Category Archives: Nanotech

Haywood analyst Pardeep Sangha says next-generation anti-counterfeiting firm Nanotech Security (TSXV:NTS) is undervalued.

In a research report to clients Monday, Sangha initiated coverage of Nanotech with a Buy rating and a one-year price target of $2.00, implying a return of 62.6 per cent at the time of publication, though the analyst categorizes the overall risk rating on the stock as very high.

Sangha says the opportunity for Nanotech, whose KolourOptik technology produces rich hologram-like images that are extremely difficult to copy, is immense.

Nanotech develops next-generation anti-counterfeiting products, initially targeting the banknote industry, explains the analyst. Counterfeiting is a US$650B per year problem across numerous industries including banknotes, secure documents, ticketing, commercial branding, and pharmaceuticals. We believe Nanotech is at a growth inflection point as it transitions from research to commercialization stage with several large growth initiatives.

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Sangha notes that Nanotech recently announced a five-year $30-million development contract and expects to ship its Optical Thin Film to a large Asian banknote issuing authority later this year. He thinks this points to one conclusion.

We believe KolourOptik has the potential to disrupt the banknote industry, he says.

Sangha thinks Nanotech Security will generate EBITDA of zero on revenue of $10.5-million in fiscal 2017. He expects these numbers will improve to EBITDA of $4.6-million on a topline of $21.5-million the following year and then to EBITDA of $14.9-million on revenue of $41.0-million in fiscal 2018.

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Nanotech Security is undervalued, says Haywood - Cantech Letter

Nanotechnology has become a growing part of medical research in recent years, with scientists feverishly working to see if tiny particles could revolutionize the world of drug delivery.

But many questions remain about how to effectively transport those particles and associated drugs to cells.

In an article published in Scientific Reports, FSU Associate Professor of Biological Science Steven Lenhert takes a step forward in the understanding of nanoparticles and how they can best be used to deliver drugs.

After conducting a series of experiments, Lenhert and his colleagues found that it may be possible to boost the efficacy of medicine entering target cells via a nanoparticle.

We can enhance how cells take them up and make more drugs more potent, Lenhert says.

Initially, Lenhert and his colleagues from the University of Toronto and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology wanted to see what happened when they encapsulated silicon nanoparticles in liposomes or small spherical sacs of molecules and delivered them to HeLa cells, a standard cancer cell model.

The initial goal was to test the toxicity of silicon-based nanoparticles and get a better understanding of its biological activity.

Silicon is a non-toxic substance and has well-known optical properties that allow their nanostructures to appear fluorescent under an infrared camera, where tissue would be nearly transparent. Scientists believe it has enormous potential as a delivery agent for drugs as well as in medical imaging.

But there are still questions about how silicon behaves at such a small size.

Nanoparticles change properties as they get smaller, so scientists want to understand the biological activity, Lenhert says. For example, how does shape and size affect toxicity?

Scientists found that 10 out of 18 types of the particles, ranging from 1.5 nanometers to 6 nanometers, were significantly more toxic than crude mixtures of the material.

At first, scientists believed this could be a setback, but they then discovered the reason for the toxicity levels. The more toxic fragments also had enhanced cellular uptake.

That information is more valuable long term, Lenhert says, because it means they could potentially alter nanoparticles to enhance the potency of a given therapeutic.

The work also paves the way for researchers to screen libraries of nanoparticles to see how cells react.

This is an essential step toward the discovery of novel nanotechnology based therapeutics, Lenhert says. Theres big potential here for new therapeutics, but we need to be able to test everything first.

Other researchers contributing to the work are Aubrey Kusi-Appiah, Lida Ghazanfari, and Plengchart Prommapan from Florida State University; Melanie Mastronardi, Chenxi Qian, Ken Chen, and Geoffrey Ozin from the University of Toronto; and Christian Kubel from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Florida State University

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Huge Step Toward Nanotech-Based Drugs - Controlled Environments Magazine

Among the numerous inventions that IBM Corp. has racked up over its more than centurylong history are DRAM, the disk drive and several other foundational components of modern data storage. On Wednesday, the company added another breakthrough to the list by revealing that it has managed to encode information into a single atom.

The IBM Research team behindthe project (pictured) published the details of their effort in this weeks edition of the science journal Nature. For the storage medium, they used an atom of the rare earth element holmium, which is employed in a variety of scientific and industrial applications including nuclear reactors. It stands out for having the highest magnetic strength on the periodic table, a property that Big Blues researchers exploited to mimic the behavior of a bit.

The team placed their holmium atom on a surface made of magnesium oxide to produce magnetic bistability, a phenomenon wherein a particle has two potential magnetic states. They then used a customized scanning tunneling microscope, an invention that happen to have originated at IBM as well and earned its creators a Nobel prize, to run a 150-millivolt current through the atom. The jolt changed its magnetic field, an effect equivalent to flipping the value of a bit in a traditional data storage medium.

From there, IBMs researchers were able to read the contents of the holmium atom by placing an iron atom in the vicinity that reflected the magnetic change in its own behavior. Developing this sensing approach was an achievement of its own that the team shared in a companion paper published by Nature Nanotechnology.

According to an IBM spokesperson, the breakthrough may one day make it possible to store the more than 25 million songs in Apple Inc.s iTunes on a device the size of a credit card. But nothing is certain at such an early stage. To make the technology viable for commercial use, the company would likely have to spend years improving its implementation and manufacturing processes.

In the meantime, new alternatives to traditional storage media are already starting to hit the market. One of the most promising contenders is NRAM, a type of non-volatile memory based on carbon nanotubes that can read and write data 100 times faster than flash while providing superior density. Nantero Inc., the startup behind the technology, recently raised $21 million in funding to fuel its commercialization efforts.

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IBM shrinks data storage to the atomic level in latest nanotech milestone - SiliconANGLE (blog)

Steven Lenhert, associate professor of biological science

Nanotechnology has become a growing part of medical research in recent years, with scientists feverishly working to see if tiny particles could revolutionize the world of drug delivery.

But many questions remain about how to effectively transport those particles and associated drugs to cells.

In an article published today in Scientific Reports, FSU Associate Professor of Biological Science Steven Lenhert takes a step forward in the understanding of nanoparticles and how they can best be used to deliver drugs.

After conducting a series of experiments, Lenhert and his colleagues found that it may be possible to boost the efficacy of medicine entering target cells via a nanoparticle.

We can enhance how cells take them up and make more drugs more potent, Lenhert said.

Initially, Lenhert and his colleagues from the University of Toronto and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology wanted to see what happened when they encapsulated silicon nanoparticles in liposomes or small spherical sacs of molecules and delivered them to HeLa cells, a standard cancer cell model.

The initial goal was to test the toxicity of silicon-based nanoparticles and get a better understanding of its biological activity.

Silicon is a non-toxic substance and has well-known optical properties that allow their nanostructures to appear fluorescent under an infrared camera, where tissue would be nearly transparent. Scientists believe it has enormous potential as a delivery agent for drugs as well as in medical imaging.

But there are still questions about how silicon behaves at such a small size.

Nanoparticles change properties as they get smaller, so scientists want to understand the biological activity, Lenhert said. For example, how does shape and size affect toxicity?

Scientists found that 10 out of 18 types of the particles, ranging from 1.5 nanometers to 6 nanometers, were significantly more toxic than crude mixtures of the material.

At first, scientists believed this could be a setback, but they then discovered the reason for the toxicity levels. The more toxic fragments also had enhanced cellular uptake.

That information is more valuable long term, Lenhert said, because it means they could potentially alter nanoparticles to enhance the potency of a given therapeutic.

The work also paves the way for researchers to screen libraries of nanoparticles to see how cells react.

This is an essential step toward the discovery of novel nanotechnology based therapeutics, Lenhert said. Theres big potential here for new therapeutics, but we need to be able to test everything first.

Other researchers contributing to the work are Aubrey Kusi-Appiah, Lida Ghazanfari and Plengchart Prommapan from Florida State University; Melanie Mastronardi, Chenxi Qian, Ken Chen and Geoffrey Ozin from the University of Toronto; and Christian Kubel from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Interested in learning more? Read about this work in Lenherts own words.

Originally posted here:

FSU researchers take big step forward in nanotech-based drugs - Florida State News

Team makes high-quality graphene with soybeans

A breakthrough by CSIRO-led scientists has made the world's strongest material more commercially viable, thanks to the humble soybean.

Engineering researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have designed ultra-flexible, nanoelectronic thread (NET) brain probes that can achieve more reliable long-term neural recording than existing probes and don't ...

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have created an atomic force microscope on a chip, dramatically shrinking the sizeand, hopefully, the price tagof a high-tech device commonly used to characterize material ...

Lithium-ion batteries have become essential in everyday technology. But these power sources can explode under certain circumstances and are not ideal for grid-scale energy storage. Sodium-ion batteries are potentially a safer ...

Determining the exact configuration of proteins and other complex biological molecules is an important step toward understanding their functions, including how they bind with receptors in the body. But such imaging is difficult ...

Pioneering research published in Nature by Professor Feng Ding's team from the Center for Multidimensional Carbon Materials, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), in collaboration with Professor Jin Zhang's team, ...

Five years of hard work and a little "cosmic luck" led Rice University researchers to a new method to obtain structural details on molecules in biomembranes.

Viruses are extremely efficient at targeting and delivering cargo to cells. In the journal ACS Nano, researchers report they have harnessed this well-honed abilityminus the part that makes us sickto develop virus-like ...

A chunk of conductive graphene foam reinforced by carbon nanotubes can support more than 3,000 times its own weight and easily bounce back to its original height, according to Rice University scientists.

A new, specially coated iron oxide nanoparticle developed by a team at MIT and elsewhere could provide an alternative to conventional gadolinium-based contrast agents used for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedures. ...

(Phys.org)A team of researchers with IBM Research in Switzerland and the University of Warwick in the U.K. has successfully created a triangulene molecule by manipulating a precursor molecule physically using a scanning ...

Quantum mechanics, the physics that governs nature at the atomic and subatomic scale, contains a host of new physical phenomena to explore quantum states at the nanoscale. Though tricky, there are ways to exploit these inherently ...

A tiny, transparent device that can fit into a contact lens has a bright future, potentially helping a range of scientific endeavors from biomedicine to geology.

Tiny carbon dots have, for the first time, been applied to intracellular imaging and tracking of drug delivery involving various optical and vibrational spectroscopic-based techniques such as fluorescence, Raman, and hyperspectral ...

Imagine patterning and visualizing silicon at the atomic level, something which, if done successfully, will revolutionize the quantum and classical computing industry. A team of scientists in Edmonton, Canada has done just ...

An organic-inorganic hybrid material may be the future for more efficient technologies that can generate electricity from either light or heat or devices that emit light from electricity.

Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), which is ubiquitously used as a solid lubricant, has recently been shown to have a two-dimensional (2D) form that is similar to graphene. But, when thinned down to less than a nanometer thick, ...

For the first time, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and collaborators have captured a movie of how large populations of carbon nanotubes grow and align themselves.

SpaceX, the upstart company, and NASA, the government agency, both have plans to venture to Mars and orbit the moon. But that doesn't mean they've launched a new space race.

The International Potato Center (CIP) launched a series of experiments to discover if potatoes can grow under Mars atmospheric conditions and thereby prove they are also able to grow in extreme climates on Earth. This Phase ...

An international team of researchers has developed a computer model that makes predictions regarding four major stressors to the world's oceans over the next several decades. In their paper published in the journal Nature ...

The bright central area of Ceres' Occator Crater, known as Cerealia Facula, is approximately 30 million years younger than the crater in which it lies, according to a new study in the Astronomical Journal. Scientists used ...

Time crystals may sound like something from science fiction, having more to do with time travel or Dr. Who. These strange materialsin which atoms and molecules are arranged across space and timeare in fact quite real, ...

An international team of researchers has developed a proof of concept for a working hand-held chemical scanner. In their paper published in the journal Nano Letters, the team describes their ideas and their belief that they ...

Ancient DNA found in the dental plaque of Neandertals - our nearest extinct relative - has provided remarkable new insights into their behaviour, diet and evolutionary history, including their use of plant-based medicine ...

Although many people have argued that rising carbon dioxide levels would benefit crop production, a recent model of the effects of increased CO2 shows that it's not that simple and that elevated levels could have a much less ...

An international team of scientists led by Liang-shi Li at Indiana University has achieved a new milestone in the quest to recycle carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere into carbon-neutral fuels and others materials.

An ancient fish species with unusual scales and teeth from the Kuanti Formation in southern China may have evolved prior to the "Age of Fish", according to a study published March 8, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE ...

A geographer from the University of Sussex who is researching a huge crater in Siberia, which is expanding at a rapid rate, believes the huge hole in the ground will help scientists to map the history of the Earth's climate.

A huge mass of glowing stardust in a galaxy seen shortly after the Universe's formation has been detected by a UCL-led team of astronomers, providing new insights into the birth and explosive deaths of the very first stars.

DNA in hair samples collected from Aboriginal people across Australia in the early to mid-1900s has revealed that populations have been continuously present in the same regions for up to 50,000 years - soon after the peopling ...

A team of astronomers has doubled the number of known young, compact radio galaxiesgalaxies powered by newly energized black holes. The improved tally will help astronomers understand the relationship between the size ...

Physicists at the University of Iowa have proposed a new technique to detect and measure materials that give off weak magnetic signals or have no magnetic field at all. Their solution would use a noninvasive probe to induce ...

A new study involving biologists from Monash University Australia has found that despite their very different ancestors, dolphins and crocodiles evolved similarly-shaped skulls to feed on similar prey.

University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science scientist Mark Donelan and his Norwegian Meteorological Institute colleague captured new information about extreme waves, as one of the steepest ever ...

EPFL scientists have carried out a genomic and evolutionary study of a large and enigmatic family of human proteins, to demonstrate that it is responsible for harnessing the millions of transposable elements in the human ...

Nearly 5,000 years ago, long before the vast east-west trade routes of the Great Silk Road were traversed by Marco Polo, the foundations for these trans-Asian interaction networks were being carved by nomads moving herds ...

Biomedical engineering researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed inexpensive paper pumps that use capillary action to power portable microfluidic devices, ...

March 8, 2017 - Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised a versatile molecule-building tool for creating new drugs and other chemical products.

An international research team has discovered a biochemical pathway that is responsible for the development of moss cuticles. These waxy coverings of epidermal cells are the outer layer of plants and protect them from water ...

Europium silicide has for some time attracted the attention of scientists. Recognized as being promising for electronics and spintronics, this material has recently been submitted by a team of physicists from Poland, Germany ...

Polymer nanocomposites mix particles billionths of a meter (nanometers, nm) in diameter with polymers, which are long molecular chains. Often used to make injection-molded products, they are common in automobiles, fire retardants, ...

A new study by G. William Arends Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois Bill Metcalf with postdoctoral Fellow Dipti Nayak has documented the use of CRISPR-Cas9 mediated genome editing in the third domain ...

University of Otago physicists have found a way to control individual atoms, making them appear wherever they want them to.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and collaborators at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for the first time have taken 3-D snapshots of operating high explosive detonators.

Ichthyosaurs, which are similar-shaped to dolphins and sharks, but are reptiles, swam the seas for millions of years during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. They were the first, large extinct reptiles brought ...

About 375 million years ago, certain fishes had developed powerfully strong paired fins that were capable of transporting them out of the water and onto land.

Proteins, those basic components of cells and tissues, carry out many biological functions by working with partners in networks. The dynamic nature of these networks - where proteins interact with different partners at different ...

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Nanotech News - phys.org

March 8, 2017

Nanotechnology has become a growing part of medical research in recent years, with scientists feverishly working to see if tiny particles could revolutionize the world of drug delivery.

But many questions remain about how to effectively transport those particles and associated drugs to cells.

In an article published today in Scientific Reports, FSU Associate Professor of Biological Science Steven Lenhert takes a step forward in the understanding of nanoparticles and how they can best be used to deliver drugs.

After conducting a series of experiments, Lenhert and his colleagues found that it may be possible to boost the efficacy of medicine entering target cells via a nanoparticle.

"We can enhance how cells take them up and make more drugs more potent," Lenhert said.

Initially, Lenhert and his colleagues from the University of Toronto and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology wanted to see what happened when they encapsulated silicon nanoparticles in liposomesor small spherical sacs of moleculesand delivered them to HeLa cells, a standard cancer cell model.

The initial goal was to test the toxicity of silicon-based nanoparticles and get a better understanding of its biological activity.

Silicon is a non-toxic substance and has well-known optical properties that allow their nanostructures to appear fluorescent under an infrared camera, where tissue would be nearly transparent. Scientists believe it has enormous potential as a delivery agent for drugs as well as in medical imaging.

But there are still questions about how silicon behaves at such a small size.

"Nanoparticles change properties as they get smaller, so scientists want to understand the biological activity," Lenhert said. "For example, how does shape and size affect toxicity?"

Scientists found that 10 out of 18 types of the particles, ranging from 1.5 nanometers to 6 nanometers, were significantly more toxic than crude mixtures of the material.

At first, scientists believed this could be a setback, but they then discovered the reason for the toxicity levels. The more toxic fragments also had enhanced cellular uptake. That information is more valuable long term, Lenhert said, because it means they could potentially alter nanoparticles to enhance the potency of a given therapeutic.

The work also paves the way for researchers to screen libraries of nanoparticles to see how cells react.

"This is an essential step toward the discovery of novel nanotechnology based therapeutics," Lenhert said. "There's big potential here for new therapeutics, but we need to be able to test everything first."

Explore further: New method to diagnose cancer

An international group of scientists has created a new approach to the diagnostics of breast cancer with the help of nanoparticles of porous silicone.

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Researchers take big step forward in nanotech-based drugs - Phys.Org

Canaccord Genuity Cuts Nanotech Security Corp (NTS) Price Target to C$1.75 Chaffey Breeze Nanotech Security Corp logo Nanotech Security Corp (CVE:NTS) had its price objective reduced by Canaccord Genuity from C$2.00 to C$1.75 in a report released on Thursday morning. They currently have a speculative buy rating on the stock. Canaccord ...

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Canaccord Genuity Cuts Nanotech Security Corp (NTS) Price Target to C$1.75 - Chaffey Breeze

Yet, the importance of nanoconfinement is not only this. Researchers from Mahidol University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have found that nano-hydrides can alter the nano-interfaces, which are phases that occur when the material is cycled.

Consequently, the researchers decided to apply nanoconfinement into Lithium Nitride hydrogen storage system. At the end, it was proved that nano-interfaces completely changed the pathways of the reaction pathways, and made the charging unit much faster and reversible.

The results were published in the Advanced Materials Interfaces journal on February 23rd. Regarding the results Brandon Wood, an LLNL materials scientist and lead author of the paper, commented:

The key is to get rid of the undesirable intermediate phases, which slow down the materials performance as they are formed or consumed. If you can do that, then the storage capacity kinetics dramatically improve and the thermodynamic requirements to achieve full recharge become far more reasonable.

In this material, the nano-interfaces do just that, as long as the nanoconfined particles are small enough. Its really a new paradigm for hydrogen storage, since it means that the reactions can be changed by engineering internal microstructures.

The paper has also opened an important door for the research on about solid-solid phase reaction in energy storage and the contribution of the nanoconfinement in this matter through thermodynamic modeling method. Tae Wook Heo, another LLNL co-author on the study, said:

There is a direct analogy between hydrogen storage reactions and solid-state reactions in battery electrode materials. People have been thinking about the role of interfaces in batteries for some time, and our work suggests that some of the same strategies being pursued in the battery community could also be applied to hydrogen storage. Tailoring morphology and internal microstructure could be the best way forward for engineering materials that could meet performance targets.

[via llnl]

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New Nanotech Material Could Solve On-Vehicle Hydrogen Storage Problems - The Green Optimistic (blog)

Analyst Activity Canaccord Genuity Lowers Its Price Target On ... Market Exclusive Today, Canaccord Genuity lowered its price target on Nanotech Security Corp (CVE:NTS) to C$1.75 per share. There are 1 hold rating on the stock. The current ... and more »

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Analyst Activity Canaccord Genuity Lowers Its Price Target On ... - Market Exclusive

Scientists, including those from the University of Minnesota in the US, developed a way to safely thaw frozen tissues with the aid of nanoparticles. (Representative image: Reuters)

Scientists are developing a new method to safely bring frozen organs back to life using nanotechnology, an advance that may make donated organs for transplants available to virtually everyone who needs them. The number of donated organs that may be transplanted into patients could increase greatly if there were a way to freeze and reheat organs without damaging the cells within them.

Scientists, including those from the University of Minnesota in the US, developed a way to safely thaw frozen tissues with the aid of nanoparticles.

The researchers manufactured silica-coated nanoparticles that contained iron oxide. When they applied a magnetic field to frozen tissues suffused with the nanoparticles, the nanoparticles generated heat rapidly and uniformly.

The tissue samples warmed up at rates of up to more than 130 degrees Celsius per minute, which is 10 to 100 times faster than previous methods.

Researchers tested their method on frozen human skin cells, segments of pig heart valves and sections of pig arteries.

None of the rewarmed tissues displayed signs of harm from the heating process, and they preserved key physical properties such as elasticity.

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The researchers were able to wash away the nanoparticles from the sample after thawing, Live Science reported.

Previous research successfully thawed tiny biological samples that were only one to three milliliters in volume.

The new technique works for samples that are up to 50 millilitres in size. The researchers said there is a strong possibility they could scale up their technique to even larger systems, such as organs.

We are at the level of rabbit organs now. We have a way to go for human organs, but nothing seems to preclude us from that, said John Bischof, from University of Minnesota.

The findings are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

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Nanotech may help bring frozen organs back to life - Financial Express