Nanohedron

		December 2007 News December 25th, 2007 Microchip-based device can detect rare tumor cells in bloodstream. In the image below a circulating tumor cell (CTC) is captured by a post covered with antibody "glue." Isotope has just released its fall/winter issue. A sample can be found here. December 17th, 2007 This is worth a peek. Adrian Ocneanu's "Octacube" aims to explore rendering 4-dimensions in sculpture. This stainless steel memorial designed with a firm basis in mathematics can be found in the McAllister Building of the Penn State Mathematics Department. (submitted by Josh) December 12th, 2007 Damian Allis reports that the Technology Roadmap For Productive Nanosystems (TRPN) has been officially released. December 10th, 2007 We have recently recieved two exceptional submissions from both a scientific and aesthetic standpoint. In November we reported in our News section the "brainbow" experiments of Lichtman's group recently reported in the Nov 1 issue of Nature (Livet et al, 2007) - see below under the Nov 7th News. Jean Livet sent Nanohedron a few brainbow images, one of which is in the DEC-JAN gallery. In subsequent months the rest will be shared as well. Giuliano Zanchetta submitted some images from a recent Science paper that he co-authored. His description of the work is below. Be sure check out the two images of his work that are in the DEC-JAN gallery, as well as images that will be popping up in future galleries. "Aqueous solutions of short DNA duplexes were recently discovered, in a joint work between our laboratories, to show chiral nematic and hexagonal columnar liquid crystalline phases, although they lack the required shape anisotropy according to classical Onsager criterion (Nakata, Zanchetta et al. Science 318, 1276 (2007)). These phases are produced by the end-to-end adhesion and consequent stacking of the duplex oligomers into polydisperse anisotropic rod-shaped aggregates, which can order into liquid crystals. Disturbing this stacking with flexible unpaired tails suppresses the nematic phase but the highest concentration columnar phase may survive." December 6th, 2007 Sculpted 3-D particles could aid diagnostics, tissue engineering (Edwin Thomas and Patrick Doyle, MIT). Microparticles sculpted with UV light possess a granular texture as shown below at three magnifications. December 3rd, 2007 Rose Lincoln's close up photos of tree bark were recently featured at HarvardScience. All images © respective artist or company. © 2007 Nanohedron.com, all rights reserved