Kanpur: Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) and Rice University signed a memorandum of understanding on 9th January 2020 at a historic event held at IITK. By signing the agreement, the two Universities agree to share resources and perform research in the development of energy solutions, materials and sustainable technologies and then expand to other areas.This is a key relationship in our new partnership strategy for international engagement and impact, said Rice University President Prof. David Leebron. India is one of our top priorities and IITK is widely acknowledged as one of the best universities in India. Were very excited about this pathbreaking collaboration to devise solutions to the energy and environmental challenges we face. he added.With the revolution in technological advances and world developing at a rapid rate, energy needs are going to be a significant challenge in the future. IIT Kanpur and Rice University, being at the forefront of cutting-edge research in energy solutions, are in an excellent position to be steering the path for international collaborative research in this area. We are especially thankful to Mr. Rahul Mehta, Mehta Family Foundation for his key role in bringing the two institutions together and making the collaboration a reality. said Prof. Karandikar, Director, IITK.Through this MoU, Rice University is the first US university to have a physical presence in India in the form of RiceIITK Research Center, located at IIT Kanpur. This center is expected to facilitate deeper levels of collaborations leading to exchange of knowledge and perspectives, enabling fertilization of ground-breaking ideas between the faculty members and researchers of Rice and IITK. This will create a fertile ground for both the institutes to undertake grand challenges in the area of sustainable energy and environment. In its initial phase, Centers research focus will be on designing and developing materials and processes for solar photovoltaics, energy storage, alternative fuels, electrocatalysis and water. Researchers on the two sides are expected to jointly supervise graduate students, publish high-impact joint research papers and garner funds from both federal agencies and industrial sponsors through joint research grants.

The Center will facilitate faculty, staff and student exchanges between the two institutes for promotion of joint research in the areas of energy, materials and sustainability. The collaboration will be fructified in a physical Rice-IITK Research Center, which will impart training to the students and researchers and conduct research in areas related to clean and sustainable energy technologies and practices in the early stage of its inception, with possibility of expansion into various other areas of not only science and engineering but also humanities. Both institutes shall appoint Faculty in-charges on each side for managing and coordinating Center activities. said Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Director, IITK.

This agreement today is the first of many we hope to support. This association has the potential to improve the quality, reach, and impact of both organizations. By bringing together two world class institutions as a team, they can accomplish deeper and more diverse solutions to problems in our world today. The Mehta Family Foundation is proud to support the creation of the Rice-IITK Research Center. We are honored to have been a part of crafting this relationship. said Mr. Rahul Mehta, CEO, Mehta Family Foundation.Rice-IITK research center will be a binding force between the two institutions, said Prof. Pulickel Ajayan, Rice University Faculty-in-Charge of the Center. IITK is a premier institution in India and very similar to Rice in size. This is a golden opportunity, something that weve always wanted to do with a partner in India that seems synergistic in many ways.For the first time, Rice faculty and students can spend substantial time at IITK. It will become their new home in India. They will become part of our family during their visit. We envisage that the deep relationship between IITK and Rice will become a benchmark for academic and research collaboration and partnerships. said Prof. Garg, Faculty-in-Charge of the Center.

The MoU with Rice is concurrent with the vision of IITK to liaise with selected top universities to enhance its global portfolio with an aim to conduct top quality research driven by exchanges between faculty members, researchers and students between the two institutes. said Prof. Joshi, Dean of International Relations, IITK.

The MoU was signed by Prof. Abhay Karandikar, Director, IITK, and Prof. Seiichi Matsuda, Interim Provost, Rice University. To signify the commitment from Rice University towards this partnership, Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering Prof. Reginald DesRoches; Vice President for Global and Digital Strategy Prof. Caroline Levander; Senior Fellow and Professor in the Practice Prof. Ed Emmett; Prof. Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Engineering and Chair, Department of Materials Science & Nano Engineering and Prof. Satish Nagarajaiah, Professor of Civil & Mechanical Engineering were present at the event.

From IIT Kanpur, Deputy Director Prof. Manindra Agrawal, Dean of Research & Development Prof. S. Ganesh, Dean of International Relations Prof. Yogesh Joshi, and Prof. Ashish Garg, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering were also present at this historic event.

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Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Rice University sign memorandum - India Education Diary

Tata Motors home-grown car, Nano, was not doomed to be a failure, but fate took it in the other direction.

Dr V Sumantran, who was the CEO of Tata Motors car business between 2001 and 2005 during which period he oversaw the development of the Nano, says he received rave reviews from European and American car designers, who marvelled at the product.

Speaking on Auto Industry Present and Future Tense at the Triplicane Cultural Academy on Sunday, Dr Sumantran observed that things could have been different but for one decision.

When Tata Motors was planning for the Nano, the company owned 1,200 acres of land near Dharwad, Karnataka, on the Golden Quadrilateral highway. The company could have produced the Nano there, as there was no need to acquire land for the factory.

But the company wanted a bigger area and it decided to go to Singur, West Bengal and you all know what happened he said. Trinamool Congress leader, Mamata Banerjee, who was then in the Opposition, protested against the state government acquiring land for the project, and eventually, the project had to be shifted out of the state.

This caused a delay of a year and the cars then had to be produced in a temporary makeshift plant in Uttaranchal. Within a month of starting production (because the production had to be hurried to make up for the lost time) three cars caught fire. All this was unnecessary, Sumantran said.

Asked if it could be revived, he said that the learnings from the Nano were already being applied elsewhere, such as in the Renault Kwid.

It was my pet project, I was passionate about it, said Sumantran ruefully over the fate of the car.

A regular mid-sized vehicle weighs about 1,300 kg which means, it takes that mass to transport a 65 kg human being. The Nano, on the other hand, weighed only 625 kg.

Earlier in his speech, Sumantran pointed out that even if a fourth of the two-wheelers and buses produced by the year 2025 were electric, it would call for a battery production capacity of 30-40 GWhr, which would call for an investment of Rs 30,000 crore to Rs 40,000 crore.

He said the vast improvements achieved in the emission and safety standards of cars produced in the country meant that India-made cars were acceptable in all parts of the world which opens up a huge export market.

Competing against the Chinese is a major challenge, he said. Wherever we go, we find extremely aggressive and subsidised Chinese products. Yet, wherever there is a high amount of engineering required and the scale is not very big, India can take on China, he said.

On driverless vehicles, Sumantran observed that the vehicles were extremely complex and had come a long way since they were conceived, but there was still a long way to go before they became completely acceptable.

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Tata Nano could have been a success, if only... - BusinessLine

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A new process can turn bulk quantities of just about any carbon source into valuable graphene flakes.

A banana peel, turned into graphene, could help facilitate a massive reduction of the environmental impact of concrete and other building materials.

This is a big deal, says James Tour, chair in chemistry as well as a professor of computer science and of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University.

The world throws out 30% to 40% of all food, because it goes bad, and plastic waste is of worldwide concern. Weve already proven that any solid carbon-based matter, including mixed plastic waste and rubber tires, can be turned into graphene.

As reported in Nature, flash graphene is made in 10 milliseconds by heating carbon-containing materials to 3,000 Kelvin (about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit). The source material can be nearly anything with carbon content. Food waste, plastic waste, petroleum coke, coal, wood clippings, and biochar are prime candidates, Tour says.

With the present commercial price of graphene being $67,000 to $200,000 per ton, the prospects for this process look superb, he says.

Tour says a concentration of as little as 0.1% of flash graphene in the cement used to bind concrete could lessen its massive environmental impact by a third. Cement production reportedly emits as much as 8% of human-made carbon dioxide every year.

By strengthening concrete with graphene, we could use less concrete for building, and it would cost less to manufacture and less to transport, he says.

Essentially, were trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane that waste food would have emitted in landfills. We are converting those carbons into graphene and adding that graphene to concrete, thereby lowering the amount of carbon dioxide generated in concrete manufacture. Its a win-win environmental scenario using graphene.

Turning trash to treasure is key to the circular economy, says co-corresponding author Rouzbeh Shahsavari, an adjunct assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and of materials science and nanoengineering and president of C-Crete Technologies. Here, graphene acts both as a 2D template and a reinforcing agent that controls cement hydration and subsequent strength development.

In the past, Tour says, graphene has been too expensive to use in these applications. The flash process will greatly lessen the price while it helps us better manage waste.

With our method, that carbon becomes fixed, he says. It will not enter the air again.

The flash graphene process can convert that solid carbon into graphene for concrete, asphalt, buildings, cars, clothing, and more, Tour says.

Flash Joule heating for bulk graphene, which lead author Duy Luong, a graduate student, developed in the Tour lab, improves upon techniques like exfoliation from graphite and chemical vapor deposition on a metal foil that require much more effort and cost to produce just a little graphene.

Even better, the process produces turbostratic graphene, with misaligned layers that are easy to separate.

A-B stacked graphene from other processes, like exfoliation of graphite, is very hard to pull apart, Tour says. The layers adhere strongly together. But turbostratic graphene is much easier to work with because the adhesion between layers is much lower. They just come apart in solution or upon blending in composites.

Thats important, because now we can get each of these single-atomic layers to interact with a host composite, he says.

The lab notes that used coffee grounds transformed into pristine single-layer sheets of graphene.

Bulk composites of graphene with plastic, metals, plywood, concrete, and other building materials would be a major market for flash graphene, according to the researchers, who are already testing graphene-enhanced concrete and plastic.

The flash process happens in a custom-designed reactor that heats material quickly and emits all noncarbon elements as gas.

When this process is industrialized, elements like oxygen and nitrogen that exit the flash reactor can all be trapped as small molecules because they have value, Tour says.

He says the flash process produces very little excess heat, channeling almost all of its energy into the target.

You can put your finger right on the container a few seconds afterwards, Tour says. And keep in mind this is almost three times hotter than the chemical vapor deposition furnaces we formerly used to make graphene, but in the flash process the heat is concentrated in the carbon material and none in a surrounding reactor.

All the excess energy comes out as light, in a very bright flash, and because there arent any solvents, its a super clean process, he says.

Luong did not expect to find graphene when he fired up the first small-scale device to find new phases of material, beginning with a sample of carbon black.

This started when I took a look at a Science paper talking about flash Joule heating to make phase-changing nanoparticles of metals, he says. But Luong quickly realized the process produced nothing but high-quality graphene.

Atom-level simulations by coauthor Ksenia Bets confirmed that temperature is key to the materials rapid formation.

We essentially speed up the slow geological process by which carbon evolves into its ground state, graphite, she says. Greatly accelerated by a heat spike, it is also stopped at the right instant, at the graphene stage.

It is amazing how state-of-the-art computer simulations, notoriously slow for observing such kinetics, reveal the details of high temperature-modulated atomic movements and transformation, Bets says.

Tour hopes to produce a kilogram (2.2 pounds) a day of flash graphene within two years, starting with a project the Department of Energy recently funded to convert US-sourced coal.

This could provide an outlet for coal in large scale by converting it inexpensively into a much-higher-value building material, he says.

Additional coauthors are from Rice and C-Crete Technologies. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported the research.

Source: Rice University

Original Study DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-1938-0

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Team turns banana peels and other trash into 'flash graphene' - Futurity: Research News

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Global Nanodiamond Market: Research Scope

Global Nanodiamond Market, by Application

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Nanodiamond Market Growth Analysis By Manufacturers, Regions, Type And Application, Forecast Analysis - Industry Mirror

Dr. Karl Jacob Jr. and Karl Jacob III Early-Career Chair Eun Ji Chung. Photo courtesy of Viterbi Staff.

Eun Ji Chung, USC Viterbis Dr. Karl Jacob Jr. and Karl Jacob III Early-Career Chair and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, has recently been honored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) for her research in nanomedicine and bioengineering.

The IEEE has selected Chung as a NANOMED New Innovator, with the award to be presented at the IEEE International Conference on Nano/Molecular Medicine and Engineering in Gwangju, Korea on 21 24 November. The latest honor recognizes Chungs eminent research activities in the field of nanomedicine and molecular engineering as well as her continuous contribution to the IEEE-NANOMED community.

Meanwhile the BMES will honor Chung with the 2020 Rising Star Junior Faculty Award, to be presented at the BMES Cell and Molecular Bioengineering conference on January 2 6 in Puerto Rico. Chung will be recognized at the conference gala, and will be invited to present at the event. The BMES describes the Rising Star Award as a leading form of recognition of outstanding research in the field of cell and molecular bioengineering.

Chung and her research groupinvestigate molecular design, nanomedicine and tissue engineering to generate biomaterial strategies for clinical applications. A key focus of Chungs labs research involves the design and application of self-assembling, peptide nanoparticles for targeted cardiovascular and cancer treatments, as well as for the treatment of kidney disease.

A faculty member of theUSC Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, Chung received her B.A. in Molecular Biology with honors from Scripps College, Claremont, California, and her Ph.D. from the Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences Program and the Department of Biomedical Engineering from Northwestern University.

She was recently named 2019 Orange County Engineering Council Outstanding Young Engineer and a Journal of Materials Chemistry B Emerging Investigator for 2019.

Last year, Chung was awarded the NIH New Innovator Award to develop a new approach to a type of kidney disease, known as autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, the most commonly inherited kidney disorder.

Chung is a recipient of the SQI-Baxter Early Career Award, the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Postdoctoral Research Grant from the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, and the K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the NIH. She is a member of the Society for Biomaterials, the BMES, and the American Institute for Chemical Engineers.

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Eun Ji Chung Named as IEEE New Innovator and BMES Rising Star - USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP) received The Research and Innovation Excellence Award for Non-Research University category at the recent Malaysias Research Star Awards (MRSA) 2019. The Research and Innovation Excellence Award aims to recognise researchers and universities for their excellent scholarly and innovative outputs. UMP Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ir. Dr. Wan Azhar Wan Yusoff accepted the award from Secretary-General of Ministry of Education, Dato Dr. Mohd. Gazali Abas who represented the Minister of Education, Hon. Dr. Maszlee Malik. Malaysias Research Star Awards was organised by the Ministry of Education with cooperation of Clarivate Analytics to honour the most promising and influential researchers and institutions in Malaysia. The award ceremony was held at Putrajaya, Malaysia on 5 November 2019, attended also by Higher Education Director-General, Datuk Ir. Dr. Siti Hamisah Tapsir and Deputy Secretary-General (Strategic), Dato Kamel Mohamad.

In his acknowledgement Professor Ir. Dr. Wan Azhar expressed that the success was a one-for-all effort and that the achievement was indeed a remarkable feat for UMP, considering it was only established 17 years earlier as one of the five technical universities (MTUN) established in the country. With the slogan Moving Together, he added that UMP would continue to enhance its strength in the fields of engineering, research and service with world-class standard. The effort would be executed in a more creative and innovative engineering and technology ecosystem which could benefit the community as well as empower high-level Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in the country.

In the same event, UMP added another impressive feather on its cap when Associate Professor Dr. Wan Azmi Wan Hamzah received two MRSA awards. Dr. Wan Azmi received Prominent Topics in Research for his outstanding research in the field of heat transfer, accumulating h-index of 27 with a total of 2,083 citations. Out of his 116 publications, 57 had been published in First Quartile (Q1) journals according to Clarivate Analytics. Aged 35, Dr. Wan Azmi was awarded the Young Researcher Award, an award for best researcher under the age of 40. Apart from research publications, he had also come up with several high impact products, results from his research works, which included nano-cooling liquid for vehicle radiator, nano-lubricant for vehicle air-conditioning system and the latest being nano-paint for automotive components.

Other awards presented by Clarivate Analytics were Hot Review Paper (one recipient) and Research and Innovation Excellence Researcher Award (seven recipients).

Elsevier also named 12 researchers as MRSA recipients for categories International Collaboration (three recipients), Prominent Topics in Research (four recipients), Citation Classic (four recipients) and Young Researcher (one recipient).

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UMP named as Best University in Research and Innovation for Non-Research University - QS WOW News

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. Eight faculty members at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been named to the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers list, a global listing of scientists who produced the past decades most influential papers, compiled by the Web of Science group, a Clarivate Analytics company.

The list recognizes researchers who produced multiple papers ranking in the top 1% by citations for their field and year of publication, demonstrating significant research influence among their peers, according to Web of Science. It selected 6,216 researchers for their performance in 21 fields and for cross-field influence in scholarly publications from 2008 to 2018.

The Illinois faculty include crop sciencesandplant biologyprofessorElizabeth Lisa Ainsworth(highly cited for cross-field impact), materials science and engineering professor Axel Hoffmann (cross-field), electrical and computer engineering professor Thomas Huang (engineering), geography and geographic information science professor Mei-Po Kwan (cross-field), crop sciencesandplant biologyprofessorStephen P. Long(cross-field), bioengineering professor Shuming Nie (cross-field), plant biology professorDonald Ort(plant and animal science), and mechanical science and engineering professor Arend van der Zande (cross-field).

Lisa Ainsworth, crop sciences and plant biology

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Ainsworth leads the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Services Global Change and Photosynthesis Research Unit. Her research examines genetic variation in crop responses to air pollution and climate change. She received the 2019 Prize in Food and Agricultural Research from the National Academy of Sciences and is an affiliate of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois.

Axel Hoffmann, materials science and engineering

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Hoffmann is a Founder Professor in materials science and engineering and a member of the Materials Research Laboratory. His research focuses on topics related to magnetism, such as spin transport, magnetization dynamics and biomedical applications. His work on spin Hall effects has contributed to the development of spintronics, electronic devices that harness electron spin for faster and more efficient computing. Hoffmann is a Fellow of the American Vacuum Society, the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Thomas Huang, electrical and computer engineering

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Huang is the Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He studies many fields related to computer engineering and artificial intelligence, including human-computer interaction, multimedia signal processing, computer vision, big data and machine learning. He retired from teaching in 2014, but remains active as a researcher. He also is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Mei-Po Kwan, geography and geographic information

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Kwan investigates health, transportation and urban issues using innovative geographic information system methods. Her work encompasses environmental health, human mobility, access to health care, neighborhood effects, sustainable travel and cities, and the application of GIS methods in geographic research. Kwan is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.K. Academy of Social Sciences. Among other honors, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016 and Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the American Association of Geographers in 2011.

Stephen Long, crop sciences and plant biology

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Long is the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair of Crop Sciences and Plant Biology. He uses computational and experimental approaches to improve photosynthetic efficiency, and works to address the effects of climate change on crop yield. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2013, and has been recognized as a highly cited researcher in the field of plant and animal science every year since 2005. He directs Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, a multinational project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, and the U.K. Department for International Development. He is a member of the IGB.

Shuming Nie, bioengineering

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Nie is the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Bioengineering and a professor of chemistry, materials science and engineering, and electrical and computer engineering. He studies nanomedicine, molecular engineering and image-guided minimally invasive robotic surgery. He is as Fellow of the AAAS, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering.

Donald Ort, crop sciences and plant biology

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Ort is the Robert Emerson Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences. His research focuses on improving photosynthesis and addresses crop responses to global change factors including increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature. He leads the Genomic Ecology of Global Change theme in the IGB and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017.

Arend van der Zande, mechanical science and engineering

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Van der Zande specializes in multidisciplinary nanoscience; specifically, his group uses two-dimensional materials, such as membranes and thin films, as molecular building blocks to construct new devices with applications in electronics, sensing, energy and more. He has affiliations with the Materials Research Laboratory, the Holonyak Micro and Nano Technology Laboratory, the Beckman Institute and the department of electrical and computer engineering.

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Eight Illinois researchers rank among world's most influential - University of Illinois News

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 25 As part of its Smarter Technology For All campaign, Lenovo has introduced two new laptops for Malaysia: the ThinkBook 14 and the ThinkBook 15. Targeted towards SMEs who want an affordable portable option, while still maintaining the quality usually associated with a Think device, the new laptops are being launched alongside the ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano and ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano IoT.

In addition to that, a new partnership between co-working space, Common Ground and Lenovo will see pay-per-use device rentals available for members.

Pricing and availability

The Lenovo ThinkBook 14 and 15 are now available at select local retailers, including Lenovo exclusive stores nationwide. Pricing is as follows:

Lenovo ThinkBook 14 RM3,439 (Recommended starting RRP)

Lenovo ThinkBook 15 RM4,299 (Recommended starting RRP)

Meanwhile, the Lenovo ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano and Lenovo ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano IoT are now available for order through the Lenovo Malaysia Sales Team (contact them at LenovoMy@lenovo.com). We dont have exact pricing for the ThinkCentre models, but Lenovo says that prices start at over RM2,000 for the lowest configuration with a 256GB SSD and an 8th Gen Intel Core i3.

Specs

Having been globally launched in September during the IFA 2019, the ThinkBook offers some of the features that the ThinkPad series has in a more consumer-friendly package.

This includes an optional fingerprint scanner that unlocks the laptop like a phone, even when the laptop is asleep. Both models feature 10th Gen Intel Core processors, along with PCIe SSD storage and DDR4 memory configurations.

Part of the appeal for the ThinkBook is ThinkShield authentication and security, along with Lenovo Vantage. You also get a Kensington Lock for the 15 version of the ThinkBook.

Connectivity-wise, youre looking at Wi-Fi 6 support, along with USB-C and USB-A ports, along with a RJ-45 network card. All of that is packed within an anodised aluminium cover with a metallic finish which Lenovo says is a modern finish designed for the new generation of professionals.

Meanwhile, the ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano is the worlds smallest commercial desktop, according to Lenovo. Its one-third of the size of the ThinkCentre Tiny, and weighs in at 505g.

For better space-saving, the device can be mounted behind the monitor, under the table, or anywhere with a VESA mount. You get up to 8th Gen Intel Core vPro i7 processors and SSD storage, along with two M.2 SSD slots and the capacity for up to 16GB DDR4 of memory. Interestingly, the ThinkCentre is powered by USB-C, which means that it can be powered by a compatible monitor.

As for the ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano IoT, Lenovo says that engineering has been done to ensure that the device can handle harsh operating temperatures, with military-standard-tested reliability. Thanks to a heat sink on top of the device, it has a broader thermal range and can withstand from 050 degrees (Celsius).

To find out more, head over to Lenovo Malaysias official website. SoyaCincau

Related Articles Lenovo unveils worlds first foldable PC Lenovos upcoming smartphone could take 100-Megapixel photos Lenovo Z5 Pro GT is an all-screen slider phone with an insane 12GB of RAM

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Lenovo ThinkBook and ThinkCentre Malaysia: Everything you need to know - Yahoo Singapore News

In this erawhere trades are increasingly placed electronically, the trading ability of human beings often comes down to little less than babysitting algorithms and recalibratingsystems to improve performance. However, human traders do still exist and exceptional humans are apparently becoming far harder to find.

One reason Louis Bacon gave for closing Moore Capital Partners last week was competition for staff. "Intense competition for trading talent coupled with client pressure on fees has led to a challenging business model for multi manager funds such as ours," Baconexplained in a letter explaining his decision to return client funds.

It's not clear where all this competition for talent is coming from. Presumably it's from other funds rather than from bankswhich are increasingly content with becoming low-risk electronic market makers. Brevan Howard, for example, is apparently hiring new portfolio managers (PMs)under incoming chief executive Aron Landy. It's just a shame, then, that there aren't more traders around like Bacon himself.

In aencomium for Bacon's trading career, the Financial Timesquotes a former colleague who says Louis was,by far the best foreign exchange trader in the world, period, and recalls that when George Soros placed his legendarybet against sterling in 1992 he called Bacon (then aged 36) for advice on increasing the size of the trade.

Nonetheless, Bacon does seem to have found some talentedtraders to work for him. As we noted last week, various traders from banks joined Moore in the past year, including Goldman Sachs' former global head of rates trading. Bacon's own son also features among the ranks: Louis Dillon Bacon (also known as Dillon Bacon) joined Moore in 2017 after nearly two years at Goldman Sachs according to his LinkedIn profile. Another ex-colleague suggests that Bacon senior might have called it a day far sooner had it not been for all the people he employed.

The real reason funds like Moore have been hurting might have less to do with problems finding goodtalent and more to do with the 'zeitgeist.'Central banks have compressed volatility, while quants have destroyed the shorter-term trading opportunities. Thats why macro has been hurt, the head of another fund(Caxton) tells the FT.

Bacon senioris fine - after a nearly 30 year trading career he's thought to be worth $1.5bn and is now free to pursue his interest in conservation and dispute with a neighbour in the Bahamas (whom he accuses of damagingthe local environment). His staff might not be - Moore employs nearly 400 people; it's unlikely Brevan Howard has that big a need for new PMs. Talent shortages or not, Bacon is offloading his people into a mostly saturatedmarket.

Separately, you might want to get some rest before the next financial crisis arrives.Symon Drake-Brockman, now 58, spoke to the FT about his experience as CEO of the Americas business at RBS in 2008, when it fell to him to de-risk the bank's mortgage book. When he arrived in the U.S. that year, Drake-Brockman said he found employees "in shock." It fell to him to find a solution. For an entire year, he worked from the moment he woke up until midnight and wrote off $3.5bn of mortgages while selling assets at a discount.

Science and engineering majors at elite schools provide the highest return on investment. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, math majors earned a median of $120,300 after graduation while borrowing just $8,219the lowest debt-to-income ratio for bachelors degrees.(Wall Street Journal)

UBS has been cutting jobs but that's fine - it has atool calledHummingbird thatmatches staff skillsets to open vacancies at UBS within "nano-seconds."(Financial News)

European banks moved $280bn of assets away from the U.S. market as they sought to escape strict capital requirements. Deutsche Bank has cut assets in its American holding company from $203bn to $117bn since 2016 (although it increased assets by $45bn at its main U.S. branch). Credit Suisse cut U.S. assets by 47%. (Financial Times)

Deutsche Bank is not as systemically important as it used to be. (Bloomberg)

Zdenek Turek, the Dublin-basedCitibank Europe Plc Chief Executive Office, says Britain needs to get on with Brexit. "People have made decisions, spent money on platforms that are ready to go but arent fully functioning yet because moves have not happened yet. Only 60 Citi jobs are being moved out of London.(Bloomberg)

I am afraid for my family, and Im afraid people will die, my friends, said Kevin, a 25 year-old who works as a researcher with a financial institution in Hong Kong and who's stuck at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Hecan't remember what day it is any more and doesn't know if he has a job to go back to.(Financial Times)

Michael Grimes at Morgan Stanley explains the role of a technology banker. "The institutional investors are the price setters; if theyre eager to invest in a company, then we try to predict that and get behind the companies that we think will work well there, or [else] give the company advice that this maybe isnt the right time or maybe this wont be well-received." (Techcrunch)

Grimes also elaborates on the benefit of direct listings. (Techcrunch)

The European Union plans a $3.9bn fund to invest in early stage technology. (Bloomberg)

Credit Suisse is laying people off in its securities finance business. (FOW)

Goldman Sachs is using gender neutral prononouns. (Reuters)

O.K. is seen as passive aggressive by Millennials. You have to say "kk". (New York Times)

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By far the best trader in the world, period. - eFinancialCareers

In Neal Stephensons 1995 novel,The Diamond Age, he imagines a world in which buildings can be constructed of diamond, a material that, thanks to submicroscopic robots and nanoengineering, had become cheaper than glass. As a result, whole cities are made of the worlds hardest material, and skyscrapers glisten in the sun.

We cant yet build with unlimited piles of diamond, no. But Rice University researchers have figured out the next best thing: handling plastic, or even materials such as metal and concrete, in a way that can nearly match diamonds strength.

The findings were just published in the amazingly named academic journal Small. The concept is a bit tricky to grasp, but its implications are easy to understand.

Since the 90s, scientists have theorized that carbon nanotubes could be arranged in what were dubbed tubulanes. The idea was that if you could arrange carbon molecules in a specific zigzagging mesh structure, youd get a material that could go blow for blow with diamond.

Scientists did all sorts of simulations on computers, explains lead author Mohammad Sajadi, and at every step of the way, the promise of tubulanes has been proven out. But nobody can synthesize them, says Sajadi. There are lots of theoretical molecular structures . . . but theyre impractical because you cant make them. As it happens, carbon nanotubes are a notorious case of theory outweighing application, because the way we make carbon nanotubes today is fairly rudimentary: Baking the right stuff in an oven grows carbon nanotubes that have pretty unpredictable shapes rather than the perfectly organized, molecular geometries of tubulanes.

But instead of trying to make tubulanes in a lab, Sajadi and his collaborators did something different: They copied the woven-looking structure of tubulanes, then 3D printed that shape in a readily available plastic polymer. The shapes were identical but rendered at a scale that was orders of magnitude larger than a tubulane would be.

The finding? Tubulanes and these 3D prints have the same trend of mechanical properties, says Sajadi. That means a small block of this printed polymer can literally stop a speeding bullet without shattering or cracking throughout. (A solid cube of the polymer cracked in the same test.) It shows the role of the geometry is still dominant over the role of material. In other words, the shape is whats most important in a building material, not the material itself.

So what is next? Well, perhaps its ironic to say, given the previous paragraph, but Sajadis lab is experimenting with 3D-printing mock tubulanes out of other materials, such as metal and concrete. So far, the approach is still working. All the tested materials are stronger when printed in these shapes than they were as solid blocks. (And incidentally, Sajadis lab is using off-the-shelf 3D printers. You could theoretically do this same experiment at home.)

The implications are wide-ranging. The plastic blocks could be printed in any shape, to make lightweight, bulletproof vests or helmets. They could also work their way into cars. A bumper printed in this way would absorb impact better than the alternatives we have today. If the technique is applied to architecture, Sajadi points out, lighter, stronger brick and walls that can bear more load will allow skyscrapers to reach higher than ever before. (Instead of looking like diamonds, theyd appear more like a gorgeous tapestry of knitted concrete.) At the same time, because these bricks inherently require less material per block, their environmental impact should be lower, too.

And this doesnt just have application in building [on earth], Sajadi offers. Assume you want a stronger structure in space.

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We're on the verge of making buildings as strong as diamonds - Fast Company

Surgical Instruments Tracking Systems Market: Introduction

Surgical instruments tracking systems have been accessible for use in medical field for several years. Today, surgical instruments tracking systems have turned into a need. The previous four to five years have witnessed major changes in tracking systems. Rapid advances in instruments tracking systems technologies such as nano-engineering and opto-electrical engineering have created new avenues in recent years. Need for unobtrusive and automated tracking systems will keep demands lucrative in coming years.

Download Brochure of This Market Report at https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=B&rep_id=5760

The report by TMR Research takes a closer look at recent trends impacting the revenue potential of various players and offers insights into imminent investment pockets in key markets.

Surgical Instruments Tracking Systems Market: Key Development

Some of the most prominent competitors operating in the competitive landscape of global surgical instruments tracking systems market include

Most players are embracing a few organic and inorganic and natural systems, for example, new launches and product advancements, mergers and acquisitions, and collaborations alongside expansion on regional and global scale for serving the unmet needs of users.

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Surgical Instruments Tracking Systems Market Dynamics

Rising instances of surgical instruments left in the human body after medical procedures and instrument scattering are the main considerations driving the evolution of the surgical instruments tracking systems market. As indicated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the casualty rate of held surgical articles is around 2.0%. Along these lines, the requirement for cutting edge innovations, for example, 2D scanner tags and RFID to follow the held instruments while the patient is still in the task theater, is rising. This factor is anticipated to push the surgical instruments tracking systems market.

Rising popularity of instruments tracking devices by emergency clinics is another main consideration boosting the market development. Following healthcare gadgets and stock administration during work cycle including medical procedure, post-medical procedure, sanitization, and storage systems are a portion of the serious issues supervised by emergency clinics. Along these lines, they are embracing new technologies to follow these gadgets and systems, which thus is relied upon to stimulate the market.

A portion of the regular instruments that are accidently left in a patients body during medical procedure consists of sponges, blades, needles, electrosurgical adapters, clamps, scalpels, safety pins, scissors, and towels. Among these instruments, towels are probably the most common thing left behind by mistake. Surgical instruments left in patients bodies will in general cut veins and puncture blood vessels that might lead to internal bleeding, creating a pressing need for technologies to track these instruments.

Expanding requirement for stock administration and usage of Unique Device Identification (UDI) guidelines by the FDA are foreseen to drive the market. Innovative headways and initiatives by governments to adopt these gadgets is foreseen to additionally boost the market in the coming years.

Surgical Instruments Tracking Systems Market: Geographical Analysis

In 2018, North America contributed sizable revenue shares in the global surgical instruments tracking systems market. The launch of unique device identification (UDI) framework by the U.S. FDA for accurately identifying proof of medicinal gadgets through their distribution networks is one of the central points credited to this lead. Moreover, the presence of well-established healthcare infrastructure, fast adoption of cutting-edge products, and high per capita healthcare consumption in other developed regions, such as Europe, are foreseen to fuel the global surgical instruments tracking systems market.

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Surgical Instruments Tracking Systems Market Expected to Witness a Sustainable Growth over 2028 - News Description

Scientists have designed artistic nanotubes, which go about as recieving wires that utilization light-matter motions to control heat radiation. The structure is a stage toward another class of earthenware production that work all the more proficiently at high temperatures. Credit: Purdue University delineation/Xueji Wang

The gas turbines fueling air ship motors depend on fired coatings that guarantee basic soundness at high temperatures. In any case, these coatings dont control heat radiation, restricting the exhibition of the motor.

Analysts at Purdue University have designed earthenware nanotubes that act as warm reception apparatuses, offering authority over the range and course of high-temperature heat radiation.

The work is distributed in Nano Letters, a diary by the American Chemical Society. A delineation of the artistic nanotubes will be included as the diarys valuable spread in a pending issue.

By controlling radiation at these high temperatures, we can expand the lifetime of the covering. The exhibition of the motor would likewise increment since it could be kept more smoking with more confinement for longer timeframes, said Zubin Jacob, a partner educator of electrical and PC building at Purdue.

The work is a piece of a bigger quest in the field for a wide scope of materials that can withstand higher temperatures. In 2016, Jacobs group built up a warm metamaterial made of tungsten and hafnium oxide that controls heat radiation with the aim of improving how waste warmth is collected from control plants and manufacturing plants.

Another class of pottery would develop approaches to all the more proficiently use heat radiation.

Jacobs group, in a joint effort with Purdue teachers Luna Lu and Tongcang Li, assembled nanotubes out of a rising fired material called boron nitride, known for its high warm soundness.

These boron nitride nanotubes control radiation through motions of light and matter, called polaritons, inside the earthenware material. High temperatures energize the polaritons, which the nanotubes as recieving wires at that point couple proficiently to active warmth radiation.

The radio wires could carry the capacity to quicken the radiation, perform upgraded cooling of a framework or send data in unmistakable ways or wavelengths, Jacob said.

The analysts intend to build increasingly clay materials with polaritonic highlights for a large group of various applications.

Polaritonic pottery can be down changing and we need them to be utilized generally, Jacob said.

###

Reference: High-Temperature Polaritons in Ceramic Nanotube Antennas by Ryan Starko-Bowes, Xueji Wang, Zhujing Xu, Sandipan Pramanik, Na Lu, Tongcang Li and Zubin Jacob, 3 Octobe 2019, Nano Letters.DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.9b03059

This exploration was performed in the Purdue Discovery Park Birck Nanotechnology Center and is bolstered through Nascent Light-Matter Interactions, a program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The program is driven by Purdue Universitys School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

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Ceramic Nanotubes Engineered As Thermal Antennas With Heat Radiation Control - Market Research Feed

New approaches to propulsion could extend humanity's reach further beyond the Solar System than ever before (Credit: Shutterstock)

It has been 50 years since humanity set foot on the Moon.

Since then we might have expected a continued drive to explore the cosmos, but limitations of money, technology and political will have put the brakes on the space race. In the 50 years since visiting the Moon we have not stepped onto Mars or explored much beyond our solar system.

But that might all be about to change. With rapid improvements in propulsion technologies, a new generation are daring to dream again, this time not of a Moon shot, or even a Mars shot, but a star shot.

One project aiming for the stars is Breakthrough Starshot. Announced in 2016 by Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking, the project would propel tiny nano-craft attached to light sails up to a fifth the speed of light using powerful arrays of Earth-based lasers. The ambitious goal would be to travel the four light years to our nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri, in just 20 years. From there the craft would beam back images and data on, among other things, the star systems Earth-like planet, Proxima B.

The idea is to leave the fuel behind, unlike any rocket that was used in the past, says Avi Loeb, physicist at Harvard University in Massachusetts and chairman of Breakthrough Starshot. The amount of power one needs is comparable to what is used for the lift-off of todays shuttles, says Loeb. The difference here is you are delivering that to a single gram of material. The electronics would also weigh less than a gram and that part is already here we do have a camera, navigation device and communication device that could be packed into a single gram.

According to the plan, the nano-craft would be delivered into orbit where the light sails measuring at current estimates about the size of a person would unfurl. An array of lasers based on Earth would then propel the craft up to 100 million miles an hour within a few minutes. Unfortunately, this wont be happening next year or even next decade as several technological hurdles stand in the way.

At the moment we are focusing on three challenges, says Loeb, one is the sail, the other is the laser and the third would be communication.

The laser itself would need to be immensely powerful around 100GW, according to Loeb. This would be too expensive to achieve with a single laser but research into creating laser arrays made up of many less-powerful lasers looks promising. The challenge is to combine these lasers in a coherent fashion so that their power adds up in a synchronised or collimated beam.

Communication is another issue. Not only will it take four years to send data back from Alpha Centauri, the great distance means it will be challenging to focus the beam on a small patch of Earth. You cannot focus the beam better than the separation between the Earth and the Sun, says Loeb, so it will be a very broad beam that will be highly diluted. What we need is a telescope or observatory that will collect that information and analyse it and that is a great challenge.

A laser array on Earth would fire together to create a powerful beam...

propelling the craft up to 100,000,000mph

One of the most immediate challenges is the sail itself which needs to combine a large number of factors to be successful, such as strength, durability, lightness and efficient reflection. We need the material to reflect 99.99% of the laser, says Loeb, otherwise it will heat up and evaporate. Diamond is one candidate, while so-called metamaterials materials engineered at the nano-scale might also be promising possibilities.

One of the biggest challenges has been creating sails that are stable enough that they dont spin uncontrollably or fall off the laser beam entirely. At first rather unwieldy spherical-shaped sails seemed a promising solution. But research at Caltech has shown that nano-engineering the surface of the material could provide the stability required. If you think of a plastic bag on a garden hose, the chances are its going to fly off to one side or the other, says Ognjen Ilic, former researcher with the Caltech team, now an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. What we can do is essentially engineer the way the object scatters light such that it wants to stay pinned to the beam of light and can be accelerated in a stable way.

The key is to create specific nano-scale patterns on the surface of the material which effectively encode their own stability, mimicking different macro-scale geometries, such as a sphere. The technique also works if the light source is a long way away several million miles in fact. Although it is still at the theoretical stage, Ilic believes it could be a promising solution to the problem of stability.

Breakthrough Starshot might still be up in the air, but another proposed contender for interstellar travel is even more contentious. If correct it might even require the physics textbooks to be rewritten.

The EM Drive, first proposed by engineer Roger Shawyer in 2001, takes a conical chamber and pumps it full of microwaves which bounce around inside the cone. If the geometry of the cone is designed so that it matches the frequency of the waves, resonance will occur which boosts the activity inside the cone further.

According to Shawyers description, these waves exert a force against the walls of the chamber and produce thrust. Because the device requires no fuel, needing only electricity to operate, it could be extremely light and therefore break free of the rocket equation the effective brakes put upon rockets by the mass of their fuel.

The only problem is that such thrust should be impossible according to basic laws of physics such as the conservation of momentum. The thrust is coming out of nowhere, says Martin Tajmar, head of space systems at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, who is currently testing the EM Drive. In our understanding there is no radiation leaving the system so its a closed box a closed box that moves. Any physicist will tell you thats nonsense. It would be, as another commentator observed, like Han Solo powering the Millennium Falcon by headbutting the dashboard.

This hasnt stopped Shawyer, who has designed an interstellar probe based on the EM Drive which, he claims, would travel at two thirds the speed of light, reaching Alpha Centauri in just 10 years. NASA has also got involved, building its own version of the EM Drive which, it claims, has produced observable amounts of thrust in tests. This is where Tajmar got involved. I didnt take it seriously, he says, until I saw a video where this EM Drive was mounted on a test stand which showed rotation.

Tajmar decided to test it himself using the hyper-sensitive vacuum-encased equipment at his Dresden lab. Initial tests showed that thermal drift could account for some of the thrust. The microwave radiation caused the chamber to heat up and expand, so shifting the centre of gravity which could produce a false thrust signal.

The first generation of Roger Shawyer's EM Drive

Another possible source of the thrust was the magnetic field produced by the electronics powering the system. This can interact with the Earths magnetic field, explains Tajmar, and then you can get a force or torque in your system which is coming from the electronics and not necessarily the thrust itself. Tajmars team has removed the electronics from the chamber, replacing them with RF waves coming from outside. This should remove the source of error, but the new system requires tinkering. Tajmar hopes to have a device that can prove or disprove the EM Drive by the end of the year.

If the former happens the implications for space travel and physics itself could be immense. Tajmar however is not optimistic for the EM Drives chances. This is such an extraordinary claim that you must, as Carl Sagan said, have extraordinary proofs, he says. You must be really super sure on that. Without that, its just a fairy tale.

So what are the chances of going interstellar this century? The Breakthrough Starshot project has a proposed timeline a decade to develop the technology, a decade to build a prototype, and a decade to prepare the real system. Loeb recognises this is ambitious but, even if it doesnt live up to the highest hopes, it will still be a vast improvement on rocket technology. If we reach only a tenth of the speed of light, he says, we can get to Pluto within a week. That is much faster than the New Horizons spacecraft which took almost a decade.

Compared with NASAs Moon shot it would certainly be cheaper, costing tens of millions of dollars, according to Ilic, rather than the tens of billions spent on the space race. Given the same critical mass as was put behind the Moon missions, Ilic believes we could achieve a star shot in this generation.

Loeb is more cautious. It was not obvious that we could land a man on the Moon but 50 years ago we did, he says. There was some risk in that but much less of a risk because rockets were used, and the technology was known. Here the technology has to be developed. So my hope is that, even if it doesnt work out the way we envision it, we will have some by-products that will be very useful for other purposes.

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FEATURE: These bold engineering ideas could take humanity to the stars - Professional Engineering

Image Credit: phive/Shutterstock.com

Nanoform, a Finnish nanotechnology and drug particle engineering company, has won the prestigious Excellence in Pharma Award for Formulation at the 16th CPhI Pharma Awards which took place in Germany this November.

The prize sees world-renowned innovative companies competing against one another. This year Nanoforms ingenious medicine enabling nanotechnology, in the form of its CESS nanonization technology, won the highly contested award.

Who are Nanoform?

International pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies are well aware of the work that Nanoform dedicates itself to. Nanoform partners with businesses with the aim to boost their molecules formulation performance as well as to reduce clinical attrition. Nanoform is committed to working with international companies to provide them with cutting-edge, innovative solutions for the development and delivery of drugs.

The technology that won it the esteemed prize at the CPhI Pharma Awards was its multi-patented nanonization process which was designed with the capability of substantially improving dissolution rates and bioavailability, having the impact of doubling the number of drug compounds reaching clinical trials. In addition, the innovation has been shown to add value to the drug delivery spaces of pulmonary, transdermal, ocular and blood-brain barrier.

For this innovative new process, Nanoform surpassed the efforts of other respected companies such as Cambrex, Lonza Capsugel, and Glatt Pharmaceutical Services, who had also entered in the same category.

The Innovation

The new CESS, short for Controlled Expansion of Supercritical Solutions, nanonization technology has multiple patents for its unique design. It creates designed-for-purpose, nano-sized active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) particles, using a process that can control the particles shape, increasing uniformity. The system also has the ability to produce nanoparticles as small as 10 nm.

The method works by controlling the solubility of an API in supercritical carbon dioxide (scCO2) through a bottom-up method of recrystallization. Previous alternatives had been limited, and the CESS system surpasses those due to its utilization of controlled mass transfer, pressure reduction and flow. Another benefit of the system is that it is green, its process is free from using excipients and organic solvents.

Through Nanoforms innovation, novel opportunities are opening up to the field of drug research and development.

The Significance of the CESS System

Nanomaterials have unique properties that differ from their bulk material counterparts. These different properties have made them of special interest to a number of scientific fields, which has boosted exploration into nanoparticles over recent years. It has been found that these unique properties have potential applications in the areas of nanomedicine, therapeutics, medical devices and more. They have been identified as vectors for medical imaging, biological diagnostics and therapeutics.

What has been achieved by Nanoform is that another avenue of potential use has been opened up for nanoparticles. Nanoform has developed a reliable system that allows the benefits of nanoparticles to be harnessed in drug research and development. The unique properties of nanoparticles will be able to be put to use in developing new therapeutic treatments, which could induce a significant shift in the pharmaceutical sector.

It is generally accepted that advancements in the use of nanoparticles in this area would significantly influence the advancement of human therapeutics. Now pharmaceutical companies have access to a system that allows them to tailor-make nanoparticles, the innovation of new therapies that previously would not have been possible could be on the horizon.

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Nanoform Wins Award for Drug Development and Delivery - AZoNano

UTRGV professor Karen Lozano keeps her calendar full.

Shes often found in the lab, where she and her students have pioneered production methods in nanotechnology. Other times, youll catch her mentoring prospective engineers in her office, or out in the community, proselytizing to high schoolers about careers in science and technology.

If students need to talk to her, they usually try to catch her in her office. She gets so many emails that its hard for her to reply to all of them.

Last month, Lozanos research took her all the way to the White House, where she received the Presidential Excellence Award in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring she was one of just 15 educators chosen for the award. This week, shell speak about her work at TEDxMcAllen.

Arguably, shes one of the busiest professors on campus, but it definitely wasnt easy getting there.

Twenty-five years ago Lozano graduated from the Universidad de Monterrey at the age of 21, with a degree in mechanical engineering. Shed always been passionate about solving problems and the hard sciences, and mechanical engineering seemed like a natural path to take.

Lozano had her doubts, however: It was almost unheard of for a woman to become a mechanical engineer in Monterrey, but her mother pushed her to stick to her passion, telling her that it would open up doors in the future.

If were going to keep on supporting you and sacrificing for you, why are you going to study something that will not give you opportunities? Lozano remembers her mother saying. Study something that will give you opportunities. Follow the path less traveled.

Lozano did just that, but it was a lonely path. She was the only female mechanical engineering graduate in Monterrey in 1993. In fact, she was the only female in her program at UdeM.

The guys would all go together to a house to study and I was never allowed to go to somebodys house to study with 20 guys, so they would all study in teams and I would study alone, in my house, she recalled. Of course, once in a while, somebody would give me the comments like, Why are you here? Youre only gonna marry and have kids. Why are you here?

Lozano would blow off the comment with a tongue-in-cheek joke.

If Im gonna have kids, and Im doing all this advanced math and stuff, Im gonna be able to help them in their math when they were in high school. That was my answer all the time, she said. Which is something that I never did. I have a senior in high school and one that already graduated, and I dont think I ever sat to help them with math.

Monterrey is an industrial city, and theres no shortage of engineering jobs. Lozano remembers watching companies snap up her male peers before theyd even graduated. No calls came for her.

After college, she started applying to jobs she found in the newspaper. Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months.

Every morning I would wake up and the first thing I would do, I would go through the classifieds, Lozano said. I was just sitting in my house for three months.

There were plenty of listings, but none she was qualified for.

There were tons of openings, Lozano remembered, but all of them said, Were looking for a mechanical engineer. Sex: Male. You can google right now, and youll still find them, in 2019.

Finally, one morning Lozano opened the paper and saw a different ad, asking specifically for a female mechanical engineer. Lozano thought her classmates had bought the ad and were making fun of her.

Everyone that graduated me was already working, she said. It was totally weird.

Lozano applied anyway and got an interview.

I went, and it was legit, she said. There was this girl working there, this engineer, that graduated four years before I did from another university as a mechanical engineer, and she had faced the same situation that I was facing. So when they had a position, she asked the boss if it was OK for her to post this one as a social experiment, to see how many women would show up. I was the only one, so I was hired.

Lozano worked at the company for a few months before being accepted into a Masters/PHD program at Rice. After her post-doc she was hired on at UTRGV, where shes researched and taught for the past 20 years, making one of the most significant breakthroughs in her field in the late aughts.

Nanofibers are an interesting technology. A thousandth the diameter of a human hair, nanofibers can be worked into a variety of products that can be used in medicine as skin grafts and drug delivery, as an ultra-efficient filtration material and even as batteries.

There are some that are very, very small and have very high thermal conductivity and electrical conductivity, so if we combine them with plastics, then we can make plastics that can conduct electricity, Lozano said. Instead of copper or aluminum it can be a polymer, a plastic, that will have similar properties in terms of electrical and thermal properties, and we can lower the weight.

According to Lozano, theres a fair chance that because of advances in nanotech, your cellphone battery will weigh little more than a Post-it Note in the near future.

As exciting as the field was, Lozano had a problem: nanofibers took forever to make. They were traditionally made through a process that involved using heat or electricity, and only produced a miniscule fiber or two an hour. Instead of making groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of medicine or technology, Lozanos undergrads were spending all of their lab time laboriously teasing out solitary strands of nanofibers.

At the undergrad level, you need to hold something in your hand, to see it, to be able to bring that interest, she said. If I just give you one little hair, you cant do very much. Theres no way I could excite them or ignite that spark to fall in love with research.

Lozano was at a loss. She considered directing her students to research something else. Then, one day, inspiration struck her in one of the most likely forms: a cotton candy machine.

My mind just went crazy, she said. You have tons of fibers, very simple to produce. Theyre not nanofibers, but were engineers, we can make changes to make it nano. A group of students started working on it, and long story short, we developed those machines, we even created a company.

With the new machines, Lozano and her students could make nanofiber material by the bolt. They created an actual business that operated in McAllen for several years, producing material at an industrial scale and showing off their new process to others in the field.

At one point there were so many people coming by, Lozano says, the FBI dropped in to see what was going on.

It was very good, Lozano said. We hired lots of people and we had people from all over the world coming by.

The business was bought by a larger company in Tennessee in 2017, but Lozano and her students have continued to work with nanofiber. Their research has led to dozens of patents and scholarly articles.

A lot of our undergraduate students are co-authors in scientific publications, and thats amazing, Lozano said. Its not that common that undergraduate students graduate with journal publications from top journals. Even our high school students that work in the lab get the opportunity to be co-authors.

For Lozano, exposing students to science in such a direct way is just as, or more, important than her research breakthroughs and academic recognitions.

If you walk into her office, you wont see the White House commendation from October; it resides in a drawer at her home. It was gratifying, she says, but not as gratifying as seeing her students working in the lab.

You will, however, see a full-sized carnival cotton candy machine in Lozanos office, a reminder of the inspiration that helped her students succeed.

I see my students getting like five offer letters, and they come to me and their problem is which one to select, she said. So Ive seen what can come after, and I tell people that theres opportunities and theres jobs and you can contribute to society.

In many ways, the woman whose own path toward a career in science was unlikely has devoted herself to paving the way for others. Lozano frequently works with local high schools and even made a YouTube channel geared at inspiring and instructing children.

Its important to plant that seed in boys and girls, she said. To me, its the fuel that keeps me going.

On Tuesday, Lozano will continue talking about science at TEDxMcAllen. Her discussion will be streamed live on the groups Facebook page.

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Renowned researcher, UTRGV professor blazes trail from Monterrey to White House to TedXMcAllen - Monitor

By Serena Shedore 11/12/19 11:39pm

Last week, Rice announced a new five-year, $30 million cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army to research next-generation wireless networks and diamond materials manufacturing for use in electronics, according to Yousif Shamoo, vice provost for research. This agreement has been in progress since General John Murray, commander of U.S. Army Futures Command, visited Rice in April 2019.

According to a Rice news release, there will be two teams with different research focuses on this new agreement: a diamonds team and a networks team. The diamond team will focus on formulating diamond structures and materials for use in electronics, while the networks team will work on creating more secure wireless networks that have the ability to sense attacks.

According to Shamoo, faster and more secure communication networks will benefit both soldiers and civilians who depend on networks in phones and computers. These devices rely on silicon-based technology, and diamond materials have the potential to be more efficient than silicon materials.

Pulickel Ajayan, chair of the materials science and nanoengineering department, will co-lead the diamond team with a member of the Army Research Lab, and Ashutosh Sabharwal, chair of the electrical and computer engineering department, will co-lead the networks team with another member of the Army Research Lab.

We plan to establish a world-class facility in diamond growth and a materials program that will lead to innovative device ideas utilizing diamond heterostructures, Ajayan said.

According to the news release, the networks team is working to reduce the time needed to establish wireless networks. Innovations from the diamond materials team could benefit the networks team.

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Ajayan said this relationship between the Army Research Lab and Rice will benefit Rice students and faculty through opportunities for the exchange of students and researchers, as well as the opportunity for Rice students to engage in innovative research.

Shamoo said that undergraduate students will be able to get involved with this project either through taking an undergraduate research course for credit or by working with a professor who is a part of the project.

I fully expect Rice undergraduate and graduate students to be important members of our research teams, Shamoo said.

According to Shamoo, the Army Research Lab established this research agreement with Rice because of its reputation as an international leader in materials science.

[Richard] Smalley and [Robert] Curl won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the buckyballs [in 1996] and since then Rice has always been at the forefront of materials discovery and innovation, Shamoo said.

Shamoo said that this technology will not only modernize the Army but will help Americans lacking access to high-speed internet.

Rice Left, a student political organization raised concerns over the repercussions of the agreement in an email sent out to its members.

Rice helping the Army modernize means Rice is directly making U.S. imperialism more efficient and more deadly, Rice Left wrote. The U.S. Army has carried out countless war crimes, in the Philippines, in Korea, in Vietnam. Since 9/11, the war on terror has resulted in over 244,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mezthly Pena, a Duncan College sophomore, expressed concerns on Twitter.

Rice claims to care about sustainability yet still collaborates with one of the biggest polluting organizations in the world, Pena tweeted.

Editors Note: The Thresher requested a comment from Shamoo about student concerns and will update the story online.

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Rice receives Army grant amid concerns - The Rice Thresher

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT (TYO:9432), today announced that its Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab has entered a joint research agreement with the Technical University of Munich (TUM) to work on three-dimensionally transformable and implantable electrodes. Dr. Hitonobu Tomoike (M.D., Ph.D.), a renowned scientist and medical researcher, directs the MEI Lab, which will be collaborating with Dr. Bernhard Wolfrum, Professor of Neuroelectronics at TUM in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Munich School of BioEngineering (MSB). The scope of work for this multi-year project includes screening and optimizing functional materials, assembling 3D structures, and evaluating their biocompatibility.

Charged with discovering technologies that can revolutionize patient care, the NTT Research MEI Lab is focusing on the transformation and miniaturization of medical device components. This joint research will address the tendency of conventional electronics to work against and at a relative distance from, rather than with and alongside their targeted organ or tissue. The flexible micro- or nano-scale electrodes envisioned as an outcome of this project are expected to minimize the negative impact that rigid and planar electrode materials have on soft and curvilinear biological samples.

In order to acquire in vivo biological signals stably, with a high accuracy for a long period of time, a flexible electrode with high biocompatibility is required, said Dr. Tomoike. To achieve this, we will use nano and micro-scale conductive polymer thin films that are friendly to living bodies and consider the use of in vivo implant electrodes, as well as the control of structural changes of the functional electrodes in the body.

The two principal researchers bring considerable expertise to this project. Dr. Tomoike, former Director of the Sakakibara Heart Institute, Director Emeritus at the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center in Japan, and former Professor of Cardiology at Yamagata University, is known for his work in precision medicine involving bio-sensors and analytics. Dr. Wolfrums research focuses on neuro- and bioelectronics. He has developed electrochemical sensor arrays and interfaces to cellular networks and employed microfabrication techniques, advanced printing technologies, and microfluidic cell culture methods with the goal of establishing neuroelectronic hybrids and systems for on-chip neuroscience and bioelectronic medicine.

The Technical University of Munich has strengths in neuron growth control and electrophysiological measurement and has recently accumulated know-how and knowledge of printing technology for bioelectronics, said Dr. Tomoike, who is also a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and of the American Heart Association. We are aiming for breakthroughs in fundamental material science and unprecedented technologies for diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical functions.

Along with pursuing ambitious research targets, this agreement also advances NTT Researchs goal of engaging with partners around the world. As part of this project, NTT Research MEI Lab will send two of its researchers to Munich. The MEI Lab also plans to open an office in Germany. The research will officially launch in Q1 2020; the first phase of the project may take as long as three years.

We are very pleased to have entered this long-term joint research agreement with the MEI Lab of NTT Research and believe our combined strengths will lead to promising advances in a critically important field of bioengineering, said Dr. Wolfrum, who conducted postdoctoral research in nanoscience at Delft University, has led a research group at the Peter Grnberg Institute in Jlich, lectured at Aachen University, and conducted research as a visiting associate professor at Tohoku University in Sendai.

Throughout this interdisciplinary research project, the two organizations are expected to leverage their respective strengths. The Technical University of Munich, which is a member of the TU9 alliance of nine leading German institutes of technology, will be involved through its Neuroelectronics Group (NEL), Munich School of BioEngineering, in the investigation, characterization, and micro/nanofabrication of materials. For its part, the MEI Lab will design experiments and research targets and conduct data analysis based on IoT and AI technologies. Each party will assume roles in evaluating the biocompatibility of fabricated devices.

One notable aspect of this project, according to Dr. Tomoike, is its focus on the physics of soft nanomaterials, the self-assembly of which allows not only for precise control of 3D structures but also reversible transformation of electrodes that interface and function with cells and tissues. Possible applications involve sensing and stimulation electrodes for the brain and heart, brain-machine interfaces, multi-array electrodes for neuronal analysis, and new approaches to vasodilation.

About NTT Research

NTT Research opened its Palo Alto offices in July 2019 as a new Silicon Valley startup to conduct basic research and advance technologies that promote positive change for humankind. Currently, three labs are housed at NTT Research: the Physics and Information Science (PHI) Lab, the Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Lab, and the Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab. The organization aims to upgrade reality in three areas: 1) quantum information, neuro-science and photonics; 2) cryptographic and information security; and 3) medical and health informatics. NTT Research is part of NTT, a global technology and business solutions provider with an annual R&D budget of $3.6 billion.

NTT and the NTT logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION and/or its affiliates. All other referenced product names are trademarks of their respective owners. 2019 NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION

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NTT Research and Technical University of Munich (TUM) Enter Joint Research Agreement to Collaborate on Technologies to Affect the Future of Patient...

A new type of micromotor has been developed. Directed by magnets and powered by ultrasound, these micromotors are capable of traveling across microscopic particles and cells in very crowded areas without causing any damage.

These microswimmers provide a new way to manipulate single particles with precise control and in three dimensions, without having to do special sample preparation, labeling, surface modification, said Joseph Wang, a professor of nanoengineering at University of California San Diego (USCD), in a UCSD press release.

Wang, Thomas Mallouk, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, and Wei Wang, professor of materials science and engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology, are credited as senior authors of a paper detailing the development of these micromotors. The study was published on Oct. 25 in Science Advances.

Researchers tested the technology by moving HeLa cells the oldest and most commonly used cell line for scientific research and silica particles in aqueous media with micromotors. They accomplished this task without damaging nearby particles and cells. In one test, the researchers were able to create letters by pushing particles with the micromotors. In another, they exerted control over the micromotors, making them climb up microscopic blocks and stairs. This test demonstrated that they were capable of navigating over three-dimensional objects.

The micromotors are essentially gold-coated hollow polymer structures that are shaped like a half capsule. Within the body of the micromotor is a tiny magnetic nickel nanoparticle, allowing them to be steered with magnets. The inside surface is treated so it can repel water, so when the micromotor is submerged in water, an air bubble is trapped inside the device. This trapped bubble is integral to the functioning of the micromotor, as it allows the micromotor to respond to ultrasound. Upon receiving ultrasound waves, the trapped bubble begins to oscillate, forming forces that give it an initial push to movement. By applying an external magnetic field, it can move continuously, while altering the direction of the field allows researchers to control the speed and trajectory of the micromotors.

We have a lot of control over the motion, unlike a chemically fueled micromotor that relies on random motion to reach its target, said Fernando Soto, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student studying at UC San Diego. Also, ultrasound and magnets are biocompatible, making this micromotor system attractive for use in biological applications.

The authors plan on making improvements to the micromotors in the coming years. For example, they want to make them more biocompatible using biodegradable polymers and a magnetic material that is less toxic, such as iron oxide. Thanks to this technology, the researchers have opened new possibilities for nanomedicine, tissue engineering, targeted drug delivery, regenerative medicine, and other applications in the field of biochemistry.

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Micromotors move single cells using magnets and ultrasound - CMU The Tartan Online

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New York, NY 13 Nov 2019: According to a new research published by Polaris Market Research the global Nanosatellite And Microsatellite Marketis anticipated to reach overUSD 6,111.8 million by 2026. In 2017, the nano satellite segment dominated the global market, in terms of revenue. In 2017, North America accounted for the majority share in the global Nano Satellite and Micro Satellite market.

Nano satellites are used in civil, government, defense, and commercial sectors for earth observation and telecommunication applications. Organizations are increasingly adopting nano and micro satellites for technology demonstration, and scientific research and experimentation. The growing commercial sector, along with low costs associated with these satellites drive the market. There has been a rising demand of earth observation services among various sectors such as agriculture, energy, civil engineering, oil and gas, and defense. Growing use of these satellites in defense sector would boost the growth of this market. Technological advancement in terms of miniaturization of components, and associated software has encouraged established organizations, and small and medium enterprises to invest in these satellites. Advancements in microelectronics such as light weight apertures, antennas, panels, transreceivers, control sensors and actuators, and multi spectral imagers would increase the efficiency and processing power of these satellites and make it easy to assemble and test, reducing the complexities associated with heavy satellites.

Request for sample copy of this report @https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/nano-satellite-and-micro-satellite-market/request-for-sample

The well-known companies profiled in the report include Lockheed Martin Corporation, Planet Labs, Inc., Sierra Nevada Corporation, Raytheon Company, Clyde Space, Inc., SpaceQuest Ltd., Surrey Satellite Technology Limited, Vector Space Systems, Tyvak Inc., The Boeing Company, GomSpace Group AB, Harris Corporation, and Thales Group among others. These companies launch new products and collaborate with other market leaders to innovate and launch new products to meet the increasing needs and requirements of consumers.

Cubesat technology is growing at a rapid rate. CubeSats are a class of research spacecraft called nanosatellites. Cubesats are miniaturized satellites with mass between 1-3 kg. CubeSats are developed to standard dimensions (Units or U) of 10x10x11. They can be 1U, 2U, 3U, or 6U in size, and typically weigh less than 1.33 kg (3 lbs) per U. CubeSats are widely used by academia and research, and would constitute around 30% of total nano satellite market during the forecast period. Nano satellites in the range of 4-6 kg would constitute around 60% of the nano-satellite market during the forecast period owing to its increasing applications in remote sensing, earth observation, and technology development.

The adoption of nano and micro satellites in the commercial sector has increased tremendously over the past few years owing to miniaturization of bulky satellite components, reduced costs, and standardization of satellite parts. In the commercial sector, these satellites are used in forestry, agriculture, energy, civil engineering, archaeology, insurance, and media and entertainment among others. These satellites are used for obtaining high-resolution earth imaging, space-based internet, and communication services. Planet, a company based in U.S., has a constellation of 36 small satellites in orbit, and offers high resolution imaging to consumers in the commercial sector. Other companies such as Skybox, Digital Globe, and O3B offer services such as real time satellite imaging, telecommunication, and space-based internet through these satellites.

Request for Discount on This Report @https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/nano-satellite-and-micro-satellite-market/request-for-discount-pricing

The various applications of nanosatellites and microsatellitesinclude earth observation, communication, technology demonstration, biological experimentation, scientific research & academic training, and others. Earth observation accounted for the highest share in 2017.These satellites are increasingly being used in this sector for commercial weather monitoring, agricultural monitoring and management, and synthetic aperture radar imagery. They are also used by the defense sector for border monitoring, disaster management, and other military missions. Companies such as Planet, Skybox Imaging, and Dauria Aerospace have launched several small satellites dedicated only for remote sensing. Over 2,100 satellites are anticipated to be launched from 2016 to 2025. Leading companies in this sector include Planet, Spire, BlackSky Global and Satellogic, which together plan to launch 1,400 out of the total 2,100 satellites. An emerging application of these satellites is near real-time remote sensing, with two U.S. companies, Planet Labs and Skybox Imaging offering services. Near-real time satellite imagery would enable monitoring of assets at the same time for global corporations, and generating high-resolution visual data for individual companies, and governments. Increasing demand of on-demand geographic information systems with pay-per-image business model is expected to supplement the growth of this market.

North America is expected to dominate the market throughout the forecast period. Rise in applications of nano and micro satellites in agriculture, real estate, defense, and government sectors in the North American region is the major driver for market growth. The affordable price of these satellites also accelerates the penetration in the commercial sector. Rise in investment in the defense sector, along with technological advancement in telecommunication industry, is expected to drive the nano and micro satellite market growth during the forecast period. Use of high-resolution imaging, and communication services for border security and monitoring high-risk situation by federal agencies, government, and non-government organizations are expected to raise the market investment for these services.

About Polaris Market Research

Polaris Market Research is a global market research and consulting company. The company specializes in providing exceptional market intelligence and in-depth business research services for our clientele spread across different enterprises. We at Polaris are obliged to serve our diverse customer base present across the industries of healthcare, technology, semi-conductors and chemicals among various other industries present around the world

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Phone: 1-646-568-9980

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Web:www.polarismarketresearch.com

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Nanosatellite And Microsatellite Market with Report In Depth Industry Analysis on Trends, Growth, Opportunities and Forecast till 2026 - Tech Admirers

New method overcomes limitations of existing chemical procedures and may accelerate nanoengineering of materials.

Schematic illustration of probe adsorption influenced by an attractive interaction within the corona

Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) have made a discovery that allows scientists to look at the surface density of dispersed nanoparticles. This technique enables researchers to understand the properties of nanoparticles without disturbing them, at a much lower cost and far more quickly than with existing methods.

The new process is explained in a paper entitled Measuring the Accessible Surface Area within the Nanoparticle Corona using Molecular Probe Adsorption, published in the academic journal Nano Letters. It was led by Michael Strano, co-lead principal investigator of the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) research group at SMART and the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor at MIT, and MIT graduate student Minkyung Park. DiSTAP is a part of SMART, MITs research enterprise in Singapore, and develops new technologies to enable Singapore, a city-state which is dependent upon imported food and produce, to improve its agriculture yield to reduce external dependencies.

The molecular probe adsorption (MPA) method is based on a noninvasive adsorption of a fluorescent probe on the surface of colloidal nanoparticles in an aqueous phase. Researchers are able to calculate the surface coverage of dispersants on the nanoparticle surface which are used to make it stable at room temperature by the physical interaction between the probe and nanoparticle surface.

We can now characterize the surface of the nanoparticle through its adsorption of the fluorescent probe. This allows us to understand the surface of the nanoparticle without damaging it, which is, unfortunately, the case with chemical processes widely used today, says Park. This new method also uses machines that are readily available in labs today, opening up a new, easy method for the scientific community to develop nanoparticles that can help revolutionize different sectors and disciplines.

The MPA method is also able to characterize a nanoparticle within minutes compared to several hours that the best chemical methods require today. Because it uses only fluorescent light, it is also substantially cheaper.

DiSTAP has started to use this method for nanoparticle sensors in plants and nanocarriers for delivery of molecular cargo into plants.

We are already using the new MPA method within DiSTAP to aid us in creating sensors and nanocarriers for plants, says Strano. It has enabled us to discover and optimize more sensitive sensors and understand the surface chemistry, which in turn allows for greater precision when monitoring plants. With higher-quality data and insight into plant biochemistry, we can ultimately provide optimal nutrient levels or beneficial hormones for healthier plants and higher yields.

Read more from the original source:

SMART discovers nondisruptive way to see surface of nanoparticles - Mirage News