A sky-high space elevator
What would you do with a super-light, super-strong, and super-conductive material like carbon nano-tubes? You could put them into a computer, into stain-resistant clothing, or into a bike frame for enhanced lightness and agility. But this is all child’s play in comparison to the space elevator, an idea that scientists, including several at NASA, have considered.
“[Carbon nano-tubes] are so strong and light, you can build a pole like a beanstalk that climbs up right into orbit, and that way you can shuttle things from the ground right up to orbit,” said Jason Zhu, a third-year undergrad at McMaster University at Saturday’s Undergraduate Nanotechnology Conference. “Instead of using up millions of dollars of rocket fuel, just take it up the elevator.”
New suites of neurons?
Today, virtually no treatments exist for paralysis, but that may soon change. Professor Sam Stupp at Northwestern University has found a way to inject a molecule into a living organism and have it spontaneously assemble into fibril-like structures carrying amino acids, the molecular building blocks of every protein in our body. The structures act as scaffolding for neurons to re-grow, and the amino acids they carry can help stimulate this growth.
“Amazingly, because these fibrils also signal the neuron to start growing again, they start growing very rapidly, they reconnect, and demonstrate the reversal of paralysis,” said physicist Dr. Don Eigler. “It’s an extraordinary accomplishment at the laboratory level, [but] it’s also important to recognize that that’s still the very early stages and is by no means demonstrated to be a viable therapy for humans yet. But this is one example of the kinds of opportunities that nanometre-scale structures offer us.”
Zeroing in
Nanotech diagnostic tools may be the disease-sniffing dogs of the future medical world. A number of studies have shown nano-particles hunting out diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, or even a virus like SARS at a molecular level. Whether in the form of a strip, a chip, a tattoo, or an intravenous formula, most methods depend on a nano-particle interacting with a biological molecule, giving indicators about the presence and severity of a disease. Treatments that deliver insulin, hormones, and drugs can also be targeted for bacteria or cancer cells using the same principles.
On the other hand, deploying a nano-robot to police the many possible ways the body can go wrong would certainly top any of these nano-particles. Unfortunately, these nano-robots exist only in theory.
“We’re definitely going to see nano-bio applications and nano-medical applications fairly soon,” said Ilia Auerbach-Ziogas, the director of the UNC and a fourth-year nano-engineering student at U of T.
“There’s a lot of really exciting results, but they’re coming out of techniques that are effectively poisonous. A lot of quantum dots, for example, are made of heavy metals and we don’t know what exactly those do at the nano-scale. The toxicity studies are always lagging behind the research so for any responsible deployments we need to start testing that, but more importantly we need to start finding more benign materials that we can use.”
-S.H.
