Ray Baughman, director of the Nanotech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas, recently presented his research on the development of ‘artificial muscles’ that could someday be used in prosthetic limbs or possibly even microscale machines for use in the human body.

By spinning carbon nanotubes into yarn a fraction of the width of a human hair, researchers have developed artificial muscles that exert 100 times the force, per area, of natural muscle. This is according to Ray Baughman, director of the Nanotech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas, who presented the research in Boston last week at the Materials Research Society conference.
Artificial muscles–actuators based on such materials as certain types of metals and polymers that shrink, grow, or change shape–are useful for prosthetic limbs, microscale machines, and robots. “Our biggest problem right now [in developing artificial muscles] is [that] the level of force being generated is not high,” says Yoseph Bar-Cohen, senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, CA. “Carbon nanotubes potentially can create enormous force.”
In Baughman’s latest work, done in collaboration with John Madden at the University of British Columbia, the researchers made actuators out of carbon-nanotube yarns. The yarns are created by first growing densely packed nanotubes, each about 100 micrometers long. The carbon nanotubes are then gathered from a portion of this field and spun together into long, thin threads. The nanotube yarn can be just 2 percent of the width of a hair–not even visible–but upwards of a meter long. According to Baughman, spinning these threads was “like hauling in a fish with an invisible line.” In his conference presentation, he described yarns that could support loads 150 times greater than nanotube papers could.

Read the full article at MIT’s Technology Review . . .

A team of researchers from UC Davis has done some interesting research into the biochemistry of human milk, using a specialized lab-on-a-chip technology by Agilent.
From UC Davis press release:

Oligosaccharides are sugar-like molecules that are the third-largest solid component of breast milk, after lactose and lipids. More than 200 oligosaccharides have been identified in milk, but there has been no way to measure their presence in an individual sample in a single test or run. They do not have direct nutritional value, and their role in development is not clear.
A recent study published online in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry detailed the successful use of two analytical tools to identify oligosaccharides in samples from five women in single runs. The tools were a “glycan chip” developed by Agilent specifically for this purpose, and a time-of-flight mass spectrometer used to characterize each oligosaccharide by determining its molecular mass to a precision of two parts per million.
The researchers found large variations between women in the total numbers and abundance of different oligosaccharides, with the total number per individual varying from 33 to 124. Only a few oligosaccharides were common to all subjects.
The combination of techniques has enabled a more complete understanding of these complex oligosaccharides, said Carlito Lebrilla, professor of chemistry at UC Davis and lead author on the paper. The techniques could be extended to other glycan structures, with medical and therapeutic applications, he said.
The new technique paves the way for further research into oligosaccharide function in human development, said co-author Rudi Grimm, worldwide proteomics and metabolomics market development manager with Agilent’s Life Sciences and Chemical Analysis (LSCA) group.

Link @ UC Davis
Article at the MIT’s Tech Review…
Read more about the technology used in the study in Agilent’s press release…
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