Tag Archives: nanotechnology

If you think at something difficult to break and resistant you won’t think to glass. How many time did you hear: “be careful, it is glass!”? Well it turns out that glass can be strong, even stronger than steel. It just a matter of how you manufacture it. If you …

When I started, over 50 years ago, there were computers (big ones) and there was a telecommunication networks. Both had in common that to work they needed to shuffle electrons. A bit later I saw the rise of experiments to use photons instead of electrons in telecommunications. Over the years …

Trilobites were aquatic animals that roam the Earth some 400 million years ago. They are long extinct but their fossil remains have let scientists discover one unique capabilities they had. They had composite eyes (nothing peculiar here, many animals have them) that were able to focus both on near objects …

Remember Star Trek? Among the many jaw-dropping features it had, tractor beams were one of those that fascinated me most: a system that could deploy a force on an object over distance, pushing or pulling it. That was science fiction. As with several other magics we saw in Star Trek …

If you, like most of us, feel awkward when confronted with a dental drill, what would you feel like knowing that millions of nanobots will be entering your tooth for an accurate debridement? I am not talking science fiction. Theranautilus is a new company that has invented a system -Theradrive- …

What annoys people most in owning an electric car is the time it takes to “fill her up”. To give an idea (there are several factors involved…) charging a small electric car with a 60kWh battery pack (for comparison the Tesla model S has a 100kWh battery pack) takes somewhere …

2. Renewable energies The BleuTech announcement for building a Smart City from scratch in the Las Vegas Valley includes the goal of creating a city that is completely based on renewable energy (wind, solar, water, kinetic). Construction starts in December 2019 and it is planned to involve 25,000 workers over …

In the previous post I considered some recent advances that help in repairing the “optical part” of the eye”. More challenging is fixing the sensorial part, the retina. In the last decade results have been achieved in both epiretinal and subretinal implant. The former are easier to implant (the surgery …

It is almost 220 years since Alessandro Volta invented the “pile” (1799 ad) and although amazing progress has been made the overall architecture of a “battery” has remained pretty similar to that first “pile” (“pila” in Italian, meaning a structure made by many layers, layered one over the other). You …

Here I stumbled onto another example of pure magic. As reported in IEEE Spectrum a team of researchers at  Ohio State University have invented a way to “infect” cells in a living organism to change, partly, their DNA code thus transforming a cell type into a different one, as an example …