The particles of cobalt-chromium can cause DNA damage even if they do not come physically into contact with the cells.

The nano-particles manage to damage the DNA of cells protected by a barrier made up of cellular membranes, without physically entering into contact with the cell, but rather through a multitude of chemical signals.

This was found in a study coordinated at the Bristol Implant Research Center, proving that it brings out a new risk associated with nanotechnology, but also the opportunity to exploit this behavior in an innovative way.

Nano-particles are now widely used. In surgery, for example, are an integral part of prostheses and implants. The research conducted so far on the risks of nanoparticles, however, relates mainly to the effects of direct exposure, while very little is known about what can cause the indirect exposure. In the new study, researchers have wondered if a barrier device was able to protect cells from the effects of nano-particles consisting of chromium and cobalt in the tissues of the clothes and orthopedic implants. The researchers interposed a barrier between nanoparticles formed out of multilayer chromium-cobalt (in quantities thousands of times greater than those with whom we come in contact normally) and a culture of human fibroblasts (connective tissue cells).

Although nano-particles have not managed to cross the membrane, the fibroblasts had DNA mutations which were ten times more than the control fibroblasts. According to scholars, the effect is due to chemical signals between the cell membrane and fibroblasts. If the lines of communication between them are broken, the rate of DNA damage returned to normal.

This study researched killing cancer cells with nano-magnets, with the same principle as a microwave oven.

The study of nano-particles applied to biomedicine continues to give interesting results, as research is still in its infancy. Through their work, the chemists from the university of Cagliari are now investigating some of the possibilities opened by this field. One is to use magnetic particles to convey the drugs only to the diseased cells, the other is to drive up the tumor and then force them to oscillate under the control of a variable magnetic field, thereby heating the target cells, just like a microwave oven does with the water molecules contained in food.

This second mechanism exploits hyperthermia. It appears that cancer cells can be destroyed by beeing brought to a temperature of 42.5 degrees Celsius for about half an hour.

In order arrive at the place desired, the particles must be incorporated into liposomes, hollow microspheres formed by lipid bilayers (for which reason they are called "magneto-liposomes"), which are able to overcome the barrier of cells. They must have a diameter of about 20 nanometers. Larger could indeed block blood vessels, while smaller particles may be "eaten" by macrophage cells which are in charge with the elimination of foreign bodies.

Currently, the research team is working on the synthesis of particles and study of their structural and magnetic properties. Currently these are being built in oxide of iron or iron cobalt. The latter are more manoeuvrable, because their magnetic properties depend strongly on the direction along which the field is applied to (property known as magnetic anisotropy).

Can we act on stopping the process of infection, without the risk to develop strains resistant to antibiotics ?

Small molecules that interrupt the chemical signals by which bacteria communicates by blocking the process of infection have been identified. The discovery, published in Molecular Cell, as well as representing a new option in the treatment of infections, reduces the risk of growth of bacteria strains resistant to antibiotics.

Bacteria will exchange information with a system of intercellular communication, called quorum sensing, which allows them to perceive and respond to changes in density and to coordinate actions of the group. As soon as the conditions are favorable to population growth, for example if they are within a host, the bacteria sends chemical signals to molecules that bind to receptors inside: LuxR-type proteins or proteins of the type LuxN, located on membrane of each cell. In this way the infection proceeds without hitches. "

Blocking the communications of the enemy has always been a winning weapon. The researchers searched the key to succeeding, and found in an old acquaintance. In a previous study Bassler and colleagues had discovered that a class of molecules called lactose acilomoserina (AHL), is able to compete with the signals acting on LuxN proteins, preventing them from binding to the receptor. In the recent study, researchers have realized that the AHL can also bind to proteins of the LuxR type.

In this way was brought into light the AHL the ability to bind to both receptors, although the two proteins have two completely different structure and location mechanisms.

Cancer threatens the conservation of some wild species because it represents one of the top causes of death. This was also recently featured on the Discovery Channel.

Cancer affects some animals with the same effect as in human beings, and could be the cause of extinction of some wild species. The researchers say the Society of Preservation of Fauna and Flora of New York have found an increase in cancer cases in wild animals in recent years.

According to their findings, published in Nature Reviews Cancer, the species most affected are those at risk of extinction, like the Tasmanian devil, a small marsupial carnivore, already decimated in the late nineties by a rare form of transmissible cancer (the devil facial tumor).

The cause is unknown, but it has been shown that malignant cells are able to spread among the samples and through bites during fights. To save the species, biologists are now isolating infected animals in zoos or reserves.

Denise McAloose and Alisa Newton, authors of the study, have investigated the possible causes of cancer in different species, and have found a correlation between cancer and pollution. For example, for the living beluga in the estuary of the St. Lawrence River (Canada), a form of bowel cancer is the second leading cause of death. The culprit could be an organic compound (a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon that is found in oil, but also in municipal waste), already known to be carcinogenic for our species.

Italian researcher Alessandra Luchini wins the first edition of "The Prize Award” with a paper of a system to identify those molecules that signal the presence of a tumor (tumor markers) that are beyond the traditional methods of investigation.

To do this requires making a hydrogel containing certain microscopic nano-spheres that once inserted in the samples of blood taken for analysis diagnostic trap some markers and protect them from deterioration.

"These nano-spheres, made of the same plastic as hydrated soft contact lenses are equipped with special molecules that, once in the blood, snap-specific tumor markers and incorporate them. In this way, they protect them from enzymes that would otherwise deteriorate them. Usually blood tests fail to identify precisely because these markers are destroyed prematurely, " says researcher Alessandra Luchini.

"The beauty of this system," says the researcher, "is that it does not need very sophisticated tools, which is simple and economical: with one hundred U.S. dollars we can make nano-spheres for more than two hundred patients." The new method is not going to replace the standard, but acts at a stage prior to analysis by providing a better quality.

Small robots that walk on water like insects? The kitchen table, the walls of a room or the arms of an armchair that are self-cleaning? Two phenomena that Xiao Cheng Zeng, a professor of chemistry at University of Nebraska in Lincoln (USA), considers possible in the near future, and based on the same characteristic: super hidrofobia.

Thanks to the computational performance of the super computer of the Riken Institute in Japan, the researcher is able to reproduce the conditions that give the area the property is to "roll" away the drops of water.

In nature this phenomenon is observed on the bristles of caterpillars or on lotus flowers, and allows insects that often are seen on ponds slip skate on water. As the authors of the study reported the caterpillars or insects skaters get the super hydrophobia surface through a "two-tier" surface which means a waxy base on which there are microscopic structures like hair, often covered in turn by smaller "hair".

These gradients decrease the surface area in contact with the drop of water. The result is that the drop rolls instead of sliding, as it would be a hydrophobic surface.

Twenty years after the first partially successful attempt to cold fusion, a new experiment seems to have reopened the hopes of obtaining nuclear reactions at low energy (LENR low-energy nuclear reactions).

This was announced by a team of researchers led by Pamela Mosier-Boss of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center San Diego (California), with a study presented at the annual meeting of American Chemical Society, the first visible evidence of the production of neutrons, the particles subatomic whose presence demonstrates the atomic reaction occurred.

It was 1989 when Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons showed that it has obtained experimentally the Cold Fusion, arousing great outcry in the scientific community. Fusion is the reaction that takes place inside of stars, their source of energy, able to reproduce in the laboratory at room temperature this process would be an amazing achievement.

Further research then disappointed initial expectations: the rare attempts (for example, those of 2000 and 2002) to reproduce the results of 1989 and have not convinced the path of nuclear reaction at low energy has not proved viable as an alternative to "clean" nuclear fission, which is based on the common operation of nuclear power.

The use of an organic material has been put in place a structure capable of transmitting data at rates eight times higher than those of traditional devices .

The study of materials capable of transmitting data at ever higher speeds is the constant challenge of the technology of optical communications. The use of a new organic material, tested by a team of U.S. and European research coordinated by Ivan Biaggi of Lehigh University (United States), has enabled to achieve data transfers much higher than that obtained so far with traditional devices.

The novelty lies in the combination of structures in silicon with organic material, identified by the initials Ddmebt . This is essentially a kind of "nonlinear" device, able to change its molecular structure to the passage of light, making it propagate at high speed. To minimize interference with the passage of data, researchers have vaporized the organic material and the deposit left on the rails of silicon and in the spaces between them. In this way, explain the authors, the molecules are deposited "like snowflakes", forming a highly homogeneous plastic. It is precisely in the interstices between the rails of silicon, filled with new material, that the light passes at high speed, allowing you to transmit data up to 170 Gigabit per second (with the traditional structures, which consist only of silicon, you can reach a maximum speed around 20-30 Gigabit per second). Combining silicon with an architecture was needed to channel and confine the flow of light within very small spaces (the guide of silicon is separated by a few tens of nanometers).

The new devices can operate at 30 degrees above zero, rather than less than 70. This is the characteristic of the new generation of semiconductors, researched at the Italian Institute for the Physics of Matter (INFM-CNR), and in the Ludwig Maximilian University in Monaco of Bavaria and the ETH Zurich (the study).

Today there are two ways to record information on a medium: the electronic format, in which the binary language is the passage of electrons (the transistors) and magnetic (MRAM memory), more recently, in which the binary language is given by state of magnetization. To communicate these two systems could boost significantly the computational schemes, pending the distant quantum computer. Doubling the processing power and memory of a chip while maintaining the size, without the need to go in nano-scale (a scale, that is, a billionth of a meter) are just two of the technology that promises magnetic semiconductors suggest a near future.

These devices were made over ten years ago, but so far required temperatures far below zero to work. The problem now seems outdated as the known semiconductors gallium arsenide containing traces of manganese, a metal which has ferromagnetic properties at around 200 degrees below zero. To increase the temperature threshold, above which the ferromagnetic behavior disappears, the researchers deposited on a semiconductor film of iron - metal known for its magnetic properties - the thickness of a few nanometers.

Iron and manganese interacted so effectively that the new material, has a ferromagnetic behavior up to 30 degrees above zero, a jump of over a hundred degrees above the starting temperature.

This result is a technological response parallel to that of the race to miniaturization and the research was selected the American Physical Society as one of the most important published in Physical Review Letters

A new instrument to simultaneously measure the magnetic field and the atomic structure of matter at the nanoscale has been developed. The applications of this are future generations of high-density memories

Snapshots of the weakest and microscopic magnetic fields generated by just a few molecules of a nanometer (billionth of a meter). The researchers have obtained the S3 Center of the National Institute for the Physics of Matter (INFM-CNR) of Modena and the University of Modena .

This is a scanning microscope combined with a new highly sensitive magnetic sensor. The microscope scans close with his point - made up of a few atoms - the area of the test and how it relates to the roughness with a resolution of several nanometers. Beside the point, the sensor records the magnetic field intensity, but with high detail ( millionth of a meter).

In this way the researchers were able to get together for the first time, images of atomic structure and magnetic properties of a thin layer of nano-magnet on a support of silicon.

"The microscope allows us to measure directly the properties of nano-molecular magnets on the surface, even at temperatures close to absolute zero, to minus 270 degrees," says Marco. "Above all," says the researcher, "it helps us to understand the magnetism on the molecular scale."