If you’re a biologist, you may soon be able to play with cells on a glass slide as if they were dominoes on a table top. And if you’re a family physician, an advance toward mass production of DNA chips could soon have you routinely administering DNA tests to your patients.

Also of interest:

• A worm crawling around one’s colondoesn’t sound too pleasant, yet it might beat conventional colonoscopy.
• Remember the line: “Plastics!” in the movie The Graduate? Well, move over, Plastics, for an equally revolutionary, but as yet unnamed, new class of materials one atom thick.

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Fujitsu Labs have announced the world’s first “film substrate-based bendable colour electronic paper with an image memory function.” It is thin, flexible, and lightweight, and it doesn’t require electricity except during image changes. It could be used wherever paper is currently used, such as for advertisements or information bulletins in public places. It can also be used in conjunction with mobile devices as an easy-to-read and portable display device.

Nano monitors

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Motorola has demonstrated a working 5-inch monitor based on “nano-emissive display” (NED) technology. The “nano” comes from the use of carbon nanotubes. NED has the potential to replace liquid crystal displays (LCD) and plasma displays in televisions and computer monitors. The display is a mere one-eighth of an inch thick and the 5-inch prototype is actually just one section of a screen that could be up to 42-inches (with potential to 100 inches), would cost under US$1,000, and could be in production in 2007 if manufacturers license the technology from Motorola. NED is easier and cheaper than LCD to manufacturer. It also consumes less power and, unlike LCD, is viewable from all angles.

Fuel Cell Phones

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NTT Docomo Inc. and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. have jointly developed a prototype methanol-based hydrogen fuel cell for cell phones, that has achieved a record average output of approximately 1 watt. The companies plan to have a fuel cell on the market for use as an external recharger for cell phone lithium ion batteries by March 2006 and a built-in fuel cell to replace lithium ion batteries by 2008 or 2009.

Holographic Video

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“One day soon,” says a writer in Popular Science, you’ll be watching football games on a large-screen holographic television in your living room. He defines “soon” as a decade away, but points out that the technology already exists. In fact, I myself saw just such a TV a month ago at a conference in Michigan, but it wasn’t aimed at sports fans — it was aimed at surgeons, so they could see an operative area in full color 3D, without special glasses, while performing laparoscopic surgery.

The Popular Science writer’s imagination was also fired by what is evidently a similar device to the one I saw. It too has medical applications in mind, and indeed was developed by Harold Garner, a medical doctor, plasma physicist, and biochemist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center using a digital micromirror device (DMD) already used in high-end video projectors, but replacing the light bulb with a laser. It’s not quite true holography, but the user can’t tell the difference and the key thing is that Dr. Garner’s method can use the current broadcast infrastructure.

Tweezers & Chips

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An “optoelectronic tweezer” developed by UC Berkeley engineers will enable researchers to manipulate single cells and particles on glass slides. Using a light-emitting diode, the device can trap more than 10,000 microparticles at once and produce instant microfluidic circuits. Existing optical tweezers require high-powered lasers and they cannot move so many cells at the same time. Dielectrophoresis can move larger numbers of particles, but lacks the resolution and flexibility of optical tweezers. The new device gets “the best of both worlds.”

The device can also arrange the cells into an almost limitless range of patterns and sort them by size. The researchers are planning to automate the sorting process and enable sorts by size, luminescence, texture, fluorescent tags, or any other visually distinguishable characteristic.

Gene Chip/DNA Reader

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If DNA chips could be easily and inexpensively mass produced, genetic testing and diagnosis in the doctor’s office would quickly become commonplace. Well, now they can. A “nano-printing” technique called “Supramolecular Nano-Stamping (SuNS), developed at MIT, can print 200 nanometer-diameter DNA dots. It requires only three steps and could reduce the cost of a microarray to under US$50 — versus 400 steps and $500 for conventionally made chips.

The lead researcher believes the technique will “completely revolutionize diagnostics.” By making DNA analysis routine, “we could know years in advance of cancer, hepatitis, or Alzheimer’s.” It would also accelerate research into the genomics of disease, since “The more we test with microarrays, the more we know about illnesses, and the more we can detect them.”

SuNS could also be used to produce other complex nanodevices such as microfluidic and nanofluidic channels, single-electron transistors, optical biosensors, and nanowires.

Robotic Endoscope

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Case Western Reserve University researchers, working with a medical unit of the Olympus camera company, have created a prototype colonoscopy robot that moves like a slug or earthworm through the colon, guided by a doctor using a joystick. The robot is nine inches long and (currently) a half inch in diameter. It contains a camera that sends video back to the doctor. The device has not yet been tested on a human being. It is made not of metal but of nylon, latex and other soft and pliable materials. Work still remains to reduce the diameter of the robot and improve its grip as it moves through the colon.

Atom-thick Materials

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British and Russian scientists have jointly discovered a class of previously unknown materials, just one atom thick. They can be ultra-strong, highly insulating, or highly conductive, opening up — as did plastics — “practically infinite possibilities for applications which people have never even thought of yet,” the lead researcher says. They can be made as metals, semiconductors, insulators, magnets, etc. Previously thought impossible even in principle, it turns out they are in fact fairly easy to make, and are stable.

Another member of the research team said: “Probably the most important part is that our discovery is not limited to just one or two new materials. It is a whole class of new materials, thousands of them. And they have a variety of properties, allowing one to choose a material most appropriate for a particular application. Although some of the applications are probably decades away, I expect to see ultra-fast transistors, micromechanical devices and nano-sensors based on the discovered one-atom-thick crystals already in a few years time.”