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Content about Nanotechnology

August 20, 2014
Attacking Ebola with nanoparticles

There is no known vaccine, treatment, or cure for Ebola, which is contracted through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person or animal. That doesn’t mean there’s no hope, however. In fact, Thomas Webster’s lab at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, US, is currently working on one possible weapon for fighting the virus: nanotechnology.

October 20, 2010
Announcement - New European petaflop supercomputer available in 2011

Announcement - New European Petaflop supercomputer available in 2011

Photo courtesy PRACE

In 2011, the 1.6 Petaflop French supercomputer, Curie, will be installed and available for use. Powered by more than 90,000 processor cores, it will be exclusively dedicated to European research and available for all fields of science, including high-energy and plasma physics, climatology and much more.
“It is crucial to have high computing power to simulate, with the most possible realism, the past of our climate, the current conditions and its future evolution according to various scenarios,” said Jean Jouzel, vice-president of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).
Scientists and engineers will also be able to use Curie’s simulations to explore the properties of various materials, improve aircraft and car construction, design better drugs, understand the intricate molecular functions of the human body and conduct simulations that are impractical in reality.
Cur

October 20, 2010
Link of the Week - Nobel Prize follows Ig Nobel

 

Link of the Week - Nobel Prize follows Ig Nobel

Artist's impression of a graphene transistor. Image courtesy physorg

A first has just occurred in the world of Nobel Prize awards: Andre Geim, a Russian-born physicist, who was previously awarded an Ig Nobel for using magnets to levitate a frog, received a Nobel Prize in Physics for his experiments on a 2-D substance called ‘graphene.’ Graphene, which is one-atom thick and entirely made from carbon, comes from the ‘lead’ in a pencil.
 
The substance is made up of a handful of atoms in a honeycomb lattice, akin to atomic scale chicken wire. At this scale,  its properties truly shine as Andre and his team discovered that the material conducts electricity 100 times faster than silicon. Possible future applications of this material could be for the creation of ultra-fast transistors for the next generation of computers, electronics, smart displays and quantum-dot computers.
 
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September 23, 2009
Image of week - Nanoporous materials for green technology

Nanoporous materials for green technology

Pictured here, a metal-organic framework with pores of approximately 1.4 nanometer in diameter.  Image courtesy of David Dubbeldam.

A new class of materials with nano-scale pores could help to improve hydrogen fuel cells or reduce auto emissions.
Using a variety of TeraGrid resources, researchers at Northwestern University and Kansas State University were able to model and evaluate metal-organic frameworks to see how these materials will perform under specific circumstances. They found that metal-organic frameworks act much like sponges, soaking up hydrogen gas and storing it in their nano-sized pores. In fact, these metal-organic frameworks are capable of soaking up far more hydrogen gas than could normally occupy the same amount of space.
To learn more about this research and its further applications, visit the research group’s website.

April 23, 2008
iSGTW Link of the week - Salute to SALUTE

 

Link of the week - Salute to SALUTE

The Bulgarian team in charge of the SALUTE project is developing algorithms for studying quantum effects in semiconductor structures. These effects influence the design of nano-devices with improved performance.Images courtesy of SALUTE and Obscura

SALUTE—or Stochastic ALgorithms for Ultra-fast Transport in sEmiconductors—is a pilot grid application developed to solve computationally intensive problems in semiconductor physics.
Semiconductors—materials that can both conduct and insulate electricity—are invaluable to modern electronics. Their ability to conduct depends on the ability of “carriers”—electrons or phonons—to transport electrical charge.This carrier transport occurs on a quantum level: the temporal scale is so short it is measured in femtoseconds, where one femtosecond is 10-15 seconds, or one millionth of a nanosecond.
Simulations on this sort of scale rely on complicated integral eq

March 19, 2008
iSGTW Image of the week - Window to a molecular world

Image of the week - Window to a molecular world  The Vaccinia virus, a bundle of DNA comprising 250 genes, is a member of the poxvirus family and was key to World Health Organization efforts to eradicate smallpox. This image was produced using EGEETomo: grid-powered electron tomography.Image courtesy of Fernández, J.J.Electron tomography, also known as ET, provides researchers with a tiny window on to the alien world of molecular biology. The technology works by shooting electron beams through super-slim samples at different angles, producing data that can be pieced together to produce a three-dimensional structure. The technology is well suited to biological specimens such as chromosomes and viruses, providing nano-scale resolution for an all-new look at these target macromolecules.To achieve such resolution, ET demands sophisticated reconstruction algorithms. Where iterative algebraic algorithms yield high quality reconstructions, they are computationally expensive and their use requires high performance techniques.

October 3, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Keeping up with Moore's Law

  Feature - Keeping up with Moore’s Law The NanoWire user interface.Image courtesy of nanoHUB Silicon nanowire transistors are promising devices for future integrated circuits. Researchers in this field are interested in geometries and properties of materials that vary on an atomic length scale; they study quantum states and the relationship between voltages and currents at these scales.  But not all nano-device engineers are nuts for computers. Many prefer to let other people worry about the computational end of things. Since this research depends heavily on simulations of nano-device behavior under varying conditions, the door is wide open for the development of accessible and intuitive computational tools.Enter Gerhard Klimeck of Purdue University, technical director of the National Science Foundation Network for Computational Nanotechnology. Klimeck and his colleagues have developed the user-friendly NanoWire computational tool, accessible via the web-based nanoHUB.  On nanoHUB, researchers set up a NanoW

September 26, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Fusion of disciplines powers Russian grid infrastructure

  Feature - Fusion of disciplines powers Russian grid infrastructure The Fusion_RDIG virtual organization works to help Russian researchers working on the international ITER project. The ITER fusion device has been designed to produce 500 MW of fusion power; construction should commence in 2008.Image courtesy of ITER Established in September 2003, development of RDIG, or the Russian Data Intensive Grid, was at first driven by the high energy physics community, which still remains the largest user of the RDIG infrastructure.Four years on, demand for RDIG infrastructure is now coming from scientists in nanotechnology, computational chemistry, biology, earth sciences, business and more. The feasibility of fusion powerIgor Semenov, head of the Department of Physics and Engineering Problems at Russian Research Center “Kurchatov Institute” (RRC KI), Russia’s lead governmental organization for nuclear research, says grid computing has been a boon for his team’s research.“The load on RRC KI computing re

August 29, 2007
iSGTW Feature - Thailand goes tera: Scientists connect to the power of ThaiGrid

  Feature - Thailand goes tera: scientists connect to the power of ThaiGrid ThaiGrid powers this tsunami simulation, run by a team from Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, and focusing on the potential effects of tsunamis in the Indian Ocean.Image courtesy of ThaiGrid Scientists across the globe are cranking up their computing requirements: they want more processing power to tackle ever more challenging problems. The wishes of Thai scientists recently came true when their first teraflop computing system went online as part of the Thai National Grid Project.“Our demand for computational power and storage is increasing rapidly,” says Putchong Uthayopas, director of the Thai National Grid Project. “We had a need for a national computational infrastructure that would allow researchers to discover and explore more challenging problems,” he says. “The Thai government decided that now was the right time to explore grids as a key infrastructure enabler.”80 systems across 15 sites Comprising 1

February 28, 2007
iSGTW Link of the Week - nanoHUB.org

Link of the Week - nanoHUB.org Structure of a lipid bilayer computed by nanoGromacs, of nanoHUB.orgCourtesy of nanoHUB.org nanoHUB.org offers free online simulation tools and educational material for teaching and research in nanotechnology. Users can choose from almost 50 simulation tools, allowing them to simulate solar cells, networks of carbon nanotubes and nano-transistors, among many other structures. The tools appear to run as applets in a browser window, but they are powered by a remote HUB infrastructure. No software is installed or uploaded to a users computer. In order to run simulations, you must log in with a nanoHUB username and password.  Initial testing is currently under way to enable end users to execute the most processing-intensive tools to both Open Science Grid and TeraGrid resources.  In addition to online simulation tools, nanoHUB also hosts online classes and seminars on subjects including quantum transport, nanoelectronics and nanophotonics.nanoHUB is supported by the National Science Fo