‘TechSci’ column: Nanotech and you

Jackie Peterson, B&W Staff

Everyone put down your pencils and take off your lab coats — science has outdone itself by figuring out how to un-boil an egg. When an egg gets boiled, the proteins tangle together so that the egg becomes as solid inside. A team at the University of California, Irvine has found that they can reverse this process, thereby un-tangling the egg’s proteins, by adding urea to a cooked egg.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on whether you want to eat de-boiled eggs), the team’s focus wasn’t really on eggs. According to Popular Science, the team wants to use this approach to help scientists recover some of the material that sticks to the sides of test tubes.

The un-boiling of a hen egg may seem like the greatest scientific breakthrough of the century, but there’s more, believe me.

With nanotech inching farther into the spotlight, there have been some interesting headlines dominating the tech and science news. For example, bubble-propelled nanobots “zooming” around inside of live mice. In my hometown of San Diego, a research team fed some mice a drop each of liquid containing thousands of tubular micro-motors. They embedded themselves into stomach linings and released nano-flakes of gold, which could be replaced with medicine in the future. Unless you would like to have thousands of microbots embed themselves in your stomach lining to drop some gold into your digestive tract.

By the way, the microbots actually get around inside of a body by harnessing your stomach acid. The zinc in the motors reacts with gastric acid to create a trail of hydrogen bubbles that trail behind the nanobots. The bubbles allow them to move about an inch every seven minutes.

Tiny robots delivering medication to your digestive tract isn’t even the most potentially helpful — or unsettling — thing. In October, Google announced that it was researching magnetic nanoparticles that would search for cancer cells in your bloodstream and report them to a wristband. They’re using synthetic skin to test the nanoparticles, and have built fake but scarily realistic arms with “the same autofluoresecence and biochemical components of real arms,” according to The Verge.

The nanoparticles report back to the smart band by using light signals. To make things creepier, the light signals will go through superficial veins on the wrist of the user, which is why the artificial arms are so important.

Nanotech is getting to be a huge player in health research for obvious reasons. Not only could they deliver medication and seek out cancer cells, they could also prevent illness by not allowing bacteria to stick to surfaces. Nonstick pots and pans have been around for a while, but it’s about to go a step further with a surface that keeps bacteria off. The process of anodization creates nanoscale pores that can change the electrical charge of a metal surface, “which in turn exerts a repulsive force on bacterial cells and prevents attachment and biofilm formation,” according to Nano Werk. The pores can be as small as 15 nanometers. In contrast, a single sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick.

The possibility of using anodized material to repel bacteria is heartening. It’s a low-cost process that would help the health, cooking and even shipping industries.

Repelling bacteria is always helpful, but water is a bigger — and very different — problem. Nanotech can help here, too, by cleaning nitrates out of groundwater. Palladium annoparticles act as a catalyst, but the issue is an output of ammonia. This can be minimized by limiting the amount of palladium, and once the technology is thoroughly tested, this approach would very beneficial. Currently, nitrates pose a threat to water supplies and the natural process of bacteria converting the nitrates to nitrogen gas is too slow to be of much help. Thus, the palladium catalyst would help greatly in not only protecting water supplies, but also purifying them.

Nanotech at the bacterial level is wonderful, but there are other applications — namely, a “remote-controlled” birth control implant that lasts up to 16 years. Once it’s implanted, the user can literally forget about it. If they want to go off of birth control, they click the implant’s remote control. If they want to turn it back on again, they click the remote again. Not only is the implant long lasting at 16 years, it can be turned off and back on again — something that current birth control lacks unless you want to wait a month to go back on. Failure rates haven’t been released yet, because the chip still has to go through its human testing. Plus, since it hasn’t been tested in the human body, we aren’t sure of the long-term (16-year, for example) effects of keeping it on and in the body.

The release mechanism of the chip, though, is something else. The chip has a hermetic titanium and platinum seal, and when a current passes through it, the seal melts temporarily. This allows a small dose of birth control hormone to diffuse each day. This could likely have all kinds of different applications, but we’ll see how it does in human trials.