Two very similar new carbon nanotube products, released eight years apart, provoked very different reactions. What’s changed about the way we consider nanotechnology risks and benefits?
Hidden tools are making the world a safer place.
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From tiny robotic doctors repairing your body to the latest climate change-tackling tools, nanotechnology is fighting an invisible battle on our behalf.
A quantum dot: A high-resolution transmission electron micrograph of cadmium telluride nanoparticles. (The scale bar in the lower right is 2 nanometers long, or two millionths of a millimeter.)
Nagpal Group, University of Colorado
Quantum dots - minuscule semiconductor particles with specific light-absorption properties - can kill drug-resistant superbugs without harming the surrounding healthy tissue.
Our civilisation is built on chemistry, and the science has a bright future, with the launch of a new Decadal Plan that will steer the science into the future.
Titanium ore can be used to develop lithium ion batteries and supercapacitors, which can aid South Africa’s energy problems.
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We need to carefully assess nanomaterials to ensure their safety, but there are questions over whether the existing practice of risk assessment is up to the task.
Fluorescent security ink produces multicolor barcode visible under UV light.
Stoddart Group
Invisible under normal light but fluorescent under UV light, this ink can print out unique signatures that use ‘molecular encryption’ to authenticate anything they tag.
Graphene powder can be manufactured.
Dr Mohammad Choucair
There is much excitement about graphene, a material only a single carbon-atom thick, but finding ways to do something with it that’s affordable have always been a challenge.
New innovations and technologies, such as the Nanopatch developed by Australian biotech Vaxxas, are instrumental to Australia’s future prosperity, and many benefit from NCRIS facilities, which are now under threat from government cuts.
AIBN
The government believes innovation will be crucial to our future productivity, yet it is threatening cuts to research infrastructure that is instrumental to promoting innovation and new technologies.
Fossil fuels can only go so far towards meeting our burgeoning energy demands.
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Throughout history, whenever new technologies have emerged that change our means of production and ability to communicate they have tended to transform society. The rapid technological development of the…
Ok, that’s not the way to extract it.
fabriceh_com
In the development of new drugs, taking something from nature and modifying it has been a successful tactic employed by medicinal chemists for years. Now, with the help of nanotechnology, researchers are…
Ian Burkhart moves his paralysed hand using the thought-controlled Neurobridge brain implant.
Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
Don’t be mesmerised by cool apps and flashy new gizmos – the top technology inventions of the year are ones that will have a lasting effect. Most are advances in fields that are already changing us. Some…
Plants use photosynthesis to build molecules and energy they can use. By copying plants, humans can make cleaner fuels.
Ranjit Bhatnagar/Flickr
Most of the energy that fuels our lives comes from plants. Whether it is a fossil fuel that was formed hundreds of millions of years ago or the food we eat, all carbon-borne energy has its ultimate origins…
Development of new drugs for treatment of disease is an expensive, time-consuming and labour-intensive effort for both pharmaceutical companies and academics. For the past 15 years, “cost per approval…
They have cancer in their sights.
StephenMitchell/Flickr
It sounds like a scene from a science fiction novel – an army of tiny weaponised robots travelling around a human body, hunting down malignant tumours and destroying them from within. But research in Nature…