releases inaugural version of nano@illinois research faculty handbook

The Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) released the inaugural version of the nano@illinois Research Faculty Handbook, featuring information on more than 150 U of I nanotechnology researchers and collaborators and also highlights some of the leading micro and nanotechnology laboratories and federally-funded multidisciplinary centers.



"In recent years, nanotechnology research has taken center stage at Illinois, with more than 150 researchers engaged in micro and nanotechnology research at the campus. Prior to the development of the handbook, it was a challenge to know who was involved in nanotechnology, but not anymore," said Irfan Ahmad, executive director of the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST), and acting assistant dean for research for the College of Engineering. "The revised version of the handbook is being distributed campus- and nation-wide. "It has already stimulated new cross-campus partnerships."

"When we set out to establish CNST in 2001-02 in collaboration with colleagues at the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, we had envisaged CNST to be a clearing house for nanotechnology," said Ilesanmi Adesida, dean of the College of Engineering, the CSNT founder, and a current co-director. "This handbook accomplishes just that and much more; it will go a long way in further raising the profile of nanotechnology researchers at Illinois."

"We had always envisioned this handbook to be a resource for faculty researchers, graduate students, campus administration, industry, and state and federal agencies. The release is a culmination of these efforts packaged in a nicely developed reference handbook," said Rashid Bashir, director of Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory who serves as a CSNT co-director.

"While reviewing the inaugural issue of the handbook, I was impressed at the way the information was structured for maximum benefit, while highlighting the research thrusts and faculty college and departmental affiliations," said Jozef Kokini, associate dean of Research, College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences.

A PDF of the nano@illinois Faculty Handbook can also be downloaded here. A limited number of hard copies can be requested by sending email to nanotechnology@illinois.edu; additional copies are available at cost.
Source: University of Illinois

Nano sunscreen warnings won't be mandatory

 

The Government is set to disappoint consumers who are worried about the use of nanotechnology in sunscreens, with documents obtained by PM showing the Government will not opt for mandatory labelling.
Nanotechnology opens up a new world of innovation and technological breakthrough, but also raises new safety considerations because compounds behave differently when they measure just billionths of a metre.
In October 2008, a NSW parliamentary inquiry noted that the risks of nanoparticles in sunscreen were still being investigated and it recommended sunscreens containing nanoparticles be labelled accordingly.
But such a ruling would require a change to federal laws, and the Federal Government is yet to respond to the call for mandatory labelling.
Documents obtained by PM spell out the Australian Government's position, as developed by a working group for the Department of Innovation.
The documents provide a general statement in response to labelling for any purpose: "At this early stage of use of nano products, labelling for informed choice should not be supported."
That advice was distributed at the Nanoproduct Labelling Meeting, convened by the Department of Innovation in November last year, along with a statement on the labelling of sunscreens and cosmetics specifically.
The department's advice is that nanoparticles cannot be reliably measured, and the safety concerns are dismissed: "...it would not be informing consumers of any hazard nor is it technically feasible to enforce at present."
The documents were provided to lobby group, the Friends of The Earth, after a freedom of information request.
Nanotechnology campaigner with Friends of the Earth, Elena McMaster, questions why the Government is yet to announce a position publicly, which she says is "very nervous about nanotechnology".
The question over the hazards of rubbing nanoparticles of titanium dioxide and zinc oxide into the skin is still a controversial one.
They are the chemicals which reflect UV radiation, but in nanoparticle form they absorb it, setting off a reaction which releases elements which can alter DNA.
The Australian regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, says the current weight of evidence suggests nanoparticles in sunscreen do not reach living skin cells.
But a recent article in the Australasian Journal of Dermatology says nanoparticle sunscreens should be labelled because some recent studies suggest nanoparticles go deeper into the skin than previously thought.
The long-term effects of rubbing nanoparticles on skin are also the subject of an ongoing study by the CSIRO.
Ms McMaster says the Government's position ignores warnings from scientists.
"Our Federal Government is simply sticking its head in the sand and refusing to do anything," she said.
"What Friends of the Earth is advocating for is labelling of nanoparticles in sunscreens or cosmetics. So this would allow consumers to make up their own mind about whether they use a product containing nanomaterials or not."
She says if the Government will not or cannot regulate the area, it should ban the sale of sunscreens containing nanomaterials until the science is more conclusive.
"That's the bottom line for us. If we can't regulate to ensure safety we should be instituting a moratorium."
Some scientists and dermatologists are also calling for mandatory labelling of nano-sunscreens.
The cosmetics industry also wants the Federal Government to act, but for a very different reason.
Craig Brock, the policy director for ACCORD - which represents the cosmetics industry in Australia - says the industry wants to be on a level footing with the European industry, which will have mandatory labelling by 2013.
"We're well aware that there's an undoubted scare campaign underway on this issue and we think that the way forward on this is to meet head-on the public demands for information and to recommend that the Government institute a mandatory labelling scheme," he said.
PM requested an interview with the Minister for Innovation, Kim Carr, to establish whether the Government has changed its view since the position paper was presented last November.
Senator Carr was not available and PM was referred to the Parliamentary Secretary for Health, Catherine King.
Her spokesman says she is not available either, but the position paper is consistent with the latest advice from the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

Nanotechnology goes full steam ahead

By Kaitlin Vandervoort

Nanotechnology is the study of controlling matter on an atomic or molecular scale. By being able to deconstruct then reassemble atoms into previously unknown material, nanotechnology has the potential to create numerous new materials and devices such as electronics, energy and medication. Anything from advances in medicine, food and even sports equipment can come from nanotechnology. This may sound promising, but nanotechnology also raises concerns about toxicity and environmental impact of nanomaterials. Many people think that nanotechnology could be a positive effect on society, but research shows differently.



Along with other concerns about nanotechnology, health fears are starting to grow. Molecular biologist, Benedict Trouiller, has been dousing the drinking water of lab mice with nano-titanium dioxide, the most common nanomaterial found in consumer products today, for the past two years. Halfway through the tests, the results had become alarming. When the mice had consumed the nanomaterial, it damaged or destroyed their DNA and chromosomes. The degree of DNA damage could be linked to all the big killers of humans, specifically cancer, heart disease, and neurological disease. According to the Environmental Working Group, nano-titanium dioxide is calculated to be in close to 10,000 over-the-counter products in one form or another. "[It’s] in everything from medicine capsules and nutritional supplements, to food icing and additives, to skin creams, oils and toothpaste," says Professor Robert Schiestl, a generic toxicologist who ran the lab at UCLA’s School of Public Health where Trouiller did her research.

Researchers found that carbon nanotubes, which are widely used in industrial applications, can penetrate the lungs deeper than asbestos and can cause fatal damage like asbestos does, except more rapidly. Many other nanoparticles, specifically ones composed of metal-chemical combinations, are able to cause cancer and birth defects, damage the heart, liver and other organs of lab animals. They may also lead to harmful buildups in many of the body’s systems.

Policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, Jaydee Hanson, worries that the "danger is greater when nano-titanium dioxide is used in food." Ice cream companies and bread makers are using this nanomaterial to make ice cream "look richer and better textured," and make loaves of bread "shinier and help them keep microbe-free longer"

Researchers have found that due to the size of nanoparticles, they can enter the body through any pathway. The toxicity of a specific nanoparticle depends on its shape and chemical composition. "There is so much uncertainty about the questions of safety. We can’t tell you how safe or unsafe nanomaterials are. There is just too much we just don’t yet know," says Jim Alwood, nanotechnology coordinator of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics.

Even though this research shows that nanomaterials can be harmful, most federal agencies are taking no action to ensure public safety. Unfortunately, consumers have no way of knowing if the products they are purchasing contain nanomaterials because, under current U.S. laws, it is up to the manufacturer’s discretion what they want to put on their labels.

Unfortunately, society would like to see technology that can help people. Nanotechnology manufacterers should have shown the brighter side to everything in the begining but now, we might have to be careful with the products we use.

Nanotechnology finding lands Chennai scholar big bucks job in US

A Chennai scholar has set an example for students who prefer lucrative managerial jobs to arduous research.R Shivaraman, 24, a researchscholar with SRM University, has landed a Rs1.4-crore-a-year job with an American firm for his work in increasing the capacity of computer hard drives. He holds a joint patent with another Indian for the innovation, that enables a hard drive to store 30 terabyte as against the current 500 gigabyte.
Shivaraman, who works at the Nanotechnology Research Centre of SRM, used to earn Rs12,000 per month before he was signed up by US-based Seagate Technologies as an associate scientist.
He will work on developing ultra high-density storage devices for magnetic recording after he takes up his new assignment in December. He is currently working to complete his PhD here.
His mentor and director of the Nanotechnology Research Centre, C Gopalakrishnan, said Shivaraman had been working on the development of new generation storage devices with far higher storage capacity than available today.
Gopalakrishnan said Shivaraman’s research would help Seagate Technologies use polymer templated technology to increase hard disc capacity.
“I dedicate the honour to SRM University which encouraged me at every stage since my journey in nanotechnology began six years ago. I will come back and associate with SRM,” Shivaraman said. He has sought a two-year assignment with Seagate.
Shivaraman was also invited to the IEEE International Magnetics Summer School in Nanjing University, China, in September 2009. The Chinese sent the invitation after his presentations at the 10th International Magnetics Conference in the US in May 2009. He has presented several papers in Egypt, Australia, US and Spain.

A practical example of solving environmental problems utilizing nanotechnology

(Nanowerk Spotlight) Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are 'strange' nanostructures in a sense that they have both high mechanical strength and extreme flexibility. Deforming a carbon nanotube into any shape would not easily break the structure, and it recovers to original morphology in perfect manner. Researchers in China are exploiting this phenomenon by making CNT sponges consisting of a large amount of interconnected nanotubes, thus showing a combination of useful properties such as high porosity, super elasticity, robustness, and little weight (1% of water density).
The nanotube sponges not only show exciting properties as a porous material but they also are very promising to be used practically in a short time. The production method is simple and scalable, the cost is low, and the sponges can find immediate use in many fields related to water purification.
"We hope to give an example to industry that this sponge is a real thing they can prepare at low cost, make versatile products with high performance, and solve environmental problems utilizing nanotechnology," Anyuan Cao, a professor in the Department of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at Peking University, tells Nanowerk.
Cao explains that the nanotube sponges are a completely new structure compared with artificial porous materials in several aspects: The sponge is built entirely with nanotubes through a random (yet desired) interconnection. With a high porosity of >99%, the sponge can be compressed to less than 10% of its original volume yet still recover perfectly. Usually, porous materials (e.g. silica aerogels) tend to become brittle at increasing porosity, thus obtaining a material with both high porosity and flexibility has been challenging.
"Plastic foams can be deformed in a similar way to our sponges, but they do not have such high elasticity (full structural recovery) and stability at high temperature" says Cao. "I think that the soft and elastic nanotube sponges are actually similar to some biological cellulose scaffolds."
The motivation of the team – Cao's group and collaborators from Tsinghua University –is to explore potential applications of nanotechnology, especially in energy and environmental areas.
Cao notes that fabricating porous materials with nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes could take advantage of their high surface area and excellent mechanical strength and flexibility. "We have accumulated much experience in synthesizing macroscale products in recent years, and when we made this sponge-like nanotube bricks, we became convinced that they could find use in absorbing solvents, oils, even metal ions."
The scientists synthesized the sponges by a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process during which the CNTs (multi-walled nanotubes with diameters in the range of 30 to 50nm and lengths of tens to hundreds of micrometers,) self-assembled into a porous, interconnected, three-dimensional framework.
"Our CVD method is similar to that was reported for growing vertical CNT arrays, but we used a different carbon source (dichlorobenzene) to disturb the aligned growth and obtain a randomly interconnected structure," explains Cao. "The growth process of the sponges can be seen as a consecutive stacking and penetration of numerous CNT 'piles' into centimeter thickness, which is substantially different from aligned arrays where most of CNTs grow continuously from the bottom to top surface or thin sheets where CNTs were densified into a two-dimensional network during vacuum filtration."
According to the scientists, the CNT sponges are capable of absorbing a wide range of solvents and oils with excellent selectivity, recyclability, and absorption capacities up to 180 times their own weight, two orders of magnitude higher than activated carbon.
The potential application areas for these sponges is vast. They could be used in large-area oil spill clean-ups (A small densified pellet floating on water surface can quickly remove a spreading oil film with an area up to 800 times that of the sponge), water purification (by targeted absorption of small dusts and unwanted molecules/ions from water), and toxic gas filtration. In addition to environmental applications, the CNT sponges can find use as protective coating, thermal insulator, and high strength-to-weight composite. For example, the sponges can absorb mechanical energy during large-strain deformation, therefore resist foreign force or impact. Their high surface area and porosity are also useful for supporting fine catalyst particles in photo-catalytic devices and fuel cells.
Cao cautions that safety concerns of this sponge material need to be explored before extensive use in certain situations (e.g. in water) can take place. While the sponge can be compressed arbitrarily and repeatedly, its tensile strength is relatively small – it is weak when you pull. This could cause the structure to split in certain conditions, for example, under bending or tensile stress. It is also possible that individual nanotubes detach from the sponge body during use, which could be problematic as chemical interaction of CNTs with human tissue and organs is still unclear.
"Despite of that, there are many ways to strengthen and secure our sponges to ensure the safety of those nano-products" says Cao.
Currently, the team are working on making better samples with larger size. Of particular interest is to tailor the structure and properties of the nanotube sponges to facilitate different applications.
"We can already control pore size, internal surface area, electrical and mechanical properties (related to the structure of individual nanotubes and how they are assembled) during synthesis and post-treatment" says Cao. "We are also involving methods such as chemical functionalization to make CNT sponges more or less attract specific molecules. Because the sponge pore size is relatively large (several to tens of nanometers), small molecules (e.g. gas, ions) are difficult to be absorbed and immobilized inside pristine-form sponges. It is challenging to find suitable chemical routes that can make the sponges selectively remove those molecules from water or environment, after that anchor and store them in a safe manner."

Nanotechnology in the Fight Against Cancer

Mauro Ferrari, Ph.D., explains how advanced nanotech-based therapeutic agents possess characteristics that can effectively exploit the unique mechanical properties of cancer lesions and treat the various forms of the disease locally.

According to Ferrari, professor and chairman of the Department of Nanomedicine and Biomedical Engineering at The University of Texas Health Science Center, some engineered nano-particles have demonstrated the capability to deliver drugs only to areas affected by disease, in the process protecting healthy cells and reducing debilitating side effects.

An important insight in understanding how to treat cancer, Ferrari says, is that aspects of the disease such as malignancy, metastasis, and angiogenesis (which is the growth of new arteries to feed tumors) are mechanical phenomena pertaining to the motion and transport of blood and cells. Nanotechnology-based therapies currently under experimentation for cancer treatment take advantage of some of these mechanical properties to find new ways to attack tumors.

This constitutes a new field that Ferrari and his medical colleagues refer to as “transport oncophysics.”

Formulations of drugs made from nano-particles have shown the ability to overcome biological barriers -- for example, by leaking through the blood vessels inside a tumor -- to concentrate on localized cancers. Because of this, nanotechnology-based drugs may be used in smaller doses and are less likely to disperse to healthy parts of the body. Ferrari and his team at The University of Texas also have designed nano-particles called Multi-Stage Vectors, which offer great promise in targeting individual cancer cells.

“We are on the brink of a new era in cancer treatment,” asserts Ferrari in the forthcoming article, titled “Infernal Mechanism.”

“The level of specificity that can be achieved through the use of the conceptual model of cancer as a mechanical disease - and through the power of the mechanical engineering design process - will result in greater therapeutic efficacy with reduced side effects,” he concludes.

Mauro Ferrari will speak on Feb. 8 at the First Global Congress on Nano-engineering for Medicine and Biology. The conference, sponsored by ASME, will open on Feb. 7 at the JW Marriott Houston, in Houston, Texas.

Provided by ASME

Composite nanomaterials show promise for solar hydrogen generation

Using sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen is potentially a clean and sustainable way to generate hydrogen for fuel-cell vehicles. Photovoltaic cells use solar energy to generate electricity, and electricity can be used to split water by electrolysis. But a more direct and efficient approach is provided by photoelectrochemical (PEC) cells, which use solar energy to generate hydrogen inside the cell itself.

The UCSC researchers focused on the semiconductor material used as a light-absorbing anode in the PEC cell. They combined two techniques--called elemental doping and quantum dot sensitization--that have been used to improve the performance of metal oxide semiconductors in solar cells. These techniques use nanotechnology to manipulate the structure of a material on the scale of billionths of a meter.

Previous work in the laboratory of Jin Zhang, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSC, showed that this combination of techniques has a synergistic effect, markedly enhancing the performance of photovoltaic cells (see earlier story). In the new study, Zhang teamed up with Yat Li, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, to test the same strategy in a PEC cell.

"Elemental doping and quantum dot sensitization are two different techniques that work well by themselves. We found that we can combine them to get a synergistic effect," Li said. "We not only extended this idea nicely to a photoelectrochemical cell for hydrogen generation, we also proposed a new model to explain the observed experimental data."

Zhang noted that more theoretical work is needed to fully understand the mechanisms involved. "Understanding the mechanisms will allow us to optimize the effects," he said. "The model we proposed in the first paper was very preliminary, but the new results have helped us refine our model."

The researchers reported their findings in the journal Nano Letters in a paper posted online on January 25. Lead authors of the paper were Jennifer Hensel, a graduate student in Zhang's lab, and Gongming Wang, a graduate student in Li's lab.

The researchers synthesized thin films of titanium dioxide nanoparticles, as well as titanium dioxide nanowire arrays vertically aligned in a thin film on a substrate. The titanium dioxide films were doped with nitrogen, and cadmium selenide nanoparticles were used for quantum dot sensitization. The resulting nanostructured composite materials were then used as photoanodes in a PEC cell to compare their performance in carefully controlled experiments.

The results are an important demonstration of the potential to improve the performance of photoelectrochemical cells, as well as photovoltaic solar cells, using carefully designed materials, Zhang said. "The key is that combining different approaches in a rational manner can significantly boost performance," he said.