Cancer is an uncontrolled growth of cells which divide too quickly in the body. There are different types of cancer depending on their cause. The known cancer treatments that exist today are chemotherapy, surgery and radiation therapy. Despite the fact that cancer treatments exist nowadays, none of these treatments seem to be as promising as “nanoshells” which have an improvement in sensitivity, specificity and cost effectiveness as compared to those other treatments. Naomi Halas, a professor at Rice University with an Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Chemistry background is known for the invention of “nanoshells”. These nanoshells are tiny spherical nanoparticles which within their structure they contain a dielectric core, one which has either poor electrical conductivity or none at all of silica and a metallic core which is typically gold.
These nanoshells seem to be very promising for therapeutic applications such as that of cancer treatment because of its optical, chemical and physical properties. Because they possess light absorbing properties, these nanoshells may be made to selectively either absorb or scatter light at any wavelength, visible and near-infrared. What is interesting about this is because by tuning nanoshells to absorb infrared radiation, that becomes useful to convert the absorbed radiation into heat which enables to destroy tumors.
Nanoshells are made up of millions of atoms yet they are still bigger than DNA but smaller than a white cell. The body’s immune system ignores these tiny particles which are usually ingested by cancerous cells only because the blood vessels that feed the cancer cells are typically bigger, allowing these nanoparticles to easily enter. This allows us an easier wa...
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.... 01 Dec. 2000. Web. 14 Feb. 2011. .
Berger, Eric. "Scientists Use Nanoparticles to 'cook' Cancer Tumors." Houston Chronicle. 06 Aug. 2010. Web. 14 Feb. 2011. .
Glassman, Gary. "Working With Nanoshells." PBS. Ed. Peter Tyson. NOVA ScienceNOW, 01 Apr. 2005. Web. 14 Feb. 2011. .
Over the years, surgery has made tremendous progress while changing human perspective; viewed as “no more science than butchery” a couple of centuries ago to now considered to be a solution for many health care problems threatening humans, like cancer, heart disease and kidney failure. Nevertheless, surgery has not been perfected to a level that provides successful results every time it is performed on patients. For example, surgery done to remove tumors in cancer patients result in only 45% of individuals to be cured. However, in order to be successful, the surgical procedure has to be carried out incredibly precisely and incomplete removal of tumors can decrease survival rate. Therefore, surgeons have to be able to recognize diseased tissue and distinguish it between healthy tissues. But even with the use of radioactive tracers and visuals, surgeons are not able to identify the exact site of the unhealthy tissue and its boundaries. Thus, almost 40% of the time cancerous cells are left behind because even the best qualified surgeons are not successful at the nanotechnological scale of tissue.
Amandi Hiyare: Before forming my research question, I had a discussion with my research project coordinator “Lisa Pope” who told me that the Flinders nanotechnology research team has been developing microbial catheters. Then on Monday I had an interview with Professor Joe Shapter who told me that your team was leading this project. So I was wondering whether you would be able to provide me with some detailed information about this innovation?
Lovgren, Stefan. Can Art Make Nanotechnology Easier t Understand? 23 December 2003. Web. 3 May 2014. .
U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. 1990. Unconventional Cancer Treatments, OTA-H-405. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Wang, K., Wu, X., & Huang, J. (2013, February 28). Cancer stem cell theory: therapeutic implications for nanomedicine. Retrieved December 12, 2013, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3589204/
Nanotechnology is the manipulation of structures at nano levels. It uses incredibly small materials, devices, and systems to manipulate matter. These structures are measured in nanometers, or one billionth of a meter, and can be used by themselves or as part of larg...
This project is focusing on the shape of silver nanoparticles and the aspect ratio of silver nanowires for the control of their absorption spectrum in the visible light to infrared ranges. Synthesis of metal nanoparticles has become increasingly important in science and engineering. Being able to control the processes is vital to success in applications and uncovering the mechanisms of nanoparticle production. Nanowires are one of the varieties of nanoparticles that will be utilized for this project. There are many different metals that can be used to synthesize nanowires, I am focusing on silver. Silver exhibits the highest thermal conductivity out of all metals (Sun, 2001). Silver nanowires with a large aspect ratio also show an absorbance of higher wavelengths then other nanoparticles, like spherical silver nanoparticles (Sun, 2001). Other silver particles that exhibit similar characteristics and show a higher wavelength absorbance will be considered as well. Controlling reaction conditions allow plasmonic, oscillatory quantum motion, colloids to obtain architecturally predictable nanostructures and can be used to understand their optical properties (Motl, 2013). There are many shapes that nanoparticles can take up. Each shape, on the nanoscale shows different properties that can be utilized, such as conductivity, anisotropy, and, what I am interested in, absorbance of light.
Nanotechnology, shortened to "nanotech", is the study of the control of matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Nano science and nanotechnology are recent, revolutionary development in Science and Engineering that are evolving at a very fast pace.[1,2] It is driven by the desire to fabricate materials with novel and improved properties that is likely to impact virtually all areas of the physical and chemical sciences, biological sciences and health sciences. The word ‘nano’ derives from the Greek word ‘nanos’, which means dwarf or extremely small and mathematically, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter or 10-9 m. Particles whose sizes fall in the size range of 1-100 nm is called a nano particles, whether it is dispersed in gaseous, liquid or solid medium. Generally nanotechnology deals with structures of the size 100 nanometers or smaller, and involves developing materials or devices within that size. Nanotechnology is very diverse, ranging from extensions of conventional device physics, to completely new approaches based upon molecular self-assembly, to developing new materials wi...
Nazir et al. "Nanomaterials in Combating Cancer." Nanomedjournal.com. Elsevier Inc., 22 July 2013. Web. 2 Jan. 2014. .
“Nanotechnology is science, engineering, and technology conducted at a nanoscale which is about 1 to 100 nanometers,” according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, there are 25,400,000 nanometers in an inch and a sheet of newspaper is about 100,000 nanometers thick. Putting that into perspective, if a marble were a nanometer, a meter would be the size of the Earth. Nanotechnology can be used throughout all fields of science, including chemistry, biology, physics, materials science and engineering to study and apply extremely small things. Physicist Richard Feynman introduced the concepts of nanoscience and nanotechnology with his talk titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the
The main purpose of green nanotechnology has been to develop clean technologies that would minimize potential human and environmental health risk. Also, to encourage replacement of existing products with the clean technologies that is more environmentally friendly. There are many benefits of using green nanotechnologies as the new solution for energy in both their current availability and their current development. Over the new few decades, the highest growth opportunities will come from application of nanomaterials for making better use of existing resources. Nanotechnologies will help reduce weight of carbon emission in transportation utilizing nanocomposite materials that quickly diffuses across the automotive and aerospace industries. Applications of nanotechnologies will result in a global annual savings of 8000 tons of carbon dioxide, which will rise even further to over millions tons by 2020. But, let’s focus on the positive effects of Green Nanotechnology in Solar.
Grundmann, Marius. Physics of Semiconductors: An Introduction Including Devices and Nanophysics. New York: Springer, 2006. Print.
I have chosen nanotechnology as my topic area of choice from the food innovation module.
Nanotechnology includes nanorobots which are so small that they can be injected into the human bloodstream after which the nanorobots can do investigations or repair at cellular level. Nanorobots could optimize the delivery of pharmaceutical products, these means that medicines which are targeted on a specific type of cells can be delivered to only those cells by the nanorobots. The robots can attach to the cells after which they can inject the drug into the target cells. This could be a great breakthrough for cancer treatments such as chemotherapy because there is a minimal chance of injecting healthy cells with the drug and therefor negative side effects can be avoided.
Nanoscience is the study of metal nanoparticles (Banerjee et al, pp. 42) ,and these particles are widely distributed in nature. These particles may be form when volcanic eruptions spew out materials from below the earth surface or when tidal waves erode a coast or bank. The notorious eruptions of Eyjafjallajokull spread in the atmosphere nanoparticles of size range 100-400nm (Harrison et al, 2010).