4 Topic Commentaries

A New Building Block for Nanostructures

A New Building Block for Nanostructures

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  Donald E. Ingber, M.D., Ph.D.

  Bioengineering; Vascular Biology

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  Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University

  We are moving at lightning speed in our ability to devise ever more powerful ways to use biocompatible DNA molecules as structural building blocks for nanotechnology, which could have great value for medicine as well as non-medical applications,

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  Robert J. Macfarlane, PhD

  Materials Science & Engineering; Nanomaterials Self-Assembly

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  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  The idea here is if we have this universal self-assembly methodology, we can target many different material types simply by changing out the chemical composition of the building blocks we’re working with.

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  Julia R. Greer, PhD

  Materials Science and Mechanics; Nanofabrication

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  California Institute of Technology

  Inspired, in part, by hard biological materials and by earlier work by Toby Schaedler and a team from HRL Laboratories, Caltech, and UC Irvine on the fabrication of extremely lightweight microtrusses, we designed architectures with building blocks that are less than five microns long, meaning that they are not resolvable by the human eye,

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  Zhong Lin Wang, PhD

  Nanoscience and Nanotechnology; Piezoelectric Nanostructures

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  Georgia Institute of Technology

  This structure provides a new building block for nanodevices,

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