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Issue no. 20, 2010 Published: Jun 11, 2010
Telescope 'to find' space origin
Flexible nanocircuits can be drawn with heat
Deter quantum hackers by hiding the photon keys
Plastic antibody works in first tests in living animals
Filter successfully cleans water and recovers oil
Abu Dhabi to build 'world's largest' solar plant

Telescope 'to find' space origin
A major UK-built radio telescope has been launched in Hampshire to help astronomers detect when the first stars in the universe were formed. The European Low Frequency Array (Lofar) telescope involves 96 radio antennae erected in a field at the Chilbolton Observatory near Andover. The telescope, which works on a low FM frequency, will collect data to help astronomers with their research. A further 5,000 antennae are set to be positioned across Europe. Some have already been installed in the Netherlands and Germany and more are planned in France, Sweden and Poland. The project, which has included contributions from scientists at universities in Portsmouth, Southampton and Oxford, will combine the signals received from the antennae to make images of the sky, using a super-computer based in the Netherlands.
BBC News Jun 09, 2010	back to top

Flexible nanocircuits can be drawn with heat
Silicon is still the material of choice for computer chips, but the electronic properties that make it so appealing begin to break down as parts shrink much below a few tens of nanometres. Graphene, however – a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like lattice – continues to conduct with little heat loss at smaller dimensions, which makes it a likely candidate to succeed silicon. But it's not enough for graphene to conduct well; it must also semiconduct. Cutting graphene into nanoribbons, each just 10 nanometres wide, makes this possible. Slicing graphene into nanoribbons of a standard width is difficult using conventional chemical methods, however. Now Paul Sheehan of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC and Elisa Riedo of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have 'written' nanoribbons directly onto the carbon sheets. They began with a sheet of graphene oxide – an electrical insulator – instead of graphene. They heated the tip of a tiny cantilever to temperatures between 100 and 1000 °C, then moved it across the graphene oxide surface. The hot tip provided enough energy to free most of the oxygen atoms from the lattice, leaving trails of near-pure graphene in its wake. The 12-nanometre-wide lines were up to 10,000 times as conductive than the surrounding graphene oxide – allowing them to act as electrical 'wires'. The oxygen impurities still attached to the lines allowed the 'wires' to semiconduct even though they were slightly wider than the semiconducting limit for pure graphene.
New Scientist / Science Jun 10, 2010	back to top

Deter quantum hackers by hiding the photon keys
Spotting a lone messenger in a crowd of decoys is tricky - a concept that might make it possible to improve the security of quantum cryptography. Quantum links are said to be unhackable because the 'key' used to establish a secure channel is encoded into the spin of a photon. If the photon is intercepted, it becomes altered in a detectable way. However, hackers have discovered loopholes that allow them to escape detection, for instance, by intercepting the photons and replacing them with copies. Now researchers at Stanford University in California have developed a photon-hiding system to make the key harder to intercept. They fired a laser at rubidium atoms, causing them to release infrared 'signal' photons, each with an average frequency of 377 terahertz. The actual values are scattered 3.5 megahertz on each side of the average. These photons are fed into a modulator, which uses a random number generator to increase the variation in their frequencies by another three orders of magnitude, meaning each photon could be anywhere within a 20 gigahertz region of the spectrum. An eavesdropper would then have to scan that entire region to locate all of the key photons. The team then made an eavesdropper's task harder by flooding the region with a sea of decoys, all with the same frequencies as the original key. The intended receiver uses a second modulator connected to the same random number generator to reverse the work of the first modulator.
New Scientist / Physical Review Letters Jun 09, 2010	back to top

Plastic antibody works in first tests in living animals
Scientists from the University of California are reporting the first evidence that a plastic antibody — an artificial version of the proteins produced by the body's immune system to recognise and fight infections and foreign substances — works in the bloodstream of a living animal. In their report the researchers refer to previous research in which they developed a method for making plastic nanoparticles that mimic natural antibodies in their ability to latch onto an antigen. That antigen was melittin, the main toxin in bee venom. They make the antibody with molecular imprinting, a process similar to leaving a footprint in wet concrete. The scientists mixed melittin with small molecules called monomers, and then started a chemical reaction that links those building blocks into long chains, and makes them solidify. When the plastic dots hardened, the researchers leached the poison out. That left the nanoparticles with tiny toxin-shaped craters. Their new research, together with a team from University Shizuoka Japan, established that the plastic melittin antibodies worked like natural antibodies. The scientists gave lab mice lethal injections of melittin, which breaks open and kills cells. Animals that then immediately received an injection of the melittin-targeting plastic antibody showed a significantly higher survival rate than those that did not receive the nanoparticles. Such nanoparticles could be fabricated for a variety of targets, according to the researchers.
Nanotech web / Journal of the American Chemical Society Jun 09, 2010	back to top

Filter successfully cleans water and recovers oil
In response to the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, a University of Pittsburgh engineering professor has developed a technique for separating oil from water via a cotton filter coated in a chemical polymer that blocks oil while allowing water to pass through. The filter was successfully tested off the coast of Louisiana and shown to simultaneously clean water and preserve the oil. Di Gao created his filter as a possible method to help manage the spreading oil slick that resulted from the April 20 explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. Gao has submitted his idea through the Deepwater Horizon Response Web site managed by the consortium of companies and government agencies overseeing the disaster response. Gao's filter hinges on a polymer that is both hydrophilic—it bonds with the hydrogen molecules in water—and oleophobic, meaning that it repels oil. When the polymer is applied to an ordinary cotton filter, it allows water to pass through but not oil. The filter is produced by submerging the cotton in a liquid solution containing the polymer then drying it in an oven or in open air, Gao explained. For the massive slick off the US Gulf Coast, Gao envisions large, trough-shaped filters that could be dragged through the water to capture surface oil. The oil could be recovered and stored and the filter reused. Current cleanup methods range from giant containment booms and absorbent skimmers to controlled fires and chemical dispersants with questionable effects on human health and the environment.
PhysOrg / University of Pittsburgh Jun 07, 2010	back to top

Abu Dhabi to build 'world's largest' solar plant
French oil firm Total and Spain's Abengoa Solar are to partner with Abu Dhabi's state-owned alternative energy company Masdar to build 'the world's largest' concentrated solar power plant. Construction of the plant, which will cover an area of 2.5 square kilometres and have a 100 megawatt capacity, will begin in the third quarter of 2010 and be completed in approximately two years, according to Masdar, who will hold a 60% stake in the project, while Total and Abengoa Solar will each have 20%. Shams (Arabic for sun) is the first major step for Abu Dhabi to achieve its seven percent target for renewable energy use by 2020, and will be followed by the next projects, Shams Two and Three, the company said. Concentrated solar power (CSP) plants use mirrors to heat liquid - a type of oil, in the case of Shams 1 - to then heat water to run a steam generator and produce electricity. The plant will be located in Madinat Zayed, around 120 kilometres southwest of Abu Dhabi.
PhysOrg / AFP Jun 09, 2010	back to top