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An implant that goes in without surgery could help make “electroceuticals” a reality- By Samuel K. Moore Engineers at Stanford University have built a new kind of millimetre-scale nerve-stimulating implant that beats all others of its size at a crucial parameter: how deep inside the body it can operate. The 6.5-millimeter-long programmable implant can receive both power and data via ultrasound through more than 10.5 centimetres of tissue. That’s deep enough for most any application, say its inventors. And because of its versatility and small size—with some modification it could be injected through a needle rather than requiring real surgery—they envision that it will greatly expand the number of conditions treated with electrical stimulation of the body’s nerves.

So far, most of those treatments have focused on stimulating spinal nerves for controlling pain and the vagus nerve for epilepsy and depression. However, researchers have been working on expanding the role of such “electroceutical” treatments to include ending postpartum bleeding, alleviating rheumatoid arthritis, and restoring bladder control, among many others. Because implants today require surgery, “implantable devices are seen as a last resort solution,” says Stanford University assistant professor electrical engineering Amin Arbabian. “If you have a disease with any other solution you’ll probably opt for that.” But a nerve stimulator that can be implanted with minimally invasive surgery or simply is injected would allow nerve stimulation treatments to reach 100-fold more patients, he argues.

The Stanford implant consists of: a piezoelectric receiver that converts ultrasound applied from outside the body to electricity, a capacitor for storing that electricity, two stimulating electrodes, an LED, and a custom chip to control it all. Those components are all inside a biocompatible package about the size of a fat grain of rice or a rather slim tic-tac.

The device is capable of extraordinary flexibility in its electrical stimulation parameters. It’s programmable via data sent through the ultrasound signal, allowing the stimulation’s amplitude, pulse width, and frequency to be adjusted to whatever recipe will best interface with the body’s peripheral nerves. “The reason we’re able to do all this is that we have orders of magnitude more power available at large tissue depths than in conventional wireless implants,” says Arbabian.

Getting power and data deep inside the body has always been a problem, but it gets more difficult the smaller the implant is. “Our aim was to design it to be very small and operate very deep,” says Jayant Charthad, one of Arabian students. “This is the hardest problem for transferring wireless power and data.” Comparing the ratios of tissue depth to system volume, the Stanford stimulator beats other experimental systems by at least an order of magnitude. “This has been a long-standing challenge for developing electroceuticals,” he says.

Arabian’s team chose ultrasound to carry the power and data rather than radio signals as other implants do, because its small wavelength matched the millimetre size of the implant and because ultrasound can penetrate far into the body without harming intervening tissue. But even so, the system required considerable design work so that the implant could make the most of ultrasonic energy. “It’s taken five or six years and five or six students,” says Arbabian. “It’s not a straightforward application.”

Now that they’ve built working stimulators, it’s time to test them in living things. One early application is likely to be as the stimulator in a bladder control system, Arbabian says. But first, they will be conducting tests in animals. That’s where the system’s LED will come in handy. At the same time it produces electrical stimulation, it can provide the light for so-called optogenetics experiments—where light triggers the actions of nearby genetically modified neurons. Being able to coordinate and compare electrical and optical stimulation “would open up a lot of science,” says Arbabian. “We can use this as a platform for discovery.”




Flexible nanodiamonds promise to open up novel optical and electronic properties-By Dexter Johnson Yang Lu, Amit Banerjee, Daniel Bernoulli, Hongti Zhang, Ming Dao and Subra Suresh

It’s commonly known that diamonds are the hardest natural material. However, with that hardness comes brittleness: they may be hard but they’re not very flexible.

Now an international team of researchers has demonstrated that diamonds, which are commonly believed to be inflexible, can be bent and stretched significantly. The researchers showed that the maximum tensile elastic strain of a diamond can reach nearly 9 percent, close to the theoretical limit of the material.

The researchers believe that these enhanced mechanical properties make nanodiamonds much more durable than expected, and therefore could lead to applications that involve mechanical loading, making them candidates for applications such as diamond needle-based intracellular delivery. But it is what this flexibility does to diamonds’ optical and electrical properties may prove to be the most significant in the long run.

In research described in the journal Science, scientists from the City University of Hong Kong, China, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in South Korea and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore produced nanoscale diameter (about 100-300nm) diamond needles using reactive ion etching (RIE) of CVD (chemical vapor deposition)-grown diamond thin films.

The resulting material demonstrates that the mechanical properties of even hard, brittle crystalline materials like diamonds can be fundamentally changed when their sizes are reduced to nanometer-length scale.

While the purity of the internal crystalline structure and surface smoothness of the material is important, the key to achieving such flexibility in diamonds is actually the “size”—the dimension/diameter of the nanodiamond needles, according to Yang Lu, an associate professor at the City University of Hong Kong.

Flexibility on its own is great for using diamonds in applications that require more mechanical loading, but there is also a quantum mechanical effect that comes with this bending. Images: Yang Lu, Amit Banerjee, Daniel Bernoulli, Hong Zhang, Ming Dao and Subra Suresh. SEM image sequence of bending deformation of a typical polycrystalline nanoneedle, where (B) shows the maximum deformation before fracture and (C) shows the nanoneedle immediately after the fracture has occurred.

Previous theoretical studies showed that when elastic strains exceed 1%, quantum mechanical calculations indicate significant physical and/or chemical material property alterations due to the changes in energy band gap structures, according to Ming Dao, principal investigator and director at MIT’s Nanomechanics Lab, who was a co-author of the research.

“These property alterations may include significant changes in mechanical, thermal, optical, magnetic, electrical, electronic and chemical reaction properties, and could be used to design advanced materials for various applications through the emerging ‘elastic strain engineering’,” said Dao. “When maximum elastic strains can be changed in real-time between 0 to 9% in nanodiamonds, there is a lot of potential for exploring unprecedented material properties.” After two years of careful iterations between simulations and real-time experiments, Dao said that he and his colleagues have managed to streamline a nanomechanical process that can precisely control and quantify the maximum amount of elastic deformation within the nanodiamonds.  The resulting method enables accurate control and on-the-fly alterations of the maximum strain in the nanoneedle below its fracture limit. This also means, of course, that its electronic properties can be changed on-the-fly as well.

While this level of elasticity in the nanodiamonds can change their band gap structures, incorporating impurities into the severely strained lattice of the nanodiamonds may lead to revolutionary changes in diamond’s electronic and optical properties, according to Yu. “This could open up a lot of novel optoelectronics applications for diamonds, such as more powerful or colourful laser or maser (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation),” said Yu. The first step toward commercialization of these applications will require researchers to microfabricate diamond nanostructures in well-defined geometries and crystalline structures.

For optoelectronics applications, another challenge is to quantify and control the local optical/electronic property changes, in real time, for a single diamond nanostructure under elastic straining, according to Lu.

Lu added: “We will work with physicists and electrical engineers to explore the optoelectronics applications of the elastic nanodiamond structures, and we may even find its applications in the emerging diamond-based quantum computing technologies.”




This nano printing process allows researchers to 3D print more material on a biochip than ever before, making it easier to study biomedical issues- By Christina Dabney


Making biochips, a key technology in studying disease, just got a little easier. This new nano printing process uses gold-plated pyramids, an LED light, and photochemical reactions to print more organic material on the surface of one single biochip than ever before.

The technique uses an array of polymer pyramids that are covered in gold and mounted on an atomic force microscope. These arrays, which are one square centimetre in size, contain thousands of tiny pyramids with holes that allow light through and make sure that the light goes only to specific places on the surface of a chip below, immobilizing delicate organic reagents on the chip’s surface without damaging them.

Processes like this, known as tip-based lithography, are widely considered to be the best way to 3D print organic material with nanoscale feature resolution. But in the past, they were limited by the fact that they could only print one kind of molecule at a time. Now researchers at Hunter College and the Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York think they have solved that problem.

They’re using microfluidics, the manipulation of fluids on a molecular level, to expose each biochip to the desired combination of chemicals. Then, they use photochemistry to shine light through the apertures in the pyramids. As the light reacts with the molecules, it adheres them to the chip. With typical tip-based lithography systems, the light can overpower the chip, destroying some molecules. But the CUNY research team uses beam-pen lithography, where the light is confined and channelled through small apexes. This allows the team to control the light and protect the organic materials that they have already printed on the biochip.

Adam Braunschweig, the lead researcher and an associate professor with the ASRC’s Nanoscience Initiative and Hunter College’s Department of Chemistry, says this method of 3D printing biochips will help scientists understand cells and biological pathways. That’s because this technology should make it easier and more efficient to study disease development and solve other biological puzzles, such as detecting bioterrorism agents.




It’s the first publicly acknowledged deal between a major car company and a solid-state lidar firm- By Philip E. Ross Israel-based Innoviz has announced that it will supply solid-state lidar to BMW. The device, along with radar and other systems, will be incorporated into a self-driving package from Magna, a major auto supplier.

Innoviz says that when volume production begins, the lidar’s price should drop to the hundreds of dollars, down from the “single-digit thousands” that today’s test units go for. The company says that it can now make several thousand units a month on its existing assembly line, in Israel, and that it’s building another line in China.

The company argues that today’s deal with BMW vindicates the solid-state approach to lidar, in which the laser beam is steered without machinery. Innoviz does the trick with microscopic, moveable mirrors. Most recent lidar startups also use solid-state approaches. But Velodyne, the industry leader, rotates its lasers on a roof-mounted tower, and the startup Luminar uses a macroscopic mirror to sweep its beam around. Luminar recently announced the start of mass production, with some of its units going to Toyota’s self-driving research team, and the rest to other, yet-unnamed automakers. In its release, Innoviz said only that its current test unit offers “unrivalled angular resolution at the highest frame rate of any LiDAR solution currently on the market.” But earlier this year, a company spokesman told that its test units had a frame rate of 20 frames per second, an angular resolution of 0.15 by 0.3 degrees, a detection range of up to 150 meters, and a field of view of 73 by 20 degrees.

By contrast, Luminar says its mechanical system can vary the frame rate from as slow as one per second, for high resolution, to as fast as 20 per second, in exchange for lower resolution. It says its lidar can detect objects 250 meters ahead. Velodyne claims a 300-meter range for its top-of-the-line system.

It’s hard to say which design will win, though. Different self-driving packages give different weights to the various sensors; one might rely on the radar rather than lidar to cover the longer distances. Of course, another very important factor is that of cost. And solid-state systems generally cost the least.


