Items Tagged With Nanotubes

Scientists from the University of Florida have found a way to “cork” nanotubes. The goal is a better way to deliver drugs, for example, for cancer treatment, by filling the nanotubes with drugs and injecting them into the body, where they will seek diseased or cancerous cells, uncork and spill their therapeutic contents in the right place.

Thin films of carbon nanotubes deposited on transparent plastic can serve as a surface on which cells can grow. And as researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) and Rice University suggest in a paper published in the May issue of the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, these nanotube films could potentially serve as an electrical interface between living tissue and prosthetic devices or biomedical instruments.

Finding affordable ways to make technology available to everyone is a common challenge. Now, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, Greenbelt, MD, has done that with the process that creates “nanotubes.”

A nanotube is a tiny, hollow, long, thin and strong tube with an outside diameter of a nanometre that is formed from atoms such as carbon.

NaturalNano, Inc., a nanotechnology and materials science company that commercialises naturally occurring nanotubes, today announced that it has filed a US patent application for advances in the production of nanocomposites in the polymers and plastics industry.

New implantable biomedical devices that can act as artificial nerve cells, control severe pain, or allow otherwise paralysed muscles to be moved might one day be possible thanks to developments in materials science. Writing today in Advanced Materials, Nicholas Kotov of the University of Michigan, USA, and colleagues describe how they have used hollow, submicroscopic strands of carbon, carbon nanotubes, to connect an integrated circuit to nerve cells. The new technology offers the possibility of building an interface between biology and electronics.