Nanoplasmonics and Nanophotonics encompass those fields of physics/chemistry/materials science that study the interaction of light (electromagnetic fields) with matter (dielectric, conductors, …) at the nanoscale level. Specifically, nanoplasmonics deals with collective electron dynamics on the surface of metal nanostructures, which arises as a result of excitations called surface plasmons.

Did you know that stained glass windows in the medieval cathedrals represent a first example of nanoplasmonics application ? I was so surprised in reading that. Apparenlty, glaziers in medieval forges produced colors by using colloids of gold nano-particles.

As a matter of fact, nanotechnologies are providing us with such a variety of nanoscale components that sooner or later (but probably sooner than we expect) will enter in several applications, even into handheld devices, marrying novel bio-inspired solutions with computer and consumer technologies.

There is an interesting initiative at Berkeley (BioPOETS Lab) dealing with Nanoplasmonics and Nanophotonics. Main applications concern cellular biophysics, innovative biology and personalized medicine.

http://biopoets.berkeley.edu/projects.php

This vision has been presented and shared by several researchers at the Embedded Systems congress, recently held in San Jose.

http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700112&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS

Imitating nature is a complex endeavour, however, if we are able to decode its designs rules, then the combination of our creativity in engineering materials and nature’s laws has an incredible potential.

Retinal implant have been targeted by many research teams in the last 15 years and some remarkable results have been achieved (a blind person driving a car in a controlled space) but the step from the lab experiment to the market has not been taken so far. The reason lays in the problem of biocompatibility of the implant in the eye. The retinal implant requires power to operate and this create heat that can damage surrounding tissue, particularly the nerve cells that have to take the signals to the brain.

At a recent congress, held in Bonn Germany, on Artificial Vision the mood was very positive among the many researchers who gathered there. For the first time there is a feeling that biocompatibility issues have been solved, implants have been inserted in several patients’ eyes and have been left there form months without inducing any negative side effect.

The Argus II implant on the retina

In particular the Argus II implant has been able to restore a minimal vision to some patients by providing them with lights dot (phosphenes) that their brain was able to use to create images of edges and environment enabling them to walk, find the door in a room and so on. The vision provided is very crude, it is based on just 60 points (compare this with the 8 million points that a human eye is able to detect) but still, it is an important step. All the more important, as a matter of fact, is the resolution of bio compatibility since we know very well that the evolution of technology can be taken for granted and we will have more resolution in subsequent releases.

The bio- compatibility of an electronic circuitry opens up opportunities for several other kinds of implant and usher in a new age of drugs delivery, something I think will bring telecommunications at the core of health care by the middle of this decade.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7919645.stm

Recently, New Scientist has published the following article describing how simple memristors (devices that, like resistors, oppose the passage of current, and whose resistance, at any moment, depends on the last voltage) are being used in a US military-funded project (SyNAPSE) trying to make brain-like computers.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527515.900-electronics-missing-link-brings-neural-computing-closer.html

Neuroscience often compares brain to a computer but, apart from the trivial fact that both process information, it is not clear whether this remains just a metaphor or it is something more.

Yesterday, New Scientist has publishing another interesting paper by a research biologist of the University of Cambridge. Paper argues, apparently in opposite direction than SyNAPSE, that the brain is not a like a computer where neurons are components or transistors; rather each individual neuron is itself a small processing unit, and the brain is like vast network of said microscopic computers.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627571.100-the-secrets-of-intelligence-lie-within-a-single-cell.html?page=2

Paper brings several interesting examples how in nature even simple organisms or cells are not “subservient nano-bots”, but they respond to environment changes by performing a certain level of processing and by taking decisions. Biology reductionism seems missing the systemic view on how whole cells behave.

I’m wondering whether developing structural (brain-like) networks of nano-micro processing devices will be a way to test the potential emergence of that sort of intelligence elaborated in yesterday article of the New Scientist.

As a matter of fact, nanotechnologies are making amazing advances in developing nano-devices, nano-wires, nano-sources of energy…etc. Moreover, while microelectronics has experienced miniaturization pushing down the scale towards submicron circuitry, there are significant progresses in (self-)composition of nano-devices, also in order to scale up to bigger dimensions and bridging with microelectronics.

Maybe principles of simple nervous systems and brain evolution can be investigated by comparative analysis of such structural (brain-like) networks of nano-micro processing devices.

Most eBook readers are using eInk technology to display text and drawing. So far only black and white displays are available and the colour ones are still over the horizons, and will likely remain so till 2012.

Another limitation of eInk technology is the slow refresh time making it impossible to display moving images. But now eInk has demonstrated an evolution of this technology with much shorter refresh time, not as quick as to be able to show movie clips but sufficiently fast to display animation.

They have promised the availability in the 4Q of this year so we can expect products with these screens on the market next Spring. They are no match to an iPad screen of course, but they are easier on the eyes and can be seen under full sunlight. So for reading that thriller on the beach they may still be the right solutions.

http://www.trustedreviews.com/peripherals/news/2010/04/26/E-Ink-Demos-Next-Generation-eBook-Reader-Displays/p1

It is good to notice this continuous evolution and we can be sure that the future of reading will evolve significantly in the coming years and along with that learning will also experience some twists.

Printing technology never fail amazing me. It is now some years that bio-tissues, in particular skin tissue, can be printed through a devices that looks very much like an ink-jet printer.

One of the first of these printers was presented in 2005: http://www.livescience.com/technology/050201_skin_printing.html

Printing Skin from an ink made of live human cells

The idea was to take a few epithelium cells from a person needing a graft and culture them till a sufficient quantity was available. This growing cells technique was not new, and the idea of growing epithelium cells to create a graft was already applied in the last century. The problem was that the growth speed is relatively slow and a patient might have to wait for weeks before a sufficient patch was available. Scientists developed a technique to grow cells in a solution thus increasing tremendously the growth rate (since cells could grow in a 3D space, rather than a 2D and each cells could continue to multiply not being constrained by nearby-sticking cells). The printer was fed with that cells solution and managed to create the graft in the exact shape.

This process is now in use but requires quite sophisticated environments.

Now, scientists at the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine based in Salem, Massachusetts USA,  have managed to create a printer that can print directly on the wound thus greatly accelerating the procedure. Speed is crucial: a wound not covered by skin can easily get infected and people with extensive burns risk their life if not treated promptly.

The printer sprays first fibroblasts and then keratinocytes.

The cell spraying device

Experiments have been carried out on mice and they show a much faster healing. The advantage of spraying cells instead of grafting is the absence of scars, that often results from grafting. Human trials will follow after a second trial to be carried out on pigs.

http://www.physorg.com/news190269898.html

Other advances in wound cure results by using special bandage with sensors, able to detect early signs of bacterial infection. This can be reported wirelessly through communications with a cell phone and then to a monitoring centres. This allows for faster de-hospitalization.

Genome Variations in Cancer

A paper has been published on Nature, co-authored by 200 members of the International Cancer Genome Consortium – ICGC:

http://www.icgc.org/ , outlining the new era of personalised medicine.

The ICGC is cataloguing genetic changes of the 50 most common cancers, that is over 500 variations of the genome for each of them and publishes the result on the Internet.

According to the what researchers say in the paper:

“Given the tremendous potential for relatively low-cost genomic sequencing to reveal clinically useful information, we anticipate that in the not so distant future, partial or full cancer genomes will routinely be sequenced as part of the clinical evaluation of cancer patients”

In fact, the first genome project took 15 years and cost 1.5 billion US$. Now a full genome may be decoded in a few weeks at a cost well below 100,000 US$ and relevant parts of a genome may be sequenced in a few hours at a cost of 1,000$.

The real challenge to research, at ICGC but also in several other areas, from weather forecast to elemental particle physics – the LHC in Geneva, is not to get data but to analyse them and derive useful information.

Researchers now understand that the real way to cure cancers is to look at its genomic variations, there may be many and a colon cancer, as an example, although presenting at the microscope a completely different image of a melanoma of the skin may have the same genomic aberration and therefore may benefit from the same drug protocol.

In this last decade several cures have been found that are effective on some patients but useless in other. What clinicians do is try one and see if it works. If it doesn’t they try another one but this wasted time may be fatal to the patient.

Looking at its genome may on the one had help in selecting the correct treatment and in general it may indicate in a healthy individual potential genome risks and therefore activate a periodical testing protocol to intercept the cancers at its early stages.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7291/full/nature08987.html

For a population like Italy, the storage of the genome information would require some 120 PB (120 million GB), not an impossible challenge given the evolution of storage capacity we have had.

The processing required both at research and clinical level is massive and leverages on the power of pervasive and distributed computation.

Additionally, it is likely that studies on the exploitation of the genome for a better, personalised cure, for cancer will provide more opportunities in curing other deseases and pathologies. We can easly foresee a time, in the second part of this decade, where each of us will have on her clinical documentation its genome, like today it is normal to have the home address and blood type. The clinical documentation will likely reside both in health care centre, accessible to clinicians, and possibly drugstore to customise drugs, as well as in a personal record storage device, such as a cell phone.

As cell phones get more sensors it is not too far fetched thinking that they can act as gateways from body sensors, environment sensors and body actuators: people suffering from certain allergies, inducing asthma as an example, may benefit from a delivery of drugs based on data detected by the cell phone and other sensors communicating with it and acted upon information related to that persone genome.

Remember: what may seem science fiction toady may become a way of life in a few years. We should have learnt the lesson from our recent past. Telecommunications is both an enabler and a business environment form a variety of enterprises creating, through seamless communications the fabric of ecosystems.

Application of nanopiezotronics

A new word has been created to identify a class of microscopic devices based on nanoscale components that can be embedded in a variety of objects (including our body) harvesting energy by leveraging on the motion of the object: nanopiezotronics.

Sensors are the first to benefit from this technology. Nanodimension is not just tiny, it is very frugal with power consumption. It is this frugality that opens the way to harvesting energy in the environment and in the motion of surfaces. This harvesting is crucial to keep the sub-millimetre dimension: batteries are bulky. By using piezoelectric power generation one can get rid of other sources of power. Piezoelectricity is a well known phenomena (remember those lighters for the kitchen stove?, known for over a century, but it is only recently that scientists have been able to bring it at the nanoscale. In 2005 Wang was the first to demonstrate the possibility to generate electrical power by bending a zinc oxide nanowire using an atomic force microscope.
That first experiment generated few millivolt but now researchers have managed to generate up to 50 millivolts by embedding many nanowires into a layer of polymer. The “bending” can be provoked by sound waves, by the turbulence of the blood flowing in the arteries or by the wrinkle produced in our dresses. According to Wang, this technology woven inside a shirt or a jacket may generate sufficient power to charge iPods and cell phones. To get there we need at least 200 millivolts. It may take five to ten more years to get it effective, practical and cheap.
The interesting thing is that nanopiezotronics can be used to create circuits since it can be used to make transistors. These circuits are self powered. An example might be a hearing aid that can be inserted in the ear, connected to the hearing nerve and getting power from nanowires specifically designed to vibrate in response to sound waves.
The applications are many and are likely to change our environment making it more responsive.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22118/

The multiplication of sensors, made possible by this technology will increase the number of data and multiply the applications to interpret and act on them.

A team of neuroscientists and computer experts from the UK, US and Germany have discovered “striking similarities” between human brains, the nervous system of a nematode worm (Caenorhabditis elegans) and electronic chips.

http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2010042201

They have found that all three share two basic properties, at least. Firstly, all have a Russian doll-like architecture, with the same patterns repeating over and over again, at different scales. Secondly all three show the Rentian scaling – a rule used to describe the relationship between the number of elements in a given area and the number of links between them.

This challenges the amazing idea that studying the nervous system of such simple organisms could offer realistic possibilities of better understanding human brain, and what it has in common with them (maybe also from an evolutionary point of view). Lesson learnt will be valuable also for the evolution of technologies (as above analogies seems showing).

I’m wondering if also the Internet, with its ever growing complexity, will share such basic properties ?

The interesting paper is published today in PLoS Computational Biology

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000748

Shellfish are building masters to their own benefit: they build their house, the shell, layer by layer and in such a way that it can grow as need arise (the animal grows).

Scientists have been studying their way of building and now an Italian entrepreneur, Enrico Dini, chairman of Monolite in UK, http://www.d-shape.com/pg4.htm , has created a machine that can print buildings.

As row material it uses sand, pretty cheap , and it creates layers over layers of sand grains gluing them together with a patented magnesium-based binder.

The machine and the statue produced

The machine uses hundreds of nozzles to spray the sand and the binder, allowing for a fast construction. A house would be built with its walls all at the same time from the basement to the roof, each one embedding all the required conduits. A first demonstration will be the construction of a small, 9 cubic metre, statue to be placed in a roundabout in Pontedera in Tuscany.

The printer is driven by a computer and an print details as tiny as 1mm.

Enrico is now discussing with the European Space Agency the use of his machine to build Moon-station on the Moon, using the moon dust as sand to construct the future base station. The resulting walls look a bit like marble and are very resistant. This idea is being tested in the Scuola Normale di Pisa in vacuum chambers simulating the Moon environment.

http://www.physorg.com/news190873132.html

This news is a further example of a more general evolution in developing ever more sophisticated tools for production by computer driven machine that in principle can be used to create a broad variety of products, some of them even directly in the store and in the future, why not, in our homes.