Tag Archives: Small Times Magazine

May 13, 2009: Nanomaterials applications developer Zyvex Performance Materials (ZPM), has unveiled plans for a new boat to be made entirely with ZPM’s next generation carbon nanotube-enhanced Arovex material.

The boat, designated 540SE (Super Efficient), is intended as a technology demonstrator to show what future boats are capable of when built with new nano-enhanced materials like Arovex, the company said in a news release. Construction began at Pacific Washington based Strategic Composites late last month.

By building the boat with Arovex, the 54-foot boat will weigh less than 8,000 pounds, fully equipped — ~75% lighter than fiberglass boats its size, and 33% less than conventional carbon fiber boats. The drastic weight reduction allows the new boat to require 75% less horsepower, considerably reduced emissions, and extended range; the boat also is very efficient, and offers unheard-of fuel economy at low to medium cruising speeds.

“We are very proud to be unveiling this new boat. By re-imagining and designing boats to take full advantage of our materials, a new generation of boats can be built that are remarkably lighter, consume far less fuel, and cut carbon emissions,” stated Lance Criscuolo, president of Zyvex Performance Materials. “By greatly reducing the weight of the boat, performance is increased and emissions are cut by more than two-thirds. This will create a new breed of boats that have expanded capabilities, range, and are environmentally responsible.”

“This new nano-enhanced material will allow us to create the boats of the future,” added Ron Jones Jr., president of Strategic Composites. “By being able to greatly decrease the weight of the structure, the engine and fuel requirements are reduced as well. This boat will be able to do things that other boats can’t. It could be carried and airdropped by cargo aircraft, for rescue, deployment, or intercept missions.” Use of such new nano-enhanced materials, he added, is what will allow a new generation of ultra efficient green boats to be built. Cities, security forces, and governments that are looking for a flexible platform with super efficiency have an answer now.”

May 13, 2009: Bayer MaterialScience, a global leader in high-value polymers, announced today an alliance with Nano Terra Inc., a surface engineering and nanotechnology co-development company.

Nano Terra will apply its surface engineering expertise to Bayer’s materials to create new surface functionalities. A global Bayer MaterialScience research team will collaborate closely with the Cambridge, Mass.-based Nano Terra. The parties will cooperate on testing the solutions and evaluating manufacturing options.

Bayer MaterialScience fabricates polycarbonate and polyurethane polymers, films and coating raw materials. The new products address the needs of major industries such as automotive, electronics or displays. Nano Terra’s core technology in surface chemistry and engineering was pioneered by its co-founder, Professor George M. Whitesides of Harvard University.

“Bayer MaterialScience’s leading global position in the polymer and coatings raw material market makes them an ideal partner for Nano Terra,” said Ueli Morant, president of Nano Terra. “We are delighted that they have selected Nano Terra to broaden the boundaries of their films product portfolio through nanotechnology.”

Bernd Steinhilber, SVP and head of functional films at Bayer MaterialScience, added: “We are committed to delivering improved films product solutions to our customers through the judicious application of new technologies such as Nano Terra’s. The growing demand for increased functionality in the materials we supply is matched well by the improvements we expect from this collaboration.”

May 12, 2009: When a spacecraft launches from Cape Canaveral, Fla., in the future, its cargo will include a small box containing a nanofluidics experiment designed by scientists at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

Investigators in the laboratory of Mauro Ferrari, nanomedicine division director at The UT Health Science Center at Houston, won a nationwide Microgravity Research Competition and with it the opportunity to test a research project aboard an extended flight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.

When sensors inside the box determine that near weightlessness has been achieved, the experiment will activate itself and begin a series of tests designed to learn more about the diffusion of micro nanoparticles through tiny microchannels measured in millionths of a meter, said Alessandro Grattoni, experiment project manager and senior research assistant in Ferrari’s lab.

Results of these experiments could aid in the development of implantable devices for controlled, long-term drug release. This research could yield important treatment means for illnesses, including cancer, said Grattoni, a Turin, Italy, native, who will receive his doctorate in biomedical engineering in May.

“I am delighted with this historic opportunity to perform research in space and bring back the results to Earth to improve health care,” Ferrari said. “This experiment will allow us to refine our technologies for the release of a drug at the right time and to the right place in the body, and to bring to the clinic the vision of personalized medicine.”

The competition was sponsored by The Heinlein Prize Trust, SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) and the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship. The trust is named after the late science fiction writer Robert Heinlein.

“World-class experiments from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston teamed with the first cost effective laboratory in outer space from SpaceX will begin a new era of medical research for the 21st century. The commercial and health benefits to all of us will be immense,” said Art Dula, trustee of the Heinlein Prize Trust.

In addition to the opportunity to test their experiment aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, the UT scientists received $25,000 and a trip to see the launch at Cape Canaveral. The proposal is titled “Decoupling Diffusive Transport Phenomena in Microgravity.”

UT nanomedicine team members include: Xuewu Liu, Ph.D., assistant professor, and post doctoral fellows Arturas Ziemys, Ph.D., Daniel Fine, Ph.D., and Enrica De Rosa, Ph.D.

May 12, 2009: Competitive Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: CTT) has announced that its bone nanoparticle biomaterial technology has been issued a third patent supporting the first two patents and providing additional claims regarding the preparation of the primary components of the bone cement.

CTT has an exclusive agreement with the University of South Carolina Research Foundation (USCRF) to license and commercialize the injectable, flowable, fast-curing, calcium phosphate-based nanotechnology biomaterial developed by Brian R. Genge, a research professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at USC.

CTT’s licensee for human spinal applications of the bone biomaterial, Soteira Inc., completed a third fund raise providing Soteira a total of approximately $24 million and access to an additional $6 million. Soteira is using the funds on their program to gain U.S. FDA and European CE Mark clearance for sales of the bone biomaterial. CTT has the opportunity to offer licenses to the bone biomaterial for other skeletal applications, as well as dental and veterinary repairs.

CTT also announced the development of a financing unit, Competitive Technologies Financial Services (CFS), which offers customers opportunities for leasing of CTT’s pain therapy medical device in the U.S. market.

“This blockbuster medical device treats pain without the harmful side effects of most drugs, including morphine,” said John B. Nano, CTT’s Chairman, President and CEO. “This technology brings CTT to the forefront in providing a solution to the needs of patients and the improvement of palliative healthcare in the U.S. and internationally. It is a prime example of our strategy to connect clinical science to patient care. We believe that revenue and profits from the pain therapy technology will significantly increase CTT’s market capitalization.

“The establishment of CFS allows our U.S. hospitals, clinics and medical practices to purchase the device directly, or to lease it over periods of time ranging from 24 — 60 months. In this difficult economic climate, CFS, created through an agreement with Americorp Financial, LLC (AFS), allows greater flexibility for these customers in managing their organization’s cash flow. Upon execution of each lease, CTT will receive the full sales price of the device, while AFS carries the lease.”

May 11, 2009 ZettaCore Inc., a developer of molecular materials and technology for current and next-generation semiconductor products, has completed raising $21 million in a Series C financing that will allow the company to bring its technology to market, according to a company news release.

New investors Globis Capital Partners, Itochu Technology Ventures, Yasuda Enterprise Development, Epic Ventures, and Panasonic Ventures joined all previous investors: Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Radius Ventures, Oxford Biosciences, Access Ventures, Garrett Capital, and Stanford University.

“ZettaCore’s molecular technology has the potential for broad use in the electronics industry. We were impressed with the technology’s ability to further scale system level interconnect, enable high energy/power density storage in electronics and to advance Moore’s law in semiconductor memory,” said Satoshi Kabasawa, councilor in the Technology Strategy Group of the Corporate R&D Strategy Office of Panasonic Corp.

“We believe that ZettaCore’s molecular technology can be an important element in our success,” added Dilip Sampath, venture partner with Panasonic Ventures, Panasonic’s U.S.-based venture capital arm. “We look forward to working with ZettaCore to find ways to integrate the technology in Panasonic’s products.”

“We are pleased with the progress ZettaCore has made towards commercialization of its technology. The investments from Panasonic Ventures as well as the other Japanese investors are a very good endorsement of the value of ZettaCore’s technology,” said Steve Jurvetson, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, an investor in the company from its founding.

“This investment in ZettaCore will enable us to grow our business,” said Subodh Toprani, ZettaCore chief executive officer. “With the new funds we will be expanding internationally, creating new product offerings and ramping commercial production of our technology.”

ZettaCore is a developer of molecular materials for use in electronics. ZettaCore’s technology is applicable in multiple markets: molecular interface, energy storage and semiconductor memory. Customers use ZettaCore’s chemistry to enable fine line/space and to mitigate skin effect losses in IC substrates and high-speed boards. ZettaCore’s technology allows customers to leverage their existing infrastructure and thereby optimizing their costs while improving performance.

May 11, 2009: For more than a decade, scientists have been frustrated in their attempts to create continuously emitting light sources from individual molecules because of an optical quirk called “blinking,” but now scientists at the University of Rochester have uncovered the basic physics behind the phenomenon, and along with researchers at the Eastman Kodak Co., created a nanocrystal that constantly emits light.

The findings, detailed online in Nature, may open the door to dramatically less expensive and more versatile lasers, brighter LED lighting, and biological markers that track how a drug interact with a cell at a level never before possible.

Many molecules, as well as crystals just a billionth of a meter in size, can absorb or radiate photons. But they also experience random periods when they absorb a photon, but instead of the photon radiating away, its energy is transformed into heat. These “dark” periods alternate with periods when the molecule can radiate normally, leading to the appearance of them turning on and off, or blinking.

“A nanocrystal that has just absorbed the energy from a photon has two choices to rid itself of the excess energy — emission of light or of heat,” says Todd Krauss, professor of chemistry at the University of Rochester and lead author on the study. “If the nanocrystal emits that energy as heat, you’ve essentially lost that energy.”

Krauss worked with engineers at Kodak and researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory and Cornell University to discover the new, non-blinking nanocrystals.

Krauss, an expert in nanocrystals, and Keith Kahen, senior principal scientist of Kodak and an expert in optoelectronic materials and devices, were exploring new types of low-cost lighting similar to organic light-emitting diodes, but which might not suffer from the short lifespans and manufacturing challenges inherent in these diodes. Kahen, with help from Megan Hahn, a postdoctoral fellow in Krauss’ laboratory, synthesized nanocrystals of various compositions.


Rendition of the new nonblinking nanocrystal. (Credit: Todd Krauss, University of Rochester)

Xiaoyong Wang, another postdoctoral fellow in Krauss laboratory, inspected one of these new nanocrystals and saw no evidence of the expected blinking phenomenon. Remarkably, even after four hours of monitoring, the new nanocrystal showed no sign of a single blink — unheard of when blinks usually happen on a scale of miliseconds to minutes.

After a lengthy investigation, Krauss and Alexander Efros from the Naval Research Laboratory concluded that the reason the blinking didn’t occur was due to the unusual structure of the nanocrystal. Normally, nanocrystals have a core of one semiconductor material wrapped in a protective shell of another, with a sharp boundary dividing the two. The new nanocrystal, however, has a continuous gradient from a core of cadmium and selenium to a shell of zinc and selenium. That gradient squelches the processes that prevent photons from radiating, and the result is a stream of emitted photons as steady as the stream of absorbed photons.

With blink-free nanocrystals, Krauss believes lasers and lighting could be incredibly cheap and easy to fabricate. Currently, different color laser light is created using different materials and processes, but with the new nanocrystals a single fabrication process can create any color laser. To alter the light color, an engineer needs only to alter the size of the nanocrystal, which Krauss says is a relatively simple task.

The same is true of what could one day be OLED’s successor, says Krauss. Essentially, “painting” a grid of differently sized nanocrystals onto a flat surface could create computer displays as thin as paper, or a wall that lights a room in any desired color.

May 8, 2009: The mayor of Birmingham, Ala., is partnering with Illinois-based NanoInk Inc. to create a nanotech training program for area colleges and universities, according to a report in The Birmingham News.

Mayor Larry Langford met with company officials last week. Another meeting is scheduled for May 18 with academic leaders.

The purpose is to train workers for jobs of the future, the mayor said. “These people will be able to be retrained in an up-and-coming field,” Langford said.

NanoInk has a similar partnership with Dakota County Technical College, which has a nanotech partnership with the University of Minnesota.

May 8, 2009: The MEMS Industry Group and iSuppli Corp. are offering a free Webinar on MEMS and the automotive industry, presented by iSuppli’s Jérémie Bouchaud.

The Webinar, scheduled for May 22 from 8:30-9:30 a.m. PDT, is titled, “The Perfect Automotive Storm: How Will Sensor Makers Ride It Out?”

Bouchaud is principal analyst for MEMS with iSuppli. He will be introduced by Karen Lightman, MEMS Industry Group’s managing director.

May 8, 2009: Kansas-based NanoScale Corp. has signed an agreement with Enware Australia to distribute NanoScale’s FAST-ACT product in Australia and New Zealand as part of a “laboratory first response treatment” in case of toxic chemical spills.

Enware Australiahas introduced laboratory rapid response safety kits that offer one-step neutralization of either liquid or vapour spills of some of toxic chemicals. FAST-ACT is a nanotech-based chemical hazard neutralization technology originally developed for the US military to counter chemical warfare agents.

The technology creates a massive increase in the surface area of cleaning powder.

Enware provides environmentally friendly products and promotes safety to companies like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Hewlett Packard of Penang, Unilever of Indonesia, Johnson & Johnson along with other leading companies, hospitals, detention centers, and universities.

May 7, 2009 — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is criticizing the country’s strategy of developing its technology sector through state-owned corporations, singling out Rusnano as an example, according to a report in The Moscow Times.

Rusnano is the Russian state-owned nanotech business group that recently pledged heavy investment in Canada’s neglected nanotech sector and set the goal of winning 3% of the global nanotechnology market by 2015

Medvedev said state-owned companies like Rusnano, headed by Anatoly Chubais, are “unlikely” to prove successful, according to the report.

“[Rusnano] is the kind of instrument that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t work at all,” The Moscow Times quoted Medvedev as saying. He called the company a “large structure that has a lot of money and that still has to understand how to correctly spend it” so that it is not blamed for wasting it in the future.