Nano-sized carbon tubes coated with strands of DNA can create tiny sensors with abilities to detect odors and tastes, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Monell Chemical Sciences Center. Their findings are published in the current issue of the journal Nano Letters, a publication of the American Chemical Society.

According to the researchers, arrays of these nanosensors could detect molecules on the order of one part per million, akin to finding a one-second play amid 278 hours of baseball footage or a single person in Times Square on New Years' Eve. In the report, the researchers tested the nanosensors on five different chemical odorants, including methanol and dinitrotoluene, or DNT, a common chemical that is also frequently a component of military-grade explosives. The nanosensors could sniff molecules out of the air or taste them in a liquid, suggesting applications ranging from domestic security to medical detectors.

In its tireless efforts to create smaller and more powerful structures for integrated circuits, Infineon Technologies AG has achieved a further breakthrough in its Munich laboratories: researchers here have constructed the world's smallest nanotube transistor, with a channel length of only 18 nm - the most advanced transistors currently in production are almost four times this size. To build their nanotransistor, the researchers grew carbon nanotubes, each one measuring only 0.7 to 1.1 nm in diameter, in a controlled process.

Physicists at Cornell University in the US have used carbon nanotubes to make the first nanometre-sized electromechanical resonator capable of detecting extremely small forces. The device consists of a single nanotube suspended between two gold electrodes (V Sazonova et al. 2004 Nature 431 284).

New technology could soon overrun all the existing forms of memory used in computers, according to the company developing it.

Carbon nanotube memory could be a panacea to all existing memory issues, start-up Nantero said, because it was cheap and did not lose its contents if turned off. Currently computer memory comprises DRAM, S-RAM and NV-RAM (or flash memory).

DRAM, used in PCs and servers, is fast and cheap but its contents are lost when power is switched off. SRAM or Static RAM is faster and needs less power but is more expensive and also loses its contents when power is switched off. It is used most commonly for cache memory. NV-RAM is slower, power-hungry, very expensive but keeps its contents when power is switched off.

But Nanotube-based/Nonvolatile RAM (NRAM) could eventually replace all three. It is not without competitors though -- Phase-change memory and Magnetic RAM are also competing for the prize. So what's special about carbon nanotubes?

It's faster than SRAM, it should be cheap and it doesn't lose its contents when switched off. It should have an almost unlimited life, it should eventually be denser than DRAM, needs less power than DRAM and is resistant to radiation.

Nantero CEO, Greg Schmergel, claims carbon nanotube memory could be made with conventional CMOS manufacturing, keeping costs low. PCs using it could have an instant-on capability, no more lengthy boot time. Servers could have the speed of SRAM without the cost. Devices using flash could have greatly increased capacity for much lower cost. This would be nirvana for all of us and billionaire status for Nantero founders. How is it done?

Engineers in the US have made the first high-speed transistor from a carbon nanotube. Peter Burke and colleagues at the University of California at Irvine showed that their device - which consists of a single-walled carbon nanotube sandwiched between two gold electrodes - operates at extremely fast microwave frequencies. The result is an important step in the effort to develop nanoelectronic components that could be used to replace silicon in a range of electronic applications (S Li et al. 2004 Nano Lett. 4 753).

Researchers from Meijo University in Japan and Research Centre Jülich in Germany have made what they say is the smallest stable carbon nanotube. The tube, just 3 Angstroms in diameter, grew inside a multiwalled carbon nanotube during a hydrogen arc discharge process.

“This breaks the theoretical limit of 4 Angstroms, and reaches their the tubes’ minimum structural limit,” Xinluo Zhao of Meijo University told nanotechweb.org. “The 3 Angstrom carbon nanotube has only four hexagons around its circumference and each end can be capped by half of a C12 cage (hexagonal prism) containing two tetragons.”

A thread of carbon nanotubes more than 100 metres long has been pulled from a fiery furnace. The previous record holder was a mere 30 centimetres long.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have devised a new method for aligning isolated single wall carbon nanotubes and, in the process, have created a new kind of material with liquid crystal-like properties, which they call nematic nanotube gels. The gels could potentially serve as sensors in complex fluids, where changes in local chemical environment, such as acidity or solvent quality, can lead to visible changes in the gel shape. The researchers describe their findings in the current issue of Physical Review Letters.

NEC Corp. asserted Wednesday (March 3) that it owns essential patents on carbon nanotubes and, as a result, all companies seeking to make or sell carbon nanotube materials must obtain licenses from NEC.

Living tissue often reacts to foreign objects by encapsulating them in scar tissue. This is a problem with orthopedic implants like artificial hips and neural implants like electrical probes.

Researchers from Purdue University have made a discovery that may help: carbon nanofibers are surprisingly compatible with human tissue.

University of Maryland physicists have found that semiconducting carbon nanotubes have the highest mobility of any known material at room temperature. Mobility is a measure of how well a semiconductor conducts electricity.

Researchers need to be able to sense conditions in microscopic environments in order to explore nanotechnology's potential to produce useful machines at the scale of atoms and molecules.

Researchers from the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) have fashioned nano thermometers from a magnesium oxide nanotubes filled with liquid gallium. The tiny thermometers are between 20 and 60 nanometers thick, or about one hundredth the diameter of a red blood cell.

The device has an especially large temperature range for a nanothermometer—it works up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, or just shy of the melting point of gold. The researchers constructed a thermometer that was able to withstand high temperatures because they used magnesium oxide nanotubes rather than the more common carbon nanotubes.

"NRAM� will be considerably faster and denser than DRAM, have substantially lower power consumption than DRAM or flash, be as portable as flash memory, and be highly resistant to environmental forces (heat, cold, magnetism). And as a nonvolatile chip, it will provide permanent data storage even without power. Possible uses include the enabling of instant-on computers, which boot and reboot instantly, as well as high-density portable memory - MP3 players with 1000s of songs, PDAs with 10 gigabytes of memory, high-speed network servers and much more."

Attempts to create a super-strong fibre by mimicking the
chemicals found in spider silk may have all been in vain.

University of Texas scientists say they have outdone the spider and its
lab-coat imitators by spinning a fibre made of carbon nanotubes - the
microscopic tubes of carbon that have remarkable properties, being
tough, light and inert yet able to conduct heat and electricity.

Ray Baughman and colleagues, writing in Thursday's issue of the British

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US, have used carbon nanotubes as a template for growing networks of aligned carbon nanotubes. They reported the two-step chemical-vapour deposition process in Applied Physics Letters.

"We wanted to explore the possibility of using nanotubes themselves as pattern masks for growing organized carbon nanotube array patterns of different length scales," Anyuan Cao of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute told nanotechweb.org. "We found that while nanotubes selectively grow on silica as expected, they do not grow on the previously deposited nanotube films."