Nature's secrets and curiosity based research ...

... lead to wall-climbing robots! Watch this video of an exciting TED talk by Robert Full of Berkeley's Biology Department.

P.M. Ajayan on nanoscience and technology

Rediff is running this wonderful interview of my undergraduate classmate and hotshot nanoscience and nanotechnology researcher P.M. Ajayan. The interviewer, Yogesh Upadhyaya, is a good friend too (I have linked to quite a few of his Rediff articles, and he is also a frequent commenter here).

Here's a nifty quote from early in the interview:

I tend to call nanotechnology 'god's own technology,' reminiscing my own origins from the state of Kerala, which is often called 'god's own country.'

There is also another aspect that makes nano fundamentally exciting and that has to do with change of physical properties in many systems as the size becomes smaller. It does not happen at all sizes, but at some point as we go down in size, there is a transformation of quantity into quality; in other words material behaviour changes from its bulk character to something different.

Typically, ... this size -- where the transition occurs -- fall in the nano scale.

Towards the end, the interview turns to Ajayan's impressions on the nanoscience and nanotech research in India. It's worth quoting his answer in full:

Some of the premier institutions in India (IISC, IITs, National Chemical Laboratory, National Physical Laboratory, etc., to name a few) are already working in this area but the resources available to make the real impact is lacking, in my opinion. We are far behind most countries with serious research endeavours, in nanotech funding.

The infrastructure is important if we want to succeed in this effort and the lack of availability of research infrastructure to the research community at large has hampered the enthusiasm. Moreover a good planning document and long term sustained plans to create the nanotechnology infrastructure in India is missing.

There are quite a few conferences today in India focusing on nanotechnology, but the tangible results from these have been dismal. We need to have concerted efforts from the funding institutions, universities, national labs and industry to identify areas where we can make real impact and utilize resources carefully in those areas. As far as I can see India should exploit nanotech opportunities in the alternate energy and health care sectors.

Education and training of students is equally important. This is easy to do since there exist a remarkable pool of talent in India but there has to be progressive thinking in universities with regard to modernizing curriculum and the educational system. This is not just for nanotech but for science and technology in general.

* * *

It's vacation time for the nanopolitan family, and blogging is unlikely for the next few days. See you all after this short break.

My favourite Nobel

The 1986 Physics Prize recognized some of the key achievements that played -- and continue to play -- a pivotal role in materials science. One half of the Prize went to Ernst Ruska for his "fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope", and the other half was shared by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer for their "design of the scanning tunnelling microscope".

The Nobel Foundation's website has a nice page on TEM; curiously, its photo gallery of TEM images are only from biological specimens! This page and this Wikipedia entry are also quite informative.

Nobel Foundation also has a page on STM; the Wikipedia entry is here. An image gallery is hosted by IBM's Almaden Research Center.

The electron microscope -- specifically, the transmission electron microscope, or the TEM -- opened up the innards of materials, and allowed scientists to get a clear view of phenomena and processes at extremely small scales -- down to one nanometer. We can tweak modern microscopes to reveal secrets even at the atomic scale (down to 0.2 nanometer) (however, since electrons have to pass through -- hence the qualifier 'transmission' -- a layer of material, these 'atomic' level secrets are somewhat blurred).

On the other hand, the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM), is a surface probe that tells us about the structure -- arrangement of atoms and molecules -- at the surface. As Gerber and Lang note in this article (in the first issue of Nature Nanotechnoloty), the invention of STM is one of the "crucial events in the history of nanoscience and nanotechnology".

Research at the nanoscale is expensive primarily because of gadgets such as the electron microscope, STM and its cousins such as the Atomic Force Microscope. As Prof. C.N.R. Rao said in his plenary lecture at Nano-2006, 'doing' chemistry at the nanoscale -- synthesizing nano-sized compounds by exploiting interesting chemical principles -- is actually quite easy and inexpensive. With strong chemical insight and intuition, all one needs is basic infrastructure that can be found in a high school or a junior college! It is only the associated machinery required for probing the structure, chemistry, properties, etc, which makes nanoscience an expensive enterprise.

To get back to the topic of this post, I have to confess that the 1986 Physics Prize is my favourite simply because the achievements it celebrates are things that are useful for us materials scientists and engineers; more importantly, these are achievements I understand and relate to, and I can't say this about any of the other science Nobels from any era!

However, here is one more factoid which I'm sure you would find interesting: this Prize recognized research from two very different times: the electron microscopy work dates back to the 1930s, while the STM work is from the early 1980s. Thus, in terms of the time gap -- ΔT -- between the actual work and the Prize, then the 1986 Nobel in physics is unique in that it has both the longest and the shortest ΔT!

Let me end this post with a quote from Gerber and Lang's short history of STM and its cousins in Nature Nanotechnology (which actually triggered this post):

The initial results [on the design of STM] were written up in a manuscript entitled "Tunnelling through a controllable vacuum gap", which was submitted to a leading physics journal in June 1981. However, the paper was declined by the editors based on the following referee reports: one referee said that the exponential dependence of the tunnelling current on distance was well accepted, so the experiment would not give any new insight; the other report described the work as "extraordinary" and a "technical jewel", but this referee said that whether such technological work should be published in this particular physics journal was an editorial decision. Eventually the results were published in another leading journal, Applied Physics Letters, in January 1982.

Nanocuisine

Talking about food, let me give this quote, dished out by the Quote of the Day on Google personalized home page:

I like rice. Rice is great if you're hungry and want 2000 of something.
-- Mitch Hedberg

Here's the NYTimes story:

What if the candy maker Mars could come up with an additive to the coating of its M&M’s and Skittles that would keep them fresher longer and inhibit melting? Or if scientists at Unilever could shrink the fat particles (and thereby the calories) in premium ice cream without sacrificing its taste and feel?

These ideas are still laboratory dreams. The common thread in these research projects and in product development at many other food companies is nanotechnology ...

These opening lines are just a hook to draw you in; the rest of this interesting and informative story discusses quite a few different things, including benefits and potential dangers of getting nano into our foods.

C.N.R. Rao on India's nanoscience program

We missed the semiconductor revolution in the early 1950s. We had just gained independence. But with nanoscience and technology, we can certainly be on an equal footing with the rest of the world. ...

We have set up ten units of nanoscience and seven centres of nanotechnology. We have teams working in the area at the IITs, the IISc and the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), among others.

From Prof. C.N.R. Rao's op-ed in the Hindustan Times. It's not exactly the best of articles on India's science policy, but I'm linking to it here because it gives us some idea about Prof. Rao's thinking. He is the Chairman of the Prime Minister's Scientific Advisory Council.

"When things get small"

This award winning program teaches viewers about nanoscience - technology at one-millionth of a millimeter through an entertaining mix of science and humor. Produced for University of California Television (UCTV) by Not Too Serious Labs, it departs from the typical science-for-television fare by using illustrative concepts that include a stadium-sized bowl of peanuts, a magic tennis ball and shrinking elephants to describe the quest to create the world's smallest magnet.

This is how the National Science Foundation describes the this 30-minute film, whose production was funded by it. The film's website is here, and that of Ivan Schuller (University of California, San Diego) is here.

Archaeo-nano-cosmetology: Quantum-dot hair dyes and nanotube eye liners

Via Prof. Ranganathan, who co-wrote a book on archaeo-metallurgy and co-organized a mega-conference on nanomaterials, we get a link to this PTI report:

Indian women for ages have been using kaajal as eye liner without knowing that it is a product of high technology. Now scientists are talking about commercialising the process.

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur have shown that kaajal actually contains carbon nanotubes (CNTs).

And today, via slashdot, we get a link to this story about (among other things) "an ancient dyeing process for blacking hair is a remarkable illustration of synthetic nanoscale biomineralization".

A group of researchers in France showed that lead-based chemistry, which was initiated in Egypt more than 4000 years ago, could result in the synthesis of lead sulfide (PbS, galena) nanocrystals. With a diameter of about 5 nm, the appearance of these crystals is quite similar to PbS quantum dots synthesized by modern materials science techniques.

* * *

Update (30 September 2006): Scientific American has a story with some more details (and a couple of pictures) on the ancient hair-dye:

... [T]he strands [which were soaked in the Greco-Roman formula] were shot through with lead-sulfide crystals averaging 4.8 nanometers in size--about the same as the so-called quantum dots studied by researchers today. The crystals formed strings down the length of the hair fiber. Judging from the spacing of these strings and chemical changes to the hair, the crystals apparently grow among the sulfur-rich amino acids that surround the hair's keratin microfibers ...

Nanotech research in India

[Even] with the NSTI [the Nano Science and Technology Initiative] in place, the level of funding has been sub-critical as compared to China with which India inevitably tends to be compared. In 2002, for example, compared to China's $200 million, India spent a mere Rs.15 crores. Over the four and a half years of the NSTI, a total of about Rs.120 crores has been spent, much of which has gone towards basic research projects and related infrastructure, the implementation of which is overseen by a National Expert Committee headed by C.N.R. Rao. ...

Besides funding about 100 basic science projects to date (worth about Rs.60 crores), part of the money (about Rs.20 crores) has gone towards establishing six centres for nanoscience at institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, and the different IITs, six centres for nanotechnology each aimed at producing a product or a device within a reasonable time-frame and two national instrumentation/characterisation facilities. In all, 14 national institutions, including seven IITs, and 10 universities have been supported under the NSTI.

Pay no attention to the howler in that last sentence, and do read this Frontline article by R. Ramachandran on the state of nanoscience and nanotechnology research in India. [Thanks to Pradeepkumar for the e-mail alert.]

* * *

Cross-posted at nanopolitan 2.0 (where there has been some activity lately); comments are welcome there.

nano, nano

Today's Hindu had two really nice articles on nanoscience and technology.

Ram Sasisekharan grew up in Bangalore. His father, Prof. V. Sasisekharan, is a reputed biophysicist; after a thriving career in the Department of Biophysics in IISc, he retired a few years ago, and is currently a visiting scientist in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology program. Since the elder Sasisekharan is from a different era, his web footprint is small, indeed; here are two links in which he makes an appearance; the articles are actually about the younger one!

The first, by R. Prasad, describes a novel and promising way to treat cancer using 'nanocells'. This work was reported in a recent issue of Nature by Prof. Ram Sasisekharan's group. Nature's own commentary (technically more sophisticated than Prasad's piece) on this work is here.

The second piece is by Anand Parthasarathy. Titled 'harnessing science of the very small', it recounts India's efforts at sprucing up its research in this promising field through the creation of a 'national mission in nanotechnology'. In this really wonderful piece, he weaves in all kinds of interesting details about nanoscience, nanotechnology, nanodevices, nanotubes, and yes, nanowarfare! This story has a nice hook at the beginning [update: see this page about the colours of a peacock feather; link via Selva], and ends with a refreshingly new metaphor for the double-edged nature of nanoscience (or, for that matter, all of science):

Warriors skilled in the ancient Malabar art of Kalaripayattu, use one weapon with care and respect: the coiled flexible sword, or `urumi'.

Handled carefully, it can dispatch dozens of opponents, but one false move and you could end up chopping your own limbs. Nanotechnology may well turn out to be 21st century's `urumi'. A powerful tool — but only if used right.

See this post by Uma for an award-winning ad for the Hindu.

Two smart writer-reporters, one great newspaper.

Nano!

Ah! I found -- not just one or two -- but three links!

First, here is a news story (in Physics and Astronomy online) that starts with this creepy stuff:

Working with platinum nanowires 100 times thinner than a human hair--and using blood vessels as conduits to guide the wires--a team of U.S. and Japanese researchers has demonstrated a technique that may one day allow doctors to monitor individual brain cells ...

which, thankfully, is followed immediately by "... [it may] perhaps provide new treatments for neurological diseases such as Parkinson's".

Next, we have (via Slashdot) a link to the course website on Nanotechnology and Society. This site has tons of information, and some nice links. It even has a nanojokes page, but there is no dirty joke there (yet) ...

Finally, in his excellent blog, Indic View, Kiran has a nice post on a nanotech-based photovoltaic future.