Scientific and technological advances are increasingly powered by our ability to build things at the atomic level. Mimicking processes that take place in biology, scientists are using custom self-assembling structures to power new molecular breakthroughs. At the atomic level, there is no fundamental difference between the various scientific disciplines. Improving nanotechnology is converging them at an accelerating rate.

An often-overlooked transformational technology is air conditioning. We don't usually think too much about it unless it stops working. It has, however, had profound impacts on how we live and could add profit to your portfolio...

The great majority of residential units use vapor compression refrigeration. These systems work by compressing a refrigerant fluid in a pump, which raises the temperature of the refrigerant. After being compressed, the high-pressure vapor is run through a tube to a heat exchanger. Here, the heat is radiated outside.

Once cooled, the refrigerant condenses from a vapor into a liquid and moves through a thermal expansion valve. When it crosses the valve, the refrigerant is decompressed and drops in temperature. The now-cold refrigerant is then piped through the coils of another heat exchanger, where interior air transfers its heat and is cooled. The refrigerant is then cycled back to the compressor pump and the cycle starts again.

Vapor compression refrigeration isn't the only game in town, however. Other technologies, like absorption refrigeration, accomplish the same task using a different method. Rather than using an electrically driven pump to compress a refrigerant, absorption chillers use a heat source to condense refrigerant. In both cases, the evaporation of a refrigerant is used to carry heat away from indoor air.

Absorption refrigeration isn't as energy efficient as vapor compression refrigeration. However, in industrial environments that have a large source of heat, like power plants, it makes sense. Since the heat is going to get vented to the environment anyway, it can be put to work driving this type of air conditioning system.

Typically, absorption chillers are large and expensive when compared to the more common refrigeration technology. The economic case is that they pay for themselves over time by saving electricity. However, they have not had much of a role to play in residential air. A typical home does not have a ready source of waste heat - while it does have a ready source of electricity.

In absorption chillers, an evaporated refrigerant adheres to a solid surface. The refrigerant is usually a water solution. For the system to work well, a large surface area is needed. The large amount of surface area makes absorption units too large to be practical for home use compared to vapor compression They are used, though, in off-grid situations where a heat source like propane burners is available. New technology, however, is changing things.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed improved materials for use in absorption air conditioning systems. Using engineered nanostructures that self-assemble into 3-D shapes, a much-larger effective surface area is created. The end result is a unit 75% smaller that costs half as much as current technology.

In addition, the nanostructures bind more weakly to water molecules than current materials. This means that less heat is needed to drive the refrigeration cycle. It also speeds up the process of absorbing and releasing water molecules. The efficiency gains and lower heat requirements mean that the most common heat source in the world - the sun - could be used to power the air conditioner during the time of the day when it is most needed. Solar water heaters similar to those seen on the roofs of many homes today could provide the heat source needed to keep homes cool.

Today air conditioning units are in 85% of US homes and account for 16% of total residential electricity consumption. And nanotechnology is paving the way to not only reduce costs but boost efficiency. This is not the only sector where nanotechnology is making a significant impact. And in the future we will continue to see more and more developments in this arena

Ray Blanco

Fighting the “Stupid Virus” Pandemic
Pat Cox of Breakthrough Technology Alerts

..... We know another influenza pandemic will emerge in the next few years. Massive resources are therefore being spent to prepare for this inevitability. Scientists are trying now to predict which flu strains are likely to hit. Companies are preparing to manufacture enormous quantities of vaccines as quickly as possible.

Vaccinating for rapidly mutating viruses is, however, a fundamentally irrelevant technology. Unfortunately, few seem to know that there is a far cheaper and more effective solution to influenza. This technology has come out of advances in nanotechnology and has been enabled by supercomputers. I'm not speaking theoretically, by the way. The solution for rapidly mutating viruses exists now. The company that developed it, however, has garnered only a fraction of the attention it deserves.

NanoViricides Inc. creates nanotech constructs made of submicroscopic polymers and biological ligands. They are called, not coincidentally, nanoviricides. The polymer portion of these constructs are approximately spherical virus traps. If you can think of a virus as a key that cracks the cellular safe, imagine ligands as the locks. A biologist would probably prefer “biological signaling molecules.”

Regardless, ligands that match specific virus families are identified using supercomputer simulations. When attached to the polymers and introduced into the blood stream, these nanoviricides are more attractive to viruses than actual cells. Viruses enter into the nanoviricides and are dismantled harmlessly.

If this technology sounds to you like something out of Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage, you're not alone. When I first began writing about NanoViricides, the top Google search results were organized attacks on the company. A cottage industry existed that sold so-called reports that offered “the truth” about the company. Often, I was personally accused by those attacking NanoViricides of helping perpetrate a scam.

Fortunately, recent collaborations with world-renowned virus researchers has largely ended such attacks. Already, the company has demonstrated nanoviricides that lure and kill herpes, dengue and influenza viruses. In the last weeks, animal tests proved an effectiveness at killing influenza viruses that is orders of magnitude greater than Tamiflu.

All of the most infamous and scary strains of influenza were destroyed by NanoViricides' FluCide. Any future mutation of these viruses will also be destroyed. This technology, if it were approved and distributed widely, would allow us to stop worrying about influenza. At the first indication of the flu, a nanoviricide injection, skin patch or nasal spray would end flu symptoms within a few hours, no matter how lethal the virus is in nature.

Because nanoviricides operate in a biological/mechanical fashion, we don't need to worry that they will not work in humans. They work anywhere they are encountered by their target viruses. They have virtually no toxicity. They are cheap and have enormously long shelf lives. I would not hesitate to accept an injection right now. When the next pandemic inevitably arrives, I hope to do just that.

Nevertheless, I often read articles in the popular press about some new discovery that “will one day make nanotech medicine a reality.” On the contrary. It is a reality now, though we have not yet as a society understood and implemented this nanotechnology.

This is the unintended consequence of Moore's law. Science is advancing so fast that hundreds of thousands will probably die unnecessarily before we make the transition from influenza vaccines to nanoviricides. There is a very real war being fought right now between ignorance and science. Science will win but it would be nice if it won sooner than later.