From an article at CancerPage.com:

Researchers have found a way to target cancer cells by injecting tiny particles that will attack only the diseased cells while leaving healthy cells unscathed, according to a study released on Monday.

A team of researchers working at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston laced tiny particles with lethal doses of chemotherapy and when injected they targeted cancer cells alone.

The team first conducted experiments on cells growing in laboratory dishes and then on mice bearing human prostate tumors, according to the study, published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the mice, the tumors shrank dramatically and all of the mice survived the study while the untreated control animals did not.

“A single injection of our nanoparticles completely eradicated the tumors in five of the seven treated animals, and the remaining animals also had a significant tumor reduction, compared to the controls,” said Dr. Omid Farokhzad, assistant professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

While all the parts of this new delivery system are known to be safe, it must still be proven safe for humans. The scientists said that further testing is needed on larger animals, and eventually in humans.

Read the whole article.

Tags: cancer | health | news | biotechnology | blog | weblog | healthcare | nanotech | medical breakthroughs

Practical fuel cells are a step closer with news that researchers at UCLA and the University of Michigan “have demonstrated the ability to store large amounts of hydrogen at the right pressure.” All that’s left is to figure out how to keep the hydrogen stored at ambient temperature and we’ll be sporting around in cars powered by clean-burning hydrogen fuel cells.

Tags: blog | weblog | energy | politics | fuel cells | technology | hydrogen | news

Read more!

President Bush spoke those words today in Michigan while explaining his Advanced Energy Initiative to the employees of Johnson Controls in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“I laid out what’s called an Advanced Energy Initiative. And a cornerstone of the initiative is a 22 percent increase in funding for clean energy research at the Department of Energy. And it’s got two major goals, or two objectives. First, to transform the way we power our cars and trucks. And, secondly, to transform the way we power our homes and offices.

So let me talk to you about the first one. Our nation is on the threshold of some new energy technologies that I think will startle the American people. It’s not going to startle you here at Johnson Controls because you know what I’m talking about. (Laughter.) You take it for granted. But the American people will be amazed at how far our technology has advanced in order to meet an important goal, which is to reduce our imports from the Middle East by 75 percent by 2025, and eventually getting rid of our dependence totally.

The first objective is to change the way we power our cars and trucks. Today’s cars and trucks are fueled almost exclusively by gasoline and diesel fuel, which, of course, comes from oil.
…
The most promising ways to reduce gasoline consumption quickly is through hybrid vehicles. Hybrid vehicles have both a gasoline-powered engine and an electric battery based on technologies that were developed by the Department of Energy. In other words, this technology came to be because the federal government made a research commitment. That’s why I think it’s double – important to double research as we go down the next decade. The gasoline engine charges the battery, which helps drive the vehicle. And the twin sources of power allow hybrid cars and trucks to travel about twice as far on a gallon of fuel as gasoline-only vehicles. That is a good start when something that can go twice as far on a gallon of gasoline than the conventional vehicle can.

Breakthrough in solar power

The President’s second objective – changing how we power our businesses and homes – is about to get a significant boost if a reported breakthrough in solar power generation is borne out.

According to an article at IOL.com A team of South African researchers from the University of Port Elizabeth, University of Pretoria, and Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), have developed an efficient solar power technology that they say will enable homes to obtain all their electricity from the sun:

The panels are able to generate enough energy to run stoves, geysers, lights, TVs, fridges, computers - in short all the modern conveniences of the modern house.

The new technology should be available in South Africa within a year and through a special converter, energy can be fed directly into the wiring of existing houses. New powerful storage units will allow energy storage to meet demands even in winter. The panels are so efficient they can operate through a Cape Town winter, while direct sunlight is ideal for high-energy generation, other daytime light also generates energy via the panels.
…
Production will start next month and the factory will run 24 hours a day, producing more than 1 000 panels a day to meet expected demand.
…
The South African solar panels consist of a thin layer of a unique metal alloy that converts light into energy. The photo-responsive alloy can operate on virtually all flexible surfaces, which means it could in future find a host of other applications.

Alberts said the new panels are approximately five microns thick (a human hair is 20 microns thick) while the older silicon panels are 350 microns thick. the cost of the South African technology is a fraction of the less effective silicone solar panels.

An article published last October at iAfrica.com has more details:

Just one-quarter the cost and significantly more efficient than conventional solar panels, the thin film technology is jointly owned by the University of Johannesburg and the head of its physics department, professor Vivian Alberts.
…
Professor Alberts says the thin film technology he and his team developed can generate up to 150 watts of electrical power at a cost below R10 ($1.66 U.S.) per watt peak. He adds that it has demonstrated not only high efficiency, but also long-term performance stability. “The pilot plant demonstrated that these thin film solar modules could be produced by highly scalable and proven industrial technologies such as physical vapour phase deposition and diffusion processes.” Commercial-scale thin film modules are being produced with output powers between 10 and 40W in direct sunlight.

Quoted costs of R10/Wp ($1.66/Wp) look highly favourable against the cost of “traditional” electricity. And better still against the R35 ($5.81) per watt production cost of conventional modules. The import price locally of a silicon-based 50W solar panel is about R2000 ($331.97) (R40/Wp or $6.64).

The material that absorbs sunlight and converts it to electrical energy is a semiconductor material consisting of copper indium gallium selenium sulphide or Cu(In,Ga)(Se,S)2.

The metals are deposited on a glass substrate by sputtering, a standard industrial process. (Sputtering is used commercially for reflective coatings, for instance.) The coated glass is then reacted in a diffusion furnace with specialised gases that transform the metallic layers into high-quality semiconductor films.

Tags: solar power | breakthroughs | science | news | blog | weblog

According to an article at PhysOrg.com, scientists have built a molecular motor powered solely by sunlight.

By acting like pistons that move back and forth, these motors, which are only nanometers or billionths of meters across, could help read out data as ones and zeroes “for molecular photonics and electronics, two rapidly growing fields aimed at the construction of chemical computers,” said researcher Vincenzo Balzani, a chemist at the University of Bologna, Italy.

Such motors could also operate nanovalves covering the surfaces of porous silica-based nanoparticles. Scientists could then use light to fill and empty the pores of these nanoparticles with molecules such as anti-cancer drugs. After doctors target cancers with these nanoparticles, “then light is used to trigger the release of the drug,” said researcher J. Fraser Stoddart, a nanochemist at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The motor was designed and built over six years by researchers at the University of Bologna and UCLA. It essentially resembles a dumbbell roughly 6 nanometers long that threads a ring about 1.3 nanometers wide. The ring can move up and down the rod of the dumbbell but cannot go past the bulky stoppers at its ends.

A 6-nanometer length is about as long as a chain of 60 water molecules. These nanomotors are actually tinier than hemoglobin molecules (the substance that gives blood its red color). Still can’t grasp how small that is? Try this: If you stretched 13,000 of the nanomotors end-to-end, that chain would be the width of a human hair!

Noteworthy is the fact that this molecular motor does not require a chemical fuel to operate,” said Devens Gust, a chemist at Arizona State University in Tempe who did not participate in this study. “Previous motors require fuel, including biological motors. The power for this system comes directly from light, with no need to move fuels around, consume them, and generate waste products. The analogy would be a solar-powered car vs. one fueled by a gasoline engine.”

Read the whole article.

Tags: technology | science | news | nanotechnology | nano | blog | weblog

Mike Treder has an interesting post at the Responsible Nanotechnology blog:

Nanotech Today vs. Nanotech Tomorrow

How do today’s nanoscale technologies differ from tomorrow’s advanced nanotechnology, sometimes called molecular manufacturing?

Here is one way to explain it: today’s nanotechnologies use big machines to make small products – by contrast, molecular manufacturing will use small machines to make big products. That sounds simple, but it is really a profound distinction.

Due to scaling laws, these intricately constructed nanoscale and microscale machines will work much faster, using bottom-up, atomically precise manufacturing to build revolutionary products. This will impact nearly every industry and all areas of society, from local to national to global.

Read the whole article, then read Chris Phoenix’s essay Notes on Nanofactories. He explains how “nanofactories combine nanoscale components into large integrated products; the reason why a nanofactory will probably take about an hour to make its weight in product; and how to cool a nanofactory effectively at such high production rates.”

Two weeks ago, LiftPort Group, a consortium of companies working on the space elevator, announced:

[That] it has received a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use airspace to conduct preliminary tests of its high altitude robotic “lifters.” The lifters are early prototypes of the technology that the company is developing for use in its commercial space elevator to ferry cargo back and forth into space.

The tests, which are planned for early fall, will simulate a working space elevator by launching a model elevator “ribbon” attached to moored balloon initially up to a mile high. The robotic lifters will then be tested in their ability to climb up and down the free-hanging ribbon, marking the first-ever test of this technology in the development of the space elevator concept.

Currently scheduled to be deployed sometime around 2018, the LiftPort Space Elevator will consist of a counterweight positioned 62,000 miles above the Earth, tethered to an offshore sea platform located near the equator in the Pacific Ocean. The tether will be a ribbon made from super-strong carbon nanotubes. Robotic lifters carrying the payload will climb the ribbon.

The tests approved by the FAA represent the 18th set of space elevator lifter prototypes developed by LiftPort. Previous tests of earlier robotic lifter prototypes have been conducted in a variety of locations, including MIT and the Mars Desert Research Center; however, the tests approved by the FAA are the first to be conducted by LiftPort at up to a mile high and simulating a model space elevator.

You can see a video and photos of the lifter in action at last November’s Space Vision 2004 conference at MIT. Don’t bother going to their website for info because the most recent news release is dated 9/21/04. But they do have a staff weblog that gets updated fairly often.

This article at Wikipedia has more details on space elevators.

[Edit 09.21.05 12:56 pm EDT] Glenn Reynolds, the InstaPundit, has an article on space elevators at Tech Central Station that looks at what NASA wants to spend for going back to the moon versus the cost of building a space elevator first.