With news of powerful flu strains like the avian flu and hand-transmissible diseases such as colds, public transportation links operators in Asia and Europe have considered using a new disinfectant in their undergrounds. Many surfaces that people touch every day in the tube, as the London subway system is called, also carry thousands of bacteria and germs.

Hong Kong is among the first cities to test one of the latest anti-flu products, nano silver-titianium dioxide coating.. It is applied to all surfaces inside a subway car. The preliminary tests conducted in Hong Kong show that the disinfectant reduces the amount of bacteria by 60 percent.

“Especially in making bullet-proof vests, shields, and explosion proof blankets,” said Zhang, “the best protective material will have a high level of elastic storage energy that will cause the projectile to bounce off or be deflected.”

In his experiments, Zhang found that carbon nanotubes could be resilient to projectiles traveling at speeds of 200-1400 meters per second. The velocity of a typical rifle bullet is between 180 and 1500 meters per second. (photo of non-nano bullet-proof t-shirt LBA International)

“This partnership with RUSNANO offers great promise for Alcoa and the entire aluminum industry,” says Alcoa president and CEO Klaus Kleinfeld. “Building on our existing investment and presence in Russia, we are proud to be a partner of the leading Russian nanotechnology institution.”

“I am confident that the MoU that we signed with Alcoa, one of the global leaders in the production of aluminum and aluminum products, is a first step on the road to a very beneficial joint cooperation that will heavily rely on both parties’ expansive knowledge and expertise,” says RUSNANO CEO Anatoly Chubais. “With Alcoa, we are looking forward to the implementation of the concrete projects of bringing nanotechnologies’ advantage for the creation of the new generation aluminum products for the Russian and export markets.”

Working in collaboration with researchers at Yonsei University, Seoul, Brown Professor Thomas J. Webster combined neural stem cells with either hydrophobic or hydrophilic carbon nanofibers and injected the cocktail into damaged regions of the brains of rats that had suffered a simulated stroke. After a few weeks, both types of nanofibers with stem cells promoted the growth of new neural tissue. On their own, neither nanofibers nor stem cells triggered neural tissue regeneration.

Webster attributes the mixture’s regenerative power to the fibers’ favorable interaction with laminin, a key protein for promoting stem cell differentiation into neurons. Webster also thinks the nanofibers’ ability to conduct electricity could help wire the neurons to one another.

The scientists at the University of Illinois will design, model, synthesize, and fabricate nanomedical devices based on natural and synthetic ion transporters – proteins that control ion motion across the membranes of every living cell.

The first task will be to design a class of devices for generating Electric powerlinks – bio-batteries – for a wide array of implantable devices, starting with an artificial retina that has already been developed at the Doheny Eye Institute at the University of Southern California. The artificial retina and accompanying nanobattery will be used to correct certain types of macular degeneration.

To meet these challenges, the field of  biomedical nanotechnology has undergone exponential growth during the last 5 years. Technologies such as nanostructured biomaterials for biointegration, nanoprobes for cellular targeting, and nanofluidic chips for DNA processing and drug delivery promise to transform the world of biochemistry and medicine much in the same way that integrated semiconductor devices transformed the world of electronics and computation.

The key driving force is the complementary length scale between biological structures that range from the 10′s of nanometers (proteins, DNA, viruses) to the micron scale (cells and cellular assemblies) and the new capabilities of nanosystems to manipulate and control such feature sizes within our environment.

Don Eigler’s accomplishment remains, to this day, one of the most important breakthroughs in nanoscience and technology,  At the time, the implications of this achievement were so far-reaching they almost seemed like science fiction. But now, twenty years later, it’s clear that this was a defining moment that has spawned the kind of research that will eventually bring us beyond CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) and Moore’s Law, to advance computing to handle the massive volumes of data in the world while using less energy resources.