“Waterlilies” is a humorous apocalyptic nanotech art story. Just so you know.

The cover art at left is by Patrick Thomas. My story is illustrated by Alan Beck.

It sounds even more like a 2 a.m. infomercial product when you see headlines about it that claim it is “about to revolutionize everything.”

Maybe it’d sound more impressive if I used its more formal name, which is “SiO2 ultra-thin layering,” but that’s hard to type, so I’m going to stick with “spray-on liquid glass.”

Besides, that’s exactly what it is: an extremely thin layer of glass that can be sprayed onto…well, just about anything.

Though it was invented in Turkey, the patent for spray-on liquid glass is held by the German company Nanopool.

It consists of almost pure silicon dioxide, a.k.a. silica, extracted from quartz sand. Water or ethanol is added, depending on what kind of surface is to be coated: the water-based versions are good for absorbent surfaces such as stone, wood and fabrics, while the ethanol-based versions are suitable for metal, glass, plastic and painted surfaces. There are no other additives: a bottle of liquid glass contains only water or ethanol, and molecules of silica. And not too surprisingly (since silica is the most abundant mineral in the Earth’s crust), the coating is non-toxic and environmentally harmless.

The glass binds to the surface through quantum forces that come into play at the extremely small scale of these tiny glass particles. The coating is only about 100 nanometers thick–that’s only 1/500th the width of a human hair.

An article in the June, 2009, issue of the U.K. magazine Cleanroom Technology has a pretty complete list of the coating’s benefits.

First of all, it’s flexible, meaning it can be used to coat, not just hard surfaces like countertops and sinks, but fabric, conveyor belts, medical devices such as endoscopes, and more.

It’s highly durable, able to withstand tens of thousands of cleaning cycles, and heat tolerant, unaffected by temperatures as low as -150 C and as high as 450 C. It also resists both acid and alkaline substances.

It doesn’t kill bacteria, but it also doesn’t provide them with a friendly surface to attach themselves to and multiply. Wash a coated surface with hot water, and the bacteria are wiped away more effectively than you can achieve with bleach on an uncoated surface (as tests in an Austrian cheese-packaging plant have proven).

It’s so thin that it’s invisible to the human eye and can’t be felt; while it’s slippery at the micro level, at the macro level (our level), it isn’t. In fact, since bacteria can be so easily cleaned off of it, a coated shower floor would probably be less slippery, because of the lack of bacteria-produced biofilms.

The stuff is easy to apply: even large areas such as floors, walls and windows can be coated with it in minutes, and no special equipment is needed. And finally (and even more amazingly), it’s cheap: the cost to cover a square metre ranges from about 40 cents to $1.80.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Surely it must be full of little tiny glass particles that are going to get into our lungs and cause asbestos-fibre like problems?

Nope. The coating contains no discrete or potentially harmful engineered nanoparticles.

Spray-on liquid glass is already available in Germany for domestic use, for about $8.50 a bottle. In the home, it could conceivably make existing cleaning products obsolete, since hot water would do the job chemicals are doing now. It could be used in the oven, bathrooms, tiles, sinks, and on almost any other surface, and the coating is expected to last about a year with normal use.

Outside, the uses are endless. A silk shirt coated with it would shrug off a spilled glass of red wine. Stone coated with it could be more easily cleaned of graffiti. Seeds sprayed with it are protected from fungal and bacterial attacks and germinate and grow faster than untreated seeds. Wood treated with it has survived undamaged after being buried in a termite mound for nine months.

A Lancashire hospital has had “very promising” results using it as a coating for everything from equipment to medical implants, catheters, sutures and bandages.

It sounds amazing.

But it also still sounds like a 2 a.m. infomercial product.

I guess time will tell.

****

Children, I have observed (and recall, for my own childhood has not yet faded into the misty depths of time) do not enjoy getting stuck with needles.

And yet, getting stuck with needles is a part of growing up, because vaccinations, unpleasant as they momentarily are, are far less unpleasant than the diseases they help prevent.

There are vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough and polio; for Haemophilus influenzae type b (which causes meningitis); for measles, mumps and rubella (German measles); for varicella (chicken pox) and hepatitis B. There are puneumococcal and meningococcal vaccines, and, of course, the annual influenza vaccine.

Many of us of a certain age still bear (or at least remember) the round white scar on our upper arm that marks us as recipients of smallpox vaccine. Smallpox was the first disease anyone attempted to vaccinate against: back in 600 B.C., the Chinese attempted to immunize people against smallpox by putting smallpox material in their nostrils (shudder).

Modern immunization, however, began in 1796 when British physician Edward Jenner realized that people who had had cowpox, a similar but much milder disease that carries little risk of death or disfigurement, did not catch smallpox. He inserted material from cowpox sores into cuts he made on the arm of a healthy eight-year-old boy, who caught cowpox. When the boy was exposed to smallpox eight weeks later, he did not contract smallpox.

Vaccines trick the body’s immune system into treating them as a full-fledged infection. When the immune system detects foreign substances, called antigens, it creates antibodies or special white blood cells to attack them.

Traditional vaccines consist of disease-causing organisms that have been either inactivated or killed. They trigger the immune system to produce antibodies, without causing disease. If full-strength bacteria or viruses of the same type enter the body in the future, the immune system has antibodies available to attack them immediately, destroying them before they can cause infection or disease.

However, recently researchers have figured out how to generate an immune response with a single protein from a virus or bacterium. They’ve also discovered that the best way to get sustained immunity is to deliver an antigen directly to the specialized immune cells known as dendritic cells (DCs).

The trouble is, DCs aren’t all that common in skin or muscle, where injections are usually made, and in order to use them to activate the whole immune system, you also have to deliver a kind of “danger signal”–which there hasn’t been a good way to do, until now.

Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland have developed (and patented) a nanoparticle (“nano” means “very very small”) that, they believe, can deliver vaccines more cheaply, safely and effectively than current methods.

The nanoparticles are so tiny they slip right through the skin and into the lymph nodes, where there are lots of DCs, and they carry a chemical coating that mimics the surface chemistry of bacterial cell walls. The result: a strong immune response without nasty side effects.

The researchers believe these nanoparticles could make it possible to vaccinate against diseases like hepatitis and malaria with a single injection, and at a cost of only a dollar a dose, far cheaper than currently. They also plan to try using the technique to target cancer cells. And best of all, they say, the new technique could be in use within five years.

Many diseases that were once major killers we seldom give a second thought to in the developed, thanks to vaccinations. But measles, all but stamped out in North America, still kills hundreds of thousands a year in central Africa.

Stop vaccinating here, and those diseases could return–as was proved in Great Britain in the 1970s. After a drop in whooping cough vaccinations in 1974, an epidemic of more than 100,000 cases, resulting in 36 deaths, occurred in 1978.

If this new technology can make for cheaper vaccines, more people around the world will be vaccinated–and global public health will take a giant step forward.

That probably won’t stop children from crying as they get stuck, but it ought to at least make their parents feel better.

The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.

The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a “dry glue” effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.

Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attact.

The result? Levitation, on the nanoscale for now–but that alone could mean frictionless parts for tiny machines. However, get this:

Though it is possible to levitate objects as big as humans, scientists are a long way off developing the technology for such feats, said Dr Philbin.

The practicalities of designing the lens to do this are daunting but not impossible and levitation “could happen over quite a distance”.

I’m getting light-headed just thinking about it…

(Via SF Scope.)

Near-microscopic robots playing soccer. Is this a great time to be alive, or what?

A University of Alberta research team has combined two fields of study in nanotechnology to create a third field that the researchers believe will lead to revolutionary advances in computer electronics, among many other areas.

Dr. Abdulhakem Elezzabi and his colleagues have applied plasmonics principles to spintronics technology and created a novel way to control the quantum state of an electron’s spin. The new technology, which the researchers call spinplasmonics, may be used to create incredibly efficient electron spin-based photonic devices, which in turn may be used to build, for example, computers with extraordinary capacities.

Ho-hum. Another day, another possibly world-chaning scientific breakthrough. Is that the Singularity I see in the middle distance?

I’m not sure about the name, though. Sounds like a blood centrifuge…or maybe the study of why people (me, for instance) throw up on midway rides.

Best bit:

“You could actually apply it to a person walking off a plane and know if they’re infected.”

“…a team headed by Dr. Moshe Shoham of Haifa’s Technion has created a novel propulsion system for a miniature robot to travel through the spinal canal, powering through cerebrospinal fluid.”

And, of course, fogging isn’t just a problem for eyeglass wearers. It also plagues automobiles, bathroom mirrors, camera lenses, ski goggles…the list goes on and on.

But now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have come up with a solution: a coating made of nanoparticles that, they say, can create surfaces that never fog.

“Nano” means very, very small. (More precisely, a nanoparticle is a particle that is less than 100 nanometres in diameter. A nanometre is a billionth of a metre, or, if you prefer, a millionth of a millimeter.)

Glass (and other surfaces) fog when they’re cooler than the surrounding air. The moisture in the air condenses onto the cool surface. Because water molecules are more attracted to each other than air molecules, they run together to form drops, fogging the surface.

There have been lots of attempts to come up with a solution. You can buy anti-fog sprays, but they have to be constantly reapplied.

Fogging wouldn’t be a problem if you could make the surface more attractive to water, so the water would spread out in sheets instead of forming vision-obscuring droplets. Coating glass with titanium oxide increases its attractiveness to water-but the coatings have to be charged by ultraviolet light. That means they don’t work for very long in the dark. As well, they tend to stop working completely after just three months.

The MIT team, led by Michael Rubner, a materials science researcher, believes it has come up with a permanent method of making surfaces more attractive to water.

Their “superhydrophilic” (super-water-loving) coating consists of a three-dimensional matrix of nanoparticles of glass, a polymer called polyallylamine hydrochloride, and tiny bubbles. The nanoparticles and polymer are relatively cheap to manufacture, and Rubner, who has applied for a patent, thinks the coating could be ready for consumer products in just two to five years; he says he already has interest from the military and two major car manufacturers.

The roughness of the coating increases the surface area of glass in contact with the water; this helps reduce the surface tension and flatten the water droplets so they form up into continuous sheets. The bubbles actually act rather like a sponge, sucking some water downwards, again flattening the droplets.

Rubner tested his team’s concoction with the simplest of experiments: he took a piece of glass, half coated, half not, into a steamy bathroom. Sure enough, the coated side remained clear, while the uncoated side fogged up.

Interestingly, the coating could easily be reengineered to act in exactly the opposite fashion, repelling water, instead of attracting it, causing the water to form larger droplets. That could be used to develop a self-cleaning surface-any water that fell on it would snap up into large droplets that would then roll away, taking dirt with them.

Many other nanoparticle-based coatings are being developed by other researchers around the world. Some emerging applications include fireproof wood doors, stain-resistant jeans, key-stratch-resistant clear coats for cars (Mercedes already applies nanoparticle clearcoat paint to many of its models), and even bacteria-killing bandages. Ceramic nanoparticles can be melted onto metal to create a thin, hard coating resistant to corrosion.

Even Rubner’s nanoparticle coating could have more uses than just preventing fogging. Nanoparticle coatings on glass don’t obstruct vision because the particles involved are smaller than the wavelength of visible light-which means they’re invisible. In fact, the coatings can be engineered to reduce glare and maximize the amount of light passing through glass-which could be valuable for greenhouses and solar cell panels.

Alas, because the current coating just keeps water from forming droplets, it probably won’t help prevent frosting: the water will still freeze to the window, and will still have to be scraped off.

So keep working, Professor. Your little (literally) invention may impress them in Massachusetts, but here in Saskatchewan, you’ve still got your work cut out for you.