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Voyaging Into a World We Cannot See
You probably heard of the word nanoparticles, but beyond knowing it means thing that are very tiny, there’s little more you‘re aware of. The world of nanos refers to measuring things that are microscopic in size, 1 nanometer = 1 billionth of a meter. Nanoparticles represent a bridge for scientists between bulk materials and atomic or molecular structures.
The properties of materials undergo a change as their size diminishes to the nanoscale and as the percentage of atoms upon the surface of a material becomes significant. Nanoparticles exhibit several special properties relating to bulk material, providing a high surface area to volume ratio, which offers a tremendous driving force for diffusion, especially at elevated temperatures.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have recently published an amazing breakthrough in the academic journal Angewandte Chemie. Their article announces an exciting advance with nanoparticles whereby scientists have mastered the capacity to attach gold nanoparticles to proteins, forming protein-gold arrays.
The benefit of this ability now enables researchers to unlock and see the hidden mysteries of protein structures, identify key functioning elements of proteins, and to bind together new protein complexes. These new capabilities will immediately benefit the development of “targeted medical drug delivery” through biomass to energy and precision means of transportation.
Some of the immediate benefits have been:
- In the arena of energy conversion, this new ability allows precisely engineered gold nanoparticles to bind enzymes together to form oriented and ordered single layers.
- Another medical advance has enabled researchers to retrieve proteins from the surface of the adenovirus (a source of the common cold) and use these proteins to send medical drugs to specific tumor cells.
- Using gold nanoparticles can improve scientists' capability to reveal the structures and significant regions of protein molecules - the critical structures that carry out every function of living cells and whose deterioration usually results in disease.
Computer Memory Chips
In another breakthrough in the world of the microscopic, scientists have now built a computer memory chip that is approximately the size of a white blood cell, which is one-2000th of an inch (comparison to nanometers not available).
To construct the memory chip, the scientists fixed 400 parallel wires, each with of width of less than less than a millionth of an inch, over which they laid a layer of molecular switches and then another layer of 400 wires.
While the immediate creation of this chip is only a demonstration and is not technically perfected for commercial use, the significance of this breakthrough ensures a new path of exponential growth for computer memory capacity after the silicon chip technology has reached its limits (estimated to be in 10-20 years).
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