• The prowess of Israel’s Weizmann Institute continues to amaze. It was there that researchers developed cancer-killing nanobots, and it was there that a clean, safe, and inexpensive way of producing hydrogen for fuel cells was proposed and has now been taken to the next level.
• A revolutionary nanomaterial has the potential to spread very quickly through many industries, and it has particular applications for artificial muscles and tissue regeneration.
• Nanomanufacturing, using a variety of techniques including synthetic biology, is growing.

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Scientists from Israel, Sweden, Switzerland, and France have cooperated in developing a way of using sunlight and zinc oxide to produce hydrogen safely and inexpensively. The most common method of hydrogen production is electrolysis of water molecules, but the energy consumption makes it very expensive. It can also be produced by heating water to 2500°C (4530°F) — another energy guzzler.

And it can be produced using pure zinc (Zn) to extract the oxygen from water (thus producing hydrogen) at the much lower temperature of 350°C (662°F), but first electrolysis or smelting furnaces operating at about 1750°C (3182°F) are needed to get the Zn from zinc oxide (ZnO). So the European Union and the Swiss Federal Office of Science and Education funded research using the Weizmann Institute’s 1MW solar concentrator — largest in the world — to get the Zn from ZnO using solar energy. The real breakthrough was when the Weizmann researchers added small amounts of coal (carbon), which reduced the Zn production temperature to 1200°C (2192°F). In the future, biomass could be used instead of coal. The result was Zn production at an average of about 50kg/h. (On a full scale industrial facility much larger amounts could be extracted using a similar process.)

Finally. to produce hydrogen the Zn is mixed with water at a temperature of 350°C (662°F). The oxygen inside the water recombines with the Zn to produce ZnO once again and the by-product is pure hydrogen. The energy cycle is efficient and relatively self-sustaining, using the sun’s free and inexhaustible energy and relatively inexpensive zinc oxide which is almost completely recycled.

With abundant Zn produced in this manner, hydrogen could be produced right at the local fuel station, using steam to heat the Zn. Instead of transporting large amounts of explosive hydrogen across the country, safe Zn powder is all that would need to be transported. And with biomass instead of coal as the additive, the process would be completely nonpolluting.

All we need are hydrogen cars, hydrogen gas stations, and the full-scale production of hydrogen from Zn using the EU-Swiss-Weizmann method. It could all happen within ten years.

Nanotube Cloth Ready for Prime Time

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US and Australian nanotechnologists have produced transparent sheets “woven” (actually, self-assembled) from carbon nanotubes. The material could be used in organic light-emitting displays, low-noise electronic sensors, artificial muscles, conducting appliqués and broadband polarized light sources that can be switched in one ten-thousandth of a second.

Weight-for-weight, the nanotube sheets are stronger than the strongest steel sheets and the Mylar and Kapton sheets used for ultralight aircraft and proposed for solar sails for spaceships. The material can be made so thin that a square kilometer of it would weigh only 30 kilograms. It is also highly transparent, electrically conductive, and flexible. It has been demonstrated for use as electrodes for bright, organic, light-emitting diodes for displays and for use as solar cells. Because the electrodes can be deformed without losing conductivity, it would be ideal for making artificial muscles. There is also evidence suggesting that healthy cells will grow on the material, so it could also be used as a scaffold for tissue engineering.

The material can be produced at up to seven meters per minute (for comparison, commercial wool spinners produce 20 meters of woollen sheeting per minute.) It is rare for major breakthroughs to be rapidly commercialized, but this seems likely to prove one of the exceptions.

Viral Nanomanufacturing

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The CIA’s venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, has invested nearly US$14 million in Cambrios, a company that is genetically engineering bacteriophages by infecting them with viruses to manufacture artificial proteins in turn used to manufacture electronic devices such as liquid-crystal display (LCD) screens for TVs and computer monitors. The company hopes to have a product on the market by 2008.

Other examples of nanomanufacturing activities mention in the Wired story:

• The Scripps Research Institute is using viruses to manufacture materials, pharmaceuticals, and diagnostic agents
• Zettacore is looking to design molecules for use in electronics
• NanoMagnetics makes magnetic particles grown inside hollow protein spheres 12 nanometers in diameter, for use in water purification, data storage, and medical imaging