17 year old high school senior Angela Zhang just earned a $100,000 scholarship at the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology for designing a nanoparticle which targets cancer stem cells. It’s somewhat similar to this, but rather than attacking messenger RNA it instead delivers a dose of the drug salinomycin directly to the tumor cells. In addition, the nanoparticle is gold and iron-oxide based, so it can also be used to detect cancer with noninvasive means such as MRI and Photoacoustic imaging. A particle that delivers targeted doses of meds directly to affected cells, lessens side effects, helps prevent cancer resistance, and doubles as an MRI contrast solution to diagnose/monitor progress? Holy crap, that’s awesome.

Zhang said her research was partly motivated by losing her grandfather to lung cancer when she was in the seventh grade. She started working on the project when she was 15 and estimates she’s spent 1,000 hours researching. Her top school picks are Stanford and Harvard and she’s planning on majoring in physics or in chemical or biomedical engineering with hope to become a research professor. Whatever she does, it’ll be awesome. And, even if it’s not awesome, she still designed a nanoparticle already. She can pretty much eat Cheetos and play Halo for the next 70 years and she’s still ahead of the rest of us.

Oh man, this makes me feel so lazy. At age 17, she’s a high school senior who invented a cancer-fighting nanoparticle. When I was 17, I was just a sophomore in college OH IN YOUR FACE HIGH SCHOOLER. Seriously though, she totally wins. I just had to Google the correct spelling of “sophomore” and couldn’t find a nanoparticle even if you hid it in a bag of Cheetos, and I f–king love Cheetos.

[Sources: TheMarySue, MSNBC, ABC7]

You know, a phone that can shrink or expand at will sounds like a bad idea. A cellphone doesn’t need to pulsate. But UCLA researchers are laying the groundwork for it anyway.

The basic problem with stretchable, or really flexible, electronics is making a circuit that can contort without breaking. Carbon nanotubes seem ideal, but tended not to bond with plastic or to slip past each other. They got around this by attaching the nanotubes to glass, then filling everything with a polymer that dried to a flexible plastic.

In short, the good people at UCLA invented a big glowing stretchy circuit thing that may soon be in cellphones. But we can guarantee it’s going to show up elsewhere. Probably in products you hide in your nightstand.

[ via the Reed Richards fans at Technology Review ]

So, the University of Pittsburgh has created a single-electron transistor. In other words, they’ve essentially built an artificial atom. That would be the image at right: the green things are the wires. That green thing in the center would be the island, which is only 1.5 nanometers long.

Aside from proving that there is a limit to how small you can make a transistor, this is pretty much a breakthrough on par with Babbage. Why? Consider that the smallest transistor currently in use commercially is, oh, 45 nanometers. But that’s thinking small.

A transistor this size makes a lot of things possible: solid state memories with capacities that make your current CF card look like crap, for example. Even better, that tiny island could be used to make superconductors that are currently theoretical at this point, with bizarre and useful properties.

In short, it’s a great reason to stop making Pittsburgh jokes. Well, for this week, anyway.

[ via the tiny islands at Science Daily ]

The latest nano-material to get nanotech researchers all hot and bothered is Graphene: a one-atom-thick honeycomb of carbon atoms that looks like it can do everything from making much more powerful batteries to replacing silicon as the semiconductor material of choice. And now, researchers at Vanderbilt University have found another use for it: making things either super-absorb or super-repel water.

The researchers have developed a method for applying Graphene sheets to materials in two different ways: “rug” or “brick.” In a rug formation, the sheets form an even surface that causes water to spread out, while a brick formation is uneven and causes water to bead off. Since Graphene is transparent, it could be added to any number of objects to use those properties, including water repellent clothes or glasses.

Now, Vanderbilt didn’t suggest many applications for the super-absorbent setting. We’re thinking…super-towels?

[Vanderbilt University via Endgadget]

Japanese researchers took a break from constructing robot exoskeletons for kids and new and scary ways to incorporate your nonexistent anime girlfriend into your life to design an alloy with properties similar to palladium.

Palla-what, you may be asking, or simply wondering why the Japanese recreated a terrible music venue in Worcester, Massachusetts. It’s a rare-earth element mostly used in electronics. Since it’s scarce, that means it’s worth a lot, $800 per troy ounce at current market prices, and the Japanese dislike relying on the war-torn nations that generally provide the stuff for a steady supply.

Hence, they used nanotechnology to make it. Rhodium and silver were reduced to their atoms, and given heated alcohol to combine at the atomic level.

Man, we’ve got to try that heated alcohol, we haven’t combined at the atomic level in weeks.

[ via the minglers at SlashGear ]

The Tobacco mosaic virus is probably something you’ve never heard of, but it’s going to make your gadgets run a lot longer.

The key with any battery is to get as much surface area on the electrode as possible to gather as many electrons as possible. How’s a virus helping with that?

Well, by modifying the gene slightly, putting a film on the electrode and letting the virus do what comes naturally. It builds nanorod structures on the electrode, expanding the surface area to ridiculous lengths. How ridiculous?

Try ten times as efficient. Yep, your laptop is about to become that much more awesome, and my netbook is officially usable beyond an hour once these things come out. We love the future!

[ via the tobacco lovers at Engadget ]