Nanotechnology-the future

Bendable laptops, impenetrable armour:YOU ARE sitting in a park looking at your flat screen tablet computer when you decide to go for something to eat. You roll up your flexible computer, stuff it in your back pocket and head for the deli.

Bendable electronics of this kind may soon become possible, given advances in blending plastics and nanotech particles, from work underway at Tyndall National Institute.

While a working bendy laptop is still a way off, composites of this kind are being developed. It involves mixing advanced nanoparticles that conduct electricity into non-conducting flexible plastics. The result is a plastic that has picked up characteristics of the added nanoparticles. This would allow the plastic to conduct electricity and give a visual display.

Adding a different nanoparticle – for example very tough nanotubes – to existing body armour (pictured) can make these plastics 10 times tougher than before without being thicker or heavier than the original.

A new defence against superbugs

When Prof Martyn Pemble of Tyndall talks about thin, he means thin. He developed a way to lay down layers of materials that are just one atom thick.

He uses the surface chemistry of substances in a two-step process that can be used in many ways. He can use it to coat implanted medical devices such as stents with drugs that release slowly in the body to block rejection.

He can apply layers just atoms-thick to protect hard surfaces, but it could also be used for example to apply chemical coatings to fabrics.

Applying nano-layers in this way could deliver anti-bacterial coatings on hospital door handles or surgical instruments, he says. The active coatings would kill off bacteria to leave the surface sterile.

Coatings like this have already given us self-cleaning glass in buildings but might now give us a new defence against hospital superbugs.

Magnetic medicine

IT IS nice for two people to have a magnetic attraction but magnetism may also soon deliver new medical treatments that make use of nanotechnology.

Dr Gemma-Louise Davis at Trinity is studying magnetic nanoparticles that can be injected into the body and then directed where to go using magnetic fields.

They are tiny, just 10 billionths of a metre across (125 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair). But they can be used to provide images of diseased tissues or can carry anti-cancer drugs directly to a tumour, with their movement controlled by magnetism.

“What we are trying to come up with is a material that will behave like a magic bullet,” Davis says. Another way to use these nanoparticles is to direct them to a tumour site and then make them vibrate. This causes them to heat up, in turn damaging the cancerous cells while leaving healthy tissue unaffected.

Smart sensors

YOU WOULD throw out a bucket with a hole in it but a new kind of nano chip has more holes than a Swiss cheese to offer the latest medical diagnostic tool.

Drs Paul Galvin and Gregoire Herzog have developed a technique to produce rows of “pores” in a surface with the tiny holes measuring just 20 billionths of a metre across. “We want new ways to detect biomolecules,” says Herzog. “The idea of the pores is you can reduce the size to match the size of the molecule.”

They would make excellent sensors – current designs give about 400 pores on a 4mm square chip. “The smaller you get it the more sensitive it is,” he says.

They are using the pores to develop a “logic gate”, which could help for example to regulate automated insulin release in diabetics. High blood sugar seen by the sensor would trigger insulin release while low sugar would halt the release of insulin.