By Cameron Chai A research team led by Allen Apblett from the Oklahoma State University in Stillwater has delivered a presentation on the development of a capsule containing metal-oxide nanoparticles…
By Cameron Chai HyperSolar, a company developing an innovative nanotechnology process to generate renewable natural gas and hydrogen utilizing solar power and water, has released the initial test…
By Cameron Chai A research team led by Catherine Klapperich from the Boston University has devised a disposable microfluidic chip, which is a precise, inexpensive, rapid point-of-care device that…
The race towards mobile payments stops at Mike Cook’s desk in Arkansas.
Many technology companies think mobile phones will revolutionize how we pay at retail stores. For that to happen, they’ll have to make it past the desk of Mike Cook in Bentonville, Arkansas.
No other means of storing energy may be able to reach the scale required to run Germany on solar and wind power.
If Germany is to meet its ambitious goals of getting a third of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, it must find a way to store huge quantities of electricity in order to make up for the intermittency of renewable energy.
When it comes to privacy, Google wants to be the good guy. Too bad that’s not enough.
Update: Or not! According to lots of people, I got this completely wrong, since Google has a Dashboard that contains some of the information this piece asserts that Activity should contain, and I sincerely regret not including it in the original draft of this piece.
Oxford Instruments NanoScience, world leader in the supply of superconducting magnets and instrumentation for research at low temperatures, launches its new Cryospares website wwww.cryospares.com, the…
Nanotechnology News (press release)
Green Nanotechnology Investment: Researchers Help Assess Economic Impact of …
Nanotechnology News (press release)
In the United States alone, government and private industry together invest more than $3 billion per year in nanotechnology research and development, and globally the total is much higher. What will be the long-run economic returns from these …
and more
A research team at the University of Toronto has announced the discovery of a possible ‘green’ alternative to commonly used catalysts in the food, drug, and fragrance industries. From the March 27, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,
A chemistry team at the University of Toronto has discovered environmentally-friendly iron-based nanoparticle catalysts that work as well as the expensive, toxic, metal-based catalysts that are currently in wide use by the drug, fragrance and food industry.
“It is always important to strive to make industrial syntheses more green, and using iron catalysts is not only much less toxic, but it is also much more cost effective,” said Jessica Sonnenberg, a PhD student and lead author of a paper published this week in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (“Iron Nanoparticles Catalyzing the Asymmetric Transfer Hydrogenation of Ketones”).
The March 27, 2012 University of Toronto news release provides a quote from Sonnenberg which suggests there’s still a lot more work to be done before the toxic metal-based catalysts currently being used could be replaced,
… “Catalysts, even cheap iron ones developed for these types of reaction, still suffer one major downfall,” explained Sonnenberg. “They require a one-to-one ratio of very expensive organic ligands – the molecule that binds to the central metal atom of a chemical compound – to yield catalytic activity. Our discovery of functional surface nanoparticles opens the door to using much smaller ratios of these expensive compounds relative to the metal centres. This drastically reduces the overall cost of the transformations.”
This work at the University of Toronto reminded me of another team also working on green catalysts for chemical reactions and also based in Canada, this time at McGill University. The McGill team lead by Chao-Jun Li was mentioned most recently here in a Jan. 10, 2011 posting where their ‘nanomagnetics’ technology to replace the current toxic catalysts is described.
DNA sequencing gets a new fast and cheap approach