Prizes & Anniversaries
What an exciting month it is!
First comes the Nobel Prize for graphene discovery for two Russian scientists, Geim and Novoselov. It's easy to understand what graphene is - it's a single layer of carbon, just as in the picture. But even though it's just carbon, it's properties are much different: it is the strongest material ever measured, it has a thermal conductivity more than double that of diamond and has a charge mobility that is among the highest of any semiconductor.How it works: graphite in your pencil is carbon, actually they are layers of carbon one on top of the others. The bond between carbon layers are very weak and you can easily break them with the scotch tape. The layers will stick to the glue and if you repeat the process, you end up separating thinner and thinner pieces, eventually arriving at the single layer.
Ah, almost forgot - price of the final product: several hundreds dollars per gram. That's the way to get rich, especially since they are companies willing to buy TONS of this material (there's this really nice article in Nature Nanotechnology Selling graphene by the ton)
Why would anyone like to buy tons of a material that's so expensive? So, in fact, they are some chemical methods to produce it much cheaper and it's used very often in the macroscopic objects (for instance in polymers composites) to make them stronger, change their electrical or thermal properties and so on..
But the rumor has it that they don't hire girls for post-docs, since, well... they tend to get pregnant.. :s shame on you guys!!
Fullerenes are a bit forgotten nowadays, still they were the first of the carbon nanomaterials, which are such a hit right now.
Buckminsterfullerenes, because that's how they were called by their discoverers, are molecules made of 60 carbon atoms, with a structure of a football (the icosahedral, which are 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons on the surface). The funny name was inspired by the geodesic domes designed by the architect Buckminster Fuller. Now we are all familiar with the shape of a buckyball and it seems almost impossible that it took scientists almost 5 years to measure the shape of it. And during those five years they were papers claiming that C60 molecules were actually planar (including my fav: 'C60: a deflated soccer ball?')
In the end the fullerenes weren't that successful, as it was hoped, they didn't find that many applications as carbon nanotubes or graphene.
Anyway their discoverers were awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996.
So we had a Nobel for buckyballs, then 14 years later for graphene and I'm wondering how the nanotubes could have gone unnoticed!!!
Technarte, Bilbao
I think I'm obsessed with all this art thing!!Maybe that why I got so excited after seeing the info about the Technarte conference in Bilbao. It's all about art and technology, bringing together artists, researcher, professors and so on.. It might be an exciting event, see more on http://www.technarte.org/en/index.php
Congress on Energy and Environment Engineering and Management, Mérida, Spain
Mérida from 25th to 27th May 2011, will be home of The 4th International Congress of Energy and Environment Engineering and Management (CIIEM). It is organized by teachers belonging to the Areas of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre (Portugal) and the School of Industrial Engineering of the Extremadura University (Spain) and it is adressed to academic, researchers, engineers, consultants and firms from the Energy and Environment Sectors.
It will cover six mayor areas:
. Energetic Installations
. Renewable Energies
. Environmental Management. Environmental Engineering
. Environmental Education
. Materials for energy. Clean Materials.
. Energetic and environmental Project Management
For more information see the webpage here.
CienciAmérica.com
CienciAmérica.com is a webpage launched at 16th of August is aiming at communicating scientists from both of the Americas. It was set by a neurobiologist from Cornell Univ., Timothy DeVoogd, in collaboration with Galileo University of Guatemala and US Department of State. It will serve as a platform to exchange information on research, funding and possible collaborations, as well as providing science training for students and teleteaching. The website works in English and Spanish.I believe it's a great idea to establish a repport between the two sides of the continent, hope it will work as Facebook for scientists ;) bringing in fun and reminding uss that we can learn so much from each other.
Spike Walker amazig picutes
Today my discoveries were limited to watching pictures. Normally the scientific pictures are taken by scientists in a science lab (wow)But now, you take a retired schoolteacher, convert his garage into a lab and what comes out wins the Royal Photographic Society's medal. Simple, isn't it?
Enjoy the prize-winning pictures in today's Guardian.
¨Nanotechnology may revolutionize the rules and possibilities of drug discovery and change the landscape of pharmaceutical industries.¨ I was reading today in NanoLetters (full article here). I don't think it may. I'm sure it will.
As for now, there are over two dozen nanotechnology-based therapeutic products approved by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use, and more are in clinical trials. Those are the so-called first generation nanotherapeutics, most of them composed of a nontargeted delivery system (e.g., liposomes and polymers) and a drug.
The sad truth is we will need more and more medicine, as our society is growing older, environment more polluted, life more stressful and so on.. And among our civilizational diseases there's the C-word, we would never want to hear. In recent years we have progressed in our ways of dealing with cancer, we do have ways to cure it, including surgery, chemo and radio therapy. Still those methods are far from perfect, the main drawback being that they affect the whole system, not only the tumor. And still much effort is put to find new ways and to save human lives.
Help may come from quite an unexpected direction - according to results published last two months it is possible to remove tumors with help of nanosize objects.
All is based on the so called enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) theory. This theory postulates that certain sizes of particles (100-130nm) tend to accumulate in tumor tissue much more than in normal tissues because a tumor’s newly formed blood vessels are usually abnormal in form and architecture, poorly aligned with wide fenestrations, and lack a smooth muscle layer and tumors usually lack effective lymphatic drainage. Based on this theory, it is expected that nanoparticles with would be able to accumulate in a solid tumor and thus deliver a larger amount of chemotherapeutic drugs to tumors compared to normal tissues.
According to that we may try to produce the second-generation nanotherapeutics, combining nanoparticles with cancer combating drugs and then delivering it directly to the tumor, more effectively and without any harm to other tissues.
As for now, there are over two dozen nanotechnology-based therapeutic products approved by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for clinical use, and more are in clinical trials. Those are the so-called first generation nanotherapeutics, most of them composed of a nontargeted delivery system (e.g., liposomes and polymers) and a drug.
The sad truth is we will need more and more medicine, as our society is growing older, environment more polluted, life more stressful and so on.. And among our civilizational diseases there's the C-word, we would never want to hear. In recent years we have progressed in our ways of dealing with cancer, we do have ways to cure it, including surgery, chemo and radio therapy. Still those methods are far from perfect, the main drawback being that they affect the whole system, not only the tumor. And still much effort is put to find new ways and to save human lives.
Help may come from quite an unexpected direction - according to results published last two months it is possible to remove tumors with help of nanosize objects.
All is based on the so called enhanced permeability and retention (EPR) theory. This theory postulates that certain sizes of particles (100-130nm) tend to accumulate in tumor tissue much more than in normal tissues because a tumor’s newly formed blood vessels are usually abnormal in form and architecture, poorly aligned with wide fenestrations, and lack a smooth muscle layer and tumors usually lack effective lymphatic drainage. Based on this theory, it is expected that nanoparticles with would be able to accumulate in a solid tumor and thus deliver a larger amount of chemotherapeutic drugs to tumors compared to normal tissues.
According to that we may try to produce the second-generation nanotherapeutics, combining nanoparticles with cancer combating drugs and then delivering it directly to the tumor, more effectively and without any harm to other tissues.
That's not really nano...but well... Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design'
I just can't help commenting on that... The highlight of the day is "God did not create the universe". I'm astonished. You can find comments after the Thursday's the Times publication the parts of Hawking's new book almost everywhere, from Guardian to Yahoo (article available at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/, you have to pay the subscription, though). For quite a while I haven't seen such an outcry after (or even before) a book about Physics was published. (Btw, I'm curious how many of the journalists will read the WHOLE book after it's out, and out of them how many will understand it?) I´m reading all the coment, understanding that the topic is sensitive, still I'm surprized it has provoked such a fightback from the religious community (or better communities, as there were not only catholics who felt offended), saying it shows elemmentary fallacy of logic..Mmmm.. Lack of elemmentary logic? Suppose the church knows something about that..
"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist."
"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
Where do we come from. Where are we going. How was our universe created. How is it going to end. Those are our most basic questions, that's the motor of the scientific exploration, but also the motor of faith. Everyone has ther righrt to exploreare the answer according to their knowlegde and abilities.
And the scientists, just as all the rest, are divided in the ones that believe and those that don't (and there is also a third group who doesn't really care), but is there really space for god Physics? I'm not saying in your personal life. I'm saying how do you include God in your equations? Hawking seems to have exchanged it for gravity. Fair enough.
The book is on sale next week.
ImagineNano Bilbao 2011
11-14 April 2011, 20 years after discovery of carbon nanotubes Bilbao Exhibition Centre, Spain will host of the most exciting event in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. Six conferences (NanoSpain 2011 , Graphene 2011, Bio&Med, TNA Energy, PPM 2011 and HPC 2011 symposium ) and a large exhibition all that to ensure interaction between science and industry. Among invited speakers Sumio Iijima , Philip Kim , Leo Kouwenhoven, Emilio Mendez and many more.Cross your fingers my boss sends me there :)
Check out the official website here.
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