Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: nanotechnology

Optical meta‑conveyors enable programmable nanomanipulation along arbitrary open paths

The task of gently transporting a microscopic particle from one point to another along a winding path, and then bringing it back using nothing more than a single, compact chip is a challenge we set out to address in our new study, now published in Nature Communications.

Optical forces arising from momentum exchange during light–matter interactions have become indispensable tools in biophysics, soft matter science and micro-and nanofabrication. Among these, optical conveyors—capable of generating stable, directional optical flows—enable nanoparticle transport along predefined trajectories, offering unique advantages for drug delivery, cell sorting, and lab-on-a-chip systems. However, conventional platforms often rely on spatial light modulators to produce dynamic holograms. Such systems are bulky, constrained by limited pixel size and count, and difficult to integrate—factors that severely impede practical deployment.

Metasurfaces have recently opened new pathways for miniaturizing optical manipulation devices, thanks to their subwavelength field-shaping capabilities. Yet, most existing metasurface-based schemes still depend on radially or azimuthally uniform phase gradients, which confine the resulting optical flow to closed loops (vortex rings) due to the intrinsic geometry of vortex fields.

Exploiting interfacial ionic mobility to make heat-moldable nanoparticle aggregates

If you have ever warped a cheap plastic cup by pouring coffee into it, then you have witnessed thermoplasticity in action. Thermoplasticity is the ability of a material to become pliable under heating. In industry, thermoplasticity is exploited to form materials into complex shapes using heat. However, some materials, such as aggregates of nanoparticles, are not thermoplastic and cannot be easily processed without affecting their particle morphology and properties.

However, researchers at The University of Osaka have been able to use heat to shape nanoparticle aggregates, specifically cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) derived from wood pulp. This exciting advance, showcasing the mechanical and thermal potential of nanoparticles, is published in Science Advances.

Michio Kaku: The von Neumann Probe (A Nano Ship to the Stars) | Big Think

Become a Big Think member to unlock expert classes, premium print issues, exclusive events and more: https://bigthink.com/membership/?utm_… Michio Kaku: The von Neumann Probe (A Nano Ship to the Stars)
Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo.
Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge.

One of the inventions that may be realized by advances in nanotechnology is the creation of a Von Neumann probe, which is essentially a virus, a self-replicating probe that can then explore the universe near the speed of light.

Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study as well as New York University (NYU).

TRANSCRIPT:

Dr. Michio Kaku: Recently there was a conference, the One Hundred Year Starship, and of course many people came in with designs to have gigantic fusion rockets take us to Mars and beyond Jupiter, into the stars. Other people said yes, antimatter rockets, that’s the way to go, and we all had this mental vision of the Enterprise going to the nearby star systems… here is another way to do it. Think of Mother Nature. When Mother Nature wants to propagate life, one possibility is to send out seeds, not just one or two, but millions of seeds. Most of the seeds never make it, but one or two do and as a consequence that’s how trees in forests propagate. So why not create a nano ship using nanotechnology? How big would it be? Some people like Paul Davies say it could be as big as a bread box. Other people say it could be even smaller than that. Why not something the size of a needle? And because they’re so small it wouldn’t take much to accelerate them to near the speed of light.

Liquid crystals enable on‑demand skyrmion formation at room temperature

Researchers have recently found a new way to summon useful structures in magnetic materials using light, heat, and electric fields. This new method, described in a new study published in Physical Review Letters, may lead to more energy-efficient and flexible technologies for data storage and optical devices.

Within the realm of condensed matter physics, scientists study how macroscopic properties emerge from the interactions of vast numbers of microscopic particles in materials. In magnetic materials, skyrmions—nanoscale, topologically stable swirling magnetic structures—arise under certain conditions.

While they have been observed in magnets, superconductors, and liquid crystals, their nucleation is often random or requires extreme conditions. Creating these structures on demand is difficult due to high energy barriers and lack of easy, reversible control.

How Qing featherwork got its colors: New scans reveal multiple birds and hidden pigment layers

The kingfisher’s brilliant blue feathers were once used like paint to create works of art. The technique, known as tian-tsui, was popular during China’s Qing Dynasty. And because tian-tsui uses delicate feathers, previous scientists struggled to study them using traditional analytical techniques. So, researchers reporting in ACS Omega developed new methods of investigating these featherworks without harming them. The team found that multiple bird species and layered pigments provided a one-of-a-kind palette.

The shades of blue in kingfisher feathers are the result of a phenomenon called structural color. Rather than being created by pigment molecules, structural color is created by tiny, ordered structures in the feathers that interact with light to create the observed coloring—in this case, blue or purple. To gain insights into several featherwork pieces and the feathers that went into making them, Madeline Meier and colleagues combined different imaging and spectroscopy techniques that rely on the ways the feathers reflect and scatter light.

The team analyzed a decorative tian-tsui screen estimated to date from the late 18th to the early 19th century that features intricate scenes in a variety of colors. In one panel, analysis revealed that the blue feathers belonged to the common kingfisher, and the purple came from the black-capped kingfisher. The green feathers had different nanostructures than the blue feathers, leading the researchers to conclude that the green ones belonged to another bird entirely: the mallard duck.

How temperature changes light: New model could guide smarter LEDs, sensors and photonic devices

Technion researchers have developed, for the first time, a comprehensive physical model explaining how the properties of a radiating material, including absorption, emission, and quantum efficiency, affect the fundamental characteristics of the light it emits as a function of temperature. In essence, the emitted light changes its color, intensity, and randomness according to the material’s properties and its temperature. The discovery was published in Optica and opens new possibilities for designing advanced light sources, optical sensors, and thermally based photonic systems.

The research was led by M.Sc. student Tomer Bar-Lev and Prof. Carmel Rotschild from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion. According to the researchers, the central phenomenon examined in this work is photoluminescence, a process in which a material emits light in response to incident illumination. In this phenomenon, light particles (photons) are absorbed by the material and re-emitted, forming the basis of many technologies, including LED lighting and optical sensors.

The Technion researchers demonstrated that the influence of fundamental physical laws formulated more than a century ago is far broader than previously thought.

Giving X-ray vision a sense of direction

Whether in tooth enamel or in nanomaterials made of silicon, the orientation of tiny internal structures often determines the properties of a material. A new X-ray method can even make this nano-order visible when the structures are actually too small to be imaged directly. The method was developed by an international team led by the Helmholtz Center Hereon, and it opens up new possibilities to investigate materials and biological structures. The research is published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

In medical X-ray imaging, the picture is created by the varying attenuation of X-rays in the body. In order to examine materials or biological tissue in detail, experts use advanced techniques that provide additional information, such as dark-field imaging. This technique exploits the fact that X-rays are scattered, i.e., deflected, at internal interfaces and irregularities. “The scattering reveals a lot about internal structures that are not directly visible in the actual image,” explains Hereon researcher Sami Wirtensohn, first author of the study.

To make these fine structures visible, the dark field method blocks the direct X-ray beam. This allows the detector to capture only the radiation scattered inside the sample. Until now, this method has only been able to show that such structures exist, but not how they are spatially aligned.

Our Extropian Future, with Natasha Vita-More

Our extropian future: natasha vita-more on AI, nanotechnology, mind uploading, and the birth of transhumanism.

What happened to the future we dreamed about on the Extropian mailing list 30 years ago? Did we get the timelines wrong, or was the architecture of our thinking correct? In this compelling follow-up to the conversation with Max More, Giulio Prisco sits down with Natasha Vita-More—futurist, designer, and co-founder of the Extropian movement—to assess the state of \.

Spontaneous Emergence of Self-Replicating Molecules Containing Nucleobases and Amino Acids

The conditions that led to the formation of the first organisms and the ways that life originates from a lifeless chemical soup are poorly understood. The recent hypothesis of “RNA-peptide coevolution” suggests that the current close relationship between amino acids and nucleobases may well have extended to the origin of life. We now show how the interplay between these compound classes can give rise to new self-replicating molecules using a dynamic combinatorial approach. We report two strategies for the fabrication of chimeric amino acid/nucleobase self-replicating macrocycles capable of exponential growth. The first one relies on mixing nucleobase-and peptide-based building blocks, where the ligation of these two gives rise to highly specific chimeric ring structures. The second one starts from peptide nucleic acid (PNA) building blocks in which nucleobases are already linked to amino acids from the start. While previously reported nucleic acid-based self-replicating systems rely on presynthesis of (short) oligonucleotide sequences, self-replication in the present systems start from units containing only a single nucleobase. Self-replication is accompanied by self-assembly, spontaneously giving rise to an ordered one-dimensional arrangement of nucleobase nanostructures.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement.

/* */