Nu sunt un ecologist, nu am stari orgasmice atunci cand un copac este slavat, dar inteleg valoarea naturii si inteleg ca avem o mare problema in ceea ce priveste apa potabila (chiar daca nu sunt afectat de problema asta si stiu ca o sa mai dureze destula vreme pana cand sa imi fac vreo problema).

Un remediu pentru lipsa de apa potabila il reprezinta inventia lui Michael Pritchard, care datorita unei tehnologii “nanotech” de filtrare a apei, reuseste sa ofere o perspectiva linistitoare in ceea ce priveste o problema atat de mare.

Clipul are si subtitrare in limba romana:

Jenna: Long time readers of this blog will know that Bridge8 has been involved in the development of AccessNano, an innovative nanotechnology secondary school resource funded by the Australian Office of Nanotechnology (AON) and produced by Bridge8 Pty Ltd in collaboration with Mrs Francesca Calati and Dr Amanda Clarke. AccessNano was launched on November 28^th 2008 by the Honourable Julia Gillard, Minister for Education.

In the first half of this year a Teacher Professional Development (TPD) pilot programme was run with the aim of increasing uptake and improving ease of implementation of AccessNano by teachers and schools.

To extend on the TPD programme, and to further develop the uptake of AccessNano, a second programme called ‘Train the Trainer’ is being run. This programme is for people interested in developing nanotechnology TPD and contributing to the development of AccessNano in the future.

The ‘Train the Trainer’ workshop will be held Jan 18^th to 19^th 2010 at La Trobe University.  It will be run by Dr Francesca Calati and supported by Bridge8, DIISR and La Trobe University.

Each attendee will receive free meals and accommodation and have his/her travel costs refunded upon provision of receipts. Attendees of this workshop will also commit to providing their own AccessNano TPD in their local area, and will receive the knowledge, skills and materials to do so.

By committing to this workshop you are helping to spread the word about AccessNano. Positions in this workshop are very limited so to secure your position in ‘Train the Trainer’ please reply to feedback@accessnano.org, with ‘AccessNano TPD’ in the title. Also include your contact details including school address, and a tentative date of when you would hold your own TPD.

FAQ:

What is required for me to be eligible for ‘Train the Trainer’?

• You should have access to a school lab environment in order to fully demonstrate the AccessNano modules.
• Your school should have sufficient public liability and professional indemnity insurance to host guests on school property and provide instruction.

How will I know if I have been selected to attend the TPD?

• You will be advised by Bridge8 prior to December 14, 2009

How will my costs be reimbursed?

• Your food and accommodation costs will be covered by the workshop providers (please advise us if you have any special needs).
• All travel costs (taxis and flights) will be reimbursed to your upon confirmation of your TPD dates and provision of receipts and flight boarding passes to DIISR.

When can I hold my TPD?

• Anytime between February-May 2010.

How long will my TPD need to be?

It should be equivalent to the one you received initially, that is one full day or two evenings is recommended to cover the topic

What does my school need to do?

• Provide a venue and basic lab equipment, assistance from your lab technician may also be required to set up the workshop.
• You may also be required to promote the TPD through local networks.
• The school front desk will need to register attendees.

What support will I receive?

• After your initial training you will be supplied with materials specifically required for delivering AccessNano modules to your class and the TPD.
• Also, upon confirmation of your date, your TPD will be promoted through national networks such at the ASC and ASTA.
• On the provision of registered attendees from your front desk, AccessNano will produce certificates for you to distribute following the end of your TPD.

Anything else?

More information will be sent to you on confirmation of your successful registration. If you have any further queries, please send them to feedback@accessnano.org or call 02 6213 7117.

Kristin: Every month I receive a newsletter from the AZoNano.com, a website collating, publishing and promoting the best of the world’s nanotechnology innovation. In this month’s newsletter, I really enjoyed the following article on consumer product claims and their editor Andy Choi has given us permission to reproduce it here:

Nanothoughts – Nanotech Super Products – Yeah Sure, Prove It!

I bumped into some nanotechnology at the shops the other day. I was in need of a new dish brush for washing the dishes and was quite open minded about what I was going to purchase. Unlike Apple iPods, Coca-Cola and Levi’s 501s I find the dish brush market isn’t strong on brand loyalty. My only prerequisite to making a purchase was that, if possible, I wanted a locally made brush. Alas, that wasn’t to be. Although the last time I bought a dish brush I could buy a locally produced one, all that is currently on offer are ‘Made in China’ and globally ubiquitous. The supermarket has been going through some brand consolidation of late and I also only had one brand to choose from.

From the brushes I liked the look of, it came down to two brushes. The first was an ordinary generic looking dish brush. The second, at double the price, had the same style cleaning head but with a fancy, schmancy padded, ergonomic handle with a nanotech boost from antibacterial silver ions in the bristles. I’ve read the data. I know how nano silver can kill the nasties that undoubtedly populate my dirty washing – particularly the stained old chopping board. Don’t get me started about the chopping board. The problem is, I really don’t care. I wash the dishes in hot water and let them air dry in a bright sunny spot. I’m confident they are clean and non-toxic when put back in the cupboard. I can’t see the germs but I’m confident I’ve washed them away to the best of my abilities. On the other hand I also can’t see the nanosilver in the brush bristles. I had no part in making the brush so how do I know they are actually in there? I can’t test for it. Even if they are present, when I do the washing up, how do I know if my premium priced nanosilver bristles have destroyed any more pathogens than were eradicated with hot soapy water? I am also not scared of occasionally ingesting an occasional nasty bug. I’m fit, I’m healthy and in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche “that which does not kill us makes us stronger”. If I was buying a shirt that used nanotechnology to make it stainproof, I’d be readily able to test the effectiveness of the product and would likely be willing to pay a premium for it. As for the antibacterial properties of nanosilver, why would I pay extra for something that I have no way of knowing if it is even present in the product, let alone if it actually works better than my current product. Forget scare campaigns about getting nanotech products off shop shelves before they destroy the world. Unless manufacturers can prove the products actually are worth the additional expense, they’ll disappear from the shelves because no-one will buy them.

Yes, I bought the old style, dull, generic brush and my dishes haven’t given me food poisoning. It’s my cooking that’ll do that!

Researchers at Purdue University have discovered a new approach for repairing damaged nerve fibers in spinal cord injuries using nano-spheres that could be injected into the blood shortly after an accident.

The synthetic “copolymer micelles” are drug-delivery spheres about 60 nanometers in diameter, or roughly 100 times smaller than the diameter of a red blood cell.

More…

• Internet addresses set to change…

• NASA Awards 2 Million to X-Prize Winners for Helping Develop a Lunar lander…

• Rift in Africa Likely to Create a New ocean…

• Experts Explore Risks of Nanotechnology in our Clothes…

• What Happens when Animals are Possessed by a Parasitic Puppet Master?..

• Species Extinction Threat Grows…

• China is Planning to Hold a Robot Olympics in 2010…

• Experts map the body’s Bacteria…

• Tiny tech sparks cell signal find…

• NASA-Funded Monkey-Radiation Experiment Raises Hackles…

• Space-Elevator Wins $900,000 NASA Prize…

• Frozen Antarctic lakes yield New Viruses…

• Can Closing the Ozone Hole Help combat Climate Change?..

• Happy Carl Sagan Day!..He would have been 75 years old today…

• Tweak Gravity: What if There is No Dark Matter?..

• Horse genome unlocked by science…

• Was life founded on cyanide from space crashes?..

• NASA and ESA sign Mars agreement…

• Beyond North and South: Evidence for Magnetic Monopoles…

• Is Dark Matter Behind the Hazy Radiation at the Milky Way’s Center?..

Scientists are making progress toward development of an “artificial leaf” that mimics a real leaf’s chemical magic with photosynthesis — but instead converts sunlight and water into a liquid fuel such as methanol for cars and trucks. That is among the conclusions in a newly-available report from top authorities on solar energy who met at the 1st Annual Chemical Sciences and Society Symposium. The gathering launched a new effort to initiate international cooperation and innovative thinking on the global energy challenge.
The three-day symposium, which took place in Germany this past summer, included 30 chemists from China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was organized through a joint effort of the science and technology funding agencies and chemical societies of each country, including the U. S. National Science Foundation and the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society. The symposium series was initiated though the ACS Committee on International Activities in order to offer a unique forum whereby global challenges could be tackled in an open, discussion-based setting, fostering innovative solutions to some of the world’s most daunting challenges.

A “white paper” entitled “Powering the World with Sunlight,” describes highlights of the symposium and is available along with related materials here.

“The sun provides more energy to the Earth in an hour than the world consumes in a year,” the report states. “Compare that single hour to the one million years required for the Earth to accumulate the same amount of energy in the form of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are not a sustainable resource, and we must break our dependence on them. Solar power is among the most promising alternatives.”
The symposium focused on four main topics:
•Mimicking photosynthesis using synthetic materials such as the “artificial leaf”
•Production and use of biofuels as a form of stored solar energy
•Developing innovative, more efficient solar cells
•Storage and distribution of solar energy

Highlights of the symposium include a talk by Kazunari Domen, Ph.D., of the University of Tokyo in Japan. Domen described current research on developing more efficient and affordable catalysts for producing hydrogen using a new water-splitting technology called “photocatalytic overall water splitting.” The technology uses light-activated nanoparticles, each 1/50,000 the width of a human hair, to convert water to hydrogen. This technique is more efficient and less expensive than current technologies, he said.

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If you can efficiently separate tiny molecules of salt from seawater, you probably have the technology to filter out the larger bacteria, protozoan cysts, viruses and other contaminants floating around in much of the world’s freshwater. That’s part of what Richmond, Calif.-based NanOasis hopes will allow the company to not only provide tech for desalination projects in California, but also eventually sell into the market for water filtration systems in developing countries, the startup’s executives told me. “Water is a huge issue,” said NanOasis founder and President Christopher Kennedy. “Desalination is a starting point.”

NanOasis beat out nearly 99 percent of the applicants vying for a piece of the Department of Energy’s $400 million ARPA-E program, to snag a more than $2 million grant in the first round of awards last week. Over the next two years, the DOE grant will support development of next-gen reverse-osmosis membranes that use carbon nanotubes. Put simply, this could deliver a much more energy-efficient and lower-cost technology for harvesting freshwater from oceans and brackish water.

If NanOasis’ ARPA-E project is successful, it could potentially disrupt the water industry that, according to Christopher Gasson, editor in chief of Global Water Intelligence magazine, can be best described as a dysfunctional train wreck.

Recent advances in nanotech and growing urgency in the push for energy-efficiency improvements and solutions for water scarcity have produced fertile ground for startups. In addition to NanOasis, other companies, including NanoH2O and Oasys, are working on nano-engineered reverse osmosis membranes (update: Oasys is working on forward osmosis tech). And tens of millions of dollars in venture capital have begun flowing into efforts (largely early stage) to reinvent desalination — a technology that Lux Research forecasts will produce three times as much freshwater in 2020 as it did in 2008.

But while a growing number of companies are experimenting with carbon nanotubes (illustrated at left) for water desalination, NanOasis has as its CTO one of the scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab who first developed the technology, Jason Holt. As he explained to Technology Review back in 2006, when his team’s research was first published in the journal Science, “The challenge is to scale up so we can produce usable amounts of these membrane materials for desalination, or gas separation, the other high-impact application for these membranes.” Using the ARPA-E funds, Holt said, NanOasis will be continuing work on the membrane itself, and working out challenges with manufacturing and engineering.

One of the main problems with reverse osmosis desalination tech to date has been that the basic process of pumping water and forcing it through a membrane to separate out the salt is highly energy-intensive — which means high cost. The energy, in the form of electricity, is used mostly to pump the water around and force it, under very high pressure, through the membrane. In fact, the Pacific Institute has estimated that electricity accounts for 44 percent of the cost of reverse osmosis desalination, by far the single largest expense. Carbon nanotubes could drastically reduce that because water can flow through the tiny pores just as fast, with less pressure, than through conventional membranes with larger openings.

NanOasis has a long climb ahead as it looks beyond a pilot project (a portable system with NanOasis tech processing 10,000 to 100,000 gallons of water per day), which Kennedy said is targeted for 2012 or 2013. At commercial scale, challenges can arise from more than the tech itself. Kennedy noted that desalination projects are “particularly capital intensive” and called California “a difficult environment for desalination,” noting that many of the 20 or so desalination projects now at some stage of development in the state have encountered political opposition. (Much of that has come from groups concerned about damage to aquatic life, coastal wetlands and other environmental impacts, in addition to the energy demands and cost.)

Having raised venture capital in June 2008 (investors include X/Seed Capital Management), and also received some research grants (including a nearly $15,000 $150,000 award from the National Science Foundation), Kennedy said the company will be looking to “raise money several more times” before becoming profitable. “We’ll attempt to grow the company as if we were the next big thing,” said Kennedy, “building a great stand-alone company or a great acquisition.”

Graphics courtesy of the NanOasis, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Pacific Institute.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

Hydrogen fuel, because its only byproduct is steam, should be the ultimate in green alternatives to fossil fuels, but it hasn’t delivered on its promise yet because of one enormous stumbling block, storage. Now a team of chemical engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has developed a computational model that shows that carbon nanotubes may offer a surprising solution. Results are presented in the current online issue of the journal, Applied Physics Letters.

“If this works as we expect, it’s perhaps no longer science fiction to hope for a briefcase-sized hydrogen battery to run a bus or car,” says UMass Amherst chemical engineering professor Dimitrios Maroudas. “Hydrogen storage has been a huge problem in the energy field for the past 10 years because no one has been able to demonstrate a truly viable storage medium. We’ve shown that it’s possible to achieve hydrogen storage capacity up to 8 percent by weight using carbon nanotubes. This is an outstanding level, higher by 1 percent than the 2010 United States Department of Energy target for on-board hydrogen storage systems,” Maroudas adds. “The method we propose may lead to breaking the bottleneck.”

The UMass Amherst computational model strongly lends itself to verification in laboratory experiments, say Maroudas and colleagues, and it provides ample testable hypotheses for future experimental research. “People had been losing faith, but I think our predictions show that hydrogen should be back on the table and in a most promising way. We come up with modeling predictions for technologically relevant problems every day, but this cute model is special,” he notes.

Specifically, Maroudas, his graduate student Andre Muniz and their collaborator M. Meyyappan, chief scientist for exploration technology at the Center for Nanotechnology at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., show that proper arrangement of carbon nanotubes can overcome hydrogen transport limitations in nanotube bundles. It should also prevent ineffective and nonuniform hydrogenation, which is caused by nanotube swelling due to chemisorption of hydrogen atoms on the nanotube walls.

If one were to think of carbon nanotube bundles as something like a toothbrush, one strategy that Maroudas and colleagues recommend for holding hydrogen atoms most efficiently is that the brush arrangement should not be too dense. If it is, when the tubules swell they’ll block efficient passage and diffusion of the hydrogen, Maroudas explains. In addition to an optimal bundle density, further improvement can be achieved by optimizing the individual nanotube configurations to limit their swelling upon hydrogenation.

Following this approach should result in one hydrogen atom being able to chemisorb onto — form a chemical bond with — each carbon atom of the nanotubes, leading to 100 percent (atomically) storage capacity, he adds. This chemisorbed hydrogen, bound to the surface, can then be easily released by applying heat.

Maroudas says, “We propose recipes that will be very easy for others to try, by which carbon nanotubes can be arranged to accomplish practically 100 percent storage atomically, which is nearly 8 percent by weight. You can’t get any greener than hydrogen as fuel, and if the experiments we envision lead to new technology that’s economically viable, that’s as good as it gets.” This work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant and a Fulbright/CAPES scholarship to Muniz.

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Self-organized nitrogen and fluorine co-doped titanium oxide (TiONF) nanotube arrays were created by anodizing titanium foil in a fluoride and ammoniate-based electrolyte, followed by calcination of the amorphous nanotube arrays under a nitrogen protective atmosphere for crystallization. TiONF nanotube arrays were found to have enhanced visible light absorption capability and photodegradation efficiency on methylene blue under visible light illumination over the TiO2 nanotube arrays. The enhancement was dependent on both the nanotube structural architecture and the nitrogen and fluorine co-doping effect. TiONF nanotube arrays promise a wide range of technical applications, especially for environmental applications and solar cell devices.

J.Env.Sc & Tech

With potential adverse health and environmental effects often in the news about nanotechnology, scientists in Arkansas are reporting that carbon nanotubes (CNTs) could have beneficial effects in agriculture. Their study, scheduled for the October issue of ACS Nano, a monthly journal, found that tomato seeds exposed to CNTs germinated faster and grew into larger, heavier seedlings than other seeds. That growth-enhancing effect could be a boon for biomass production for plant-based biofuels and other agricultural products, they suggest.

Mariya Khodakovskaya, Alexandru Biris, and colleagues note that considerable scientific research is underway to use nanoparticles — wisps 1/50,000th the width of a human hair — in agriculture. The goals of “nano-agriculture” include improving the productivity of plants for food, fuel, and other uses.

The scientists report the first evidence that CNTs penetrate the hard outer coating of seeds, and have beneficial effects. Nanotube-exposed seeds sprouted up to two times faster than control seeds and the seedlings weighed more than twice as much as the untreated plants. Those effects may occur because nanotubes penetrate the seed coat and boost water uptake, the researchers state. “This observed positive effect of CNTs on the seed germination could have significant economic importance for agriculture, horticulture, and the energy sector, such as for production of biofuels,” they add.

source

Kristin: As Jenna blogged a week or so ago, The RiAus has now officially opened and their program of activities has commenced. One of the first event is Free Range Science in Ballarat where you can go to the George Hotel and find out more about nanotechnology.

Two of our favourite nanotech people will be speaking: Francesca Calati who we’ve long had the pleasure of working with on AccessNano, and Prof Erol Harvey, previous chair of the Australian Nano Business Forum and CEO of MiniFab. The event is being coordinated by previous Bridge8-er and now Senior Program Manager at the RiAus, Lisa Bailey. Lisa is on the Conversation Hour with Jon Faine on ABC 774 Melbourne explaining the event at 10:30am today – you can stream this here.

Another Free Range event on science fiction vs science fact is being held in Natimuk Victoria. Are there more “Free Range” events to come? We’d love to see a regional nano event in South Australia!