Nanoscience and Technology mission (NSTM)

Link: http://content.msn.co.in/News/National/NationalIndA_051107_1109.htm#top

THis article features the current stature of Nanotechnology in India and the "Five Year National-Mission" as it said planned by the DEPARTMENT OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY (DST).The Nano science and technology mission is one of the major steps to get Nanotech one step forward from where it is currently. With bilions of investment and an aim of creating India Global hub for Research and Development(R&D)in NAnoscience and Nanotechnology the mission will kick start at three Nanoinstitutes of India (so far)Banglore, Kolkotta and Mohali.What impressed me the most was the closing paragraph of this entire article, which goes on like this

"Though India may have missed many a 'technology bus' over the decades, we cannot afford to miss the 'nano bus', as it is the future of the world, dominating science and technology in the 21st century," Rao said.

Nanogenerator

Wireless biosensors that monitor pathogens in water and measure blood pressure or cancer biomarkers in the body are shrinking to nanometer dimensions. To operate them, researchers are looking for equally small power sources. Nanowires that convert mechanical energy into electricity are a promising technology.

Now researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have taken the first step toward building a nanogenerator out of barium titanate. So far, efforts to make nanogenerators have focused on zinc-oxide nanowires. But barium titanate could lead to better generators because it shows a stronger piezoelectric effect, says mechanical-science and engineering professor Min-Feng Yu, who is leading the research at UIUC. Lab experiments show that a barium-titanate nanowire can generate 16 times as much electricity as a zinc-oxide nanowire from the same amount of mechanical vibrations, he says.

Nanogenerators could lead to many advances: biomedical sensors powered by blood flow or muscle contractions, tiny gas sensors that run on wind or acoustic waves, pathogen monitors powered by water flow, and portable electronics that are hooked up to nanowires in shoes. "The nanogenerator idea has become more and more convincing, " says Yi Cui, materials-science and engineering professor at Stanford University. "It's an idea that might work."

In 2006, a team of researchers led by Zhong Lin Wang of the Georgia Institute of Technology first showed that zinc-oxide nanowires could harvest mechanical energy to generate electricity. Wang's group has since made a lot of progress, most recently demonstrating a zinc-oxide nanowire array that outputs direct current in response to ultrasonic vibrations. (See "Nanogenerator Fueled by Vibrations.")

The UIUC team is the first to use barium titanate. In an online Nano Letters paper, Yu and his colleagues show that applying vibrations to a single barium-titanate nanowire leads to a small energy output. In their experiment, the researchers bridge a nanowire across a gap on a substrate, keeping one end stationary and moving the other end. The output energy is extremely small--about 0.3 attojoules--but for the same setup, a zinc-oxide nanowire gives 16 times lesssmaller energy output, Yu says.

Xudong Wang, a researcher in Zhong Lin Wang's (no relation) group and a 2007 TR35 winner, is happy to see progress on using materials other than zinc oxide to make nanogenerators. He says that the results look promising. The biggest advantage with using barium titanate, he feels, is that "it is possible to generate higher voltages than zinc oxide. This is very important for a power source."

But zinc oxide has its own advantages. It is nontoxic to biological systems, so it might be better suited than barium titanate for implantable devices. Also, it is easier to control zinc-oxide growth in order to fabricate nanowire arrays. "To make an applicable device, you need to have many nanowires with the same orientation in the same location," Xudong Wang says. That could be hard to achieve with barium titanate.

Yu acknowledges the difficulties with growing barium-titanate nanowires. His and his colleagues' work is preliminary at this point, he says, but it already shows the potential for making more-efficient, higher-output nanogenerators. As for Cui, he says that barium-titanate nanogenerators might be feasible, but he cautions that "in terms of making a working device, certainly there's still a way to go."

Experimental Drugs

Two new classes of experimental drugs shown to have powerful muscle-building capabilities--selective androgen receptor modulators (SARMs) and myostatin inhibitors--have been added to the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) list of prohibited substances for 2008. Neither class of drugs is yet on the market. But the agency, an international, independent organization based in Lausanne, Switzerland, that coordinates anti-doping regulations across sports, is gearing up for future abuse by limiting use among athletes and by developing new detection methods. "We now have convincing data on those drugs and what they can do," says Olivier Rabin, science director at WADA. "We have a duty to act as early as we can when drugs have the potential to be doping agents."

Unlike with testosterone and other anabolic steroids, the action of SARMs and myostatin inhibitors is restricted to muscle, likely limiting side effects. That's a very good thing for patients, but it also makes the drugs more attractive to those looking to bulk up. "I think there's a whole new horizon for anabolic therapies, and the potential for abuse will be exceedingly high," says William Evans, director of the Nutrition, Metabolism, and Exercise Laboratory at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Compounds of both classes are currently in clinical trials for muscle wasting related to diseases such as cancer and muscular dystrophy. There have been no official reports of athletes using these drugs, but because there previously have been cases of athletes gaining access to compounds in clinical development, WADA officials say that they want to act early.

SARMs work similarly to testosterone but in a more targeted way. "They are effective by binding to the steroid receptor in only specific tissue, like muscle," says Evans, who is also a scientific advisor to GTx, a company developing the drugs. "They are not steroid drugs, but they produce the anabolic effect of the steroids." GTx, based in Memphis, TN, has shown in a clinical trial that one compound being developed for muscle wasting and bone loss can significantly boost lean muscle mass in older people.

Myostatin inhibitors work through a fundamentally different mechanism. They block myostatin, a naturally occurring protein in the body that stops growth of skeletal muscle. Cattle, sheep, dogs, and, in one confirmed case, a human with mutations in this gene are extremely muscular. (See "Mimicking the Massively Muscular.")

Scientists have developed antibodies to myostatin and other molecules that can boost lean muscle mass in animals by as much as 60 percent. It's not yet clear how well myostatin inhibitors will work in humans. Clinical studies of two myostatin inhibitors are now under way for muscular dystrophy and other muscle-wasting diseases.

WADA is developing detection methods for both SARMs and myostatin inhibitors, although the agency declined to say how far along those tests are. "In fairness to athletes who stay clean, we don't say when detection tools are available," says Rabin. "We say when we detect the first athletes using the drugs."

ther groups are more public about their progress. Acceleron, a company based in Cambridge, MA, that is developing a myostatin inhibitor, says that it has already developed a test for research purposes that is capable of detecting the drug in blood. And scientists at the Center for Preventive Doping Research, German Sport University Cologne, are working on a test for SARMs.

Fortunately, scientists say that detecting abuse of these two new classes of drugs is likely to be easier than detecting two doping agents that have plagued the sports world in recent years. Erythropoietin, which stimulates growth of red blood cells and is used to treat anemia patients, is processed quickly by the body, making it difficult to detect.Human growth hormone, which boosts cell growth, is a naturally occurring hormone. Tests must be able to discriminate between the natural hormone and the pharmaceutically derived version. "People who are trying to cheat like to use a steroid naturally present in the body, because it makes it much more difficult for labs to detect," says Don Catlin, founder of Anti-Doping Research, a nonprofit research institute based in Los Angeles.

Myostatin inhibitors present a particularly interesting case for WADA. In 2004, scientists published a paper describing an abnormally muscular German toddler who carried mutations in both copies of his myostatin gene. The boy's mother, who had been a professional athlete, was found to have one defective copy of the gene, raising questions about how to deal with athletes who have naturally occurring genetic mutations that give them benefits similar to those offered by performance-enhancing drugs. "We have ethicists thinking about those issues and guiding us in the future," says Rabin. "We need to maintain fair play for all competitors." The issue is likely to grow as advances in genomics allow scientists to uncover additional variants linked to muscle, or other factors related to athletic ability.

"It's a radically new technology"!!!!!

"It's a radically new technology," says Michael Kozicki, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Arizona, whose group is one of several working on a version of the new memory. "If it really works as well as everybody thinks it could, it could genuinely revolutionize the memory and storage industry."

A new memory technology, which is under development at the University of Arizona as well as Companies such as IBM and Sony can create thumb drives or Digital camera memory card that stores a terabyte of information-more then what the hard drives today do.
Programmable Metallaization Cell or Nano-ionic memory is one of a new generation of experimental technologies that are bidding to replace hard drives, the nonvolatile "flash" memory used in portable electronics, and the dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) in personal computers. Before the practical usage of ionic memory was a bit too slow, but recent demonstrations of the materials structured at nanolevel happens to yield a faster ionic-memory hs changed the scenario. The easy-to-make state of art technology can be made from the materials used in the computer chips and microprocesors, as demonstrated by a recently published work of Arizona group. This will help the manufacutrers to integrate their existing technoloiges, thus no extra retoling, hence rendering them happy.
Ionic memories and Flash memmories
One more attraction of these memories is they use lower voltage thus consuming as little as a thousandth of amount of energy that a flash memory today consumes. In thory even the storage density of these memories (ionic memories)are much higher then todays technologies.
WORKING
The new storage technologies are used unlike the Flash memory tecnology where in which the information were stored in form of electrical charges. So smaller the memory cell that holds the bits of information, lesser the charge it holds,lesser is its reliability. In case of new technology the information are stored by rearranging atoms to form stable, and potentially extremely small, memory cells. What's more, each cell could potentially store multiple bits of information, and the cells can be layered on top of each other, increasing the memory's storage density to the point that it might rival that of the densest form of memory today: hard drives.

"Each memory cell consists of a solid electrolyte sandwiched between two metal electrodes. The electrolyte is a glasslike material that contains metal ions. Ordinarily, the electrolyte resists the flow of electrons. But when a voltage is applied to the electrodes, electrons bind to the metal ions, forming metal atoms that cluster together. These atoms form a virus-sized filament that bridges the electrodes, providing a path along which electrical current can flow. Reversing the voltage causes the wire to "dissolve," Kozicki says. The highly resistive state of the electrolyte and the other, low-resistance, state can be used to represent zeroes and ones. Because the metal filament stays in place until it's erased, nano-ionic memory is nonvolatile, meaning that it doesn't require energy to hold on to information, just to read it or write it"