Last Thursday Dr. Donald Tomalia spoke in downtown Portland, Oregon at the Arlene Schnitzer hall. The lecture was ultimately about two topics; safe application of nano technology to society, and the need for a clear categorization method for nanotechnology that would serve as a foundation for moving nanotechnology to nanoscience. This idea is one that Dr. Tomalia discussed at length illustrating that the logic for needing this tool is the same logic that a chemist would site as to why we need a periodic table of elements. I am going to give a quick overview sharing some resources for learning about dendritic formations found in nature and how these formations are used to construct what are now calling Dendrimers.

Researchers have been able to see how heart failure affects the surface of an individual heart muscle cell in minute detail, using a new nanoscale scanning technique developed at Imperial College London.

Biomedical engineers from Boston University have developed a new sequencing technique that eliminates the time-consuming, and often error-prone step of DNA amplification - which will make future genome sequencing both faster and less expensive than any current technologies.

UC Berkely researchers have developed a "NanoPen" that they say overcomes one of the top challenges in nanotechnology manufacturing - producing nano-scale components quickly, cheaply and efficiently.

Researchers are using the popular children's LEGO pieces to re-create - on a much larger scale - the microscopic activity taking place inside microfluidic arrays, commonly called lab-on-a-chip devices. The observations could offer clues on how to improve the design and fabrication of lab-on-a-chip technology.

Researchers from Dupont and Lehigh University are using short stretches of single-stranded DNA sequences to accurately sort and separate mixtures of Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) into distinct categories - previously a major hurdle in nanotube production. The details are published in an article found in the July 9 issue of Nature.

One-third of eukaryotic proteins are integrated within membranes, as are the targets of 40% of approved drugs. However, the lack of a general means of solubilizing, stabilizing and structurally characterizing these active membrane proteins has frustrated efforts to understand their mechanisms and exploit their potential value.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created bright, stable and bio-friendly nanocrystals that act as individual investigators of activity within a cell. These ideal light emitting probes represent a significant step in scrutinizing the behaviors of proteins and other components in complex systems such as a living cell.

University of Washington researchers have discovered that by combining chlorotoxin - a small peptide isolated from the venom of scorpions - with nanoparticles, they were able to cut the spread of cancerous cells by 98 percent.

MIT researchers have discovered a method of further reducing the width and resolution of etched lines by using an interference-generated optical mask as a kind of stencil pattern above the surface to be marked. The ability to create high resolution patterns is crucial to a variety of fields, including microchip manufacturing, biotechnology, and many other emerging branches of nanotechnology.