NanAlert: Nanostructured Magnetic Propellers

This neat widget just published in Nano Letters, in a paper published by Ambarish Ghosh and Peer Fischer from Harvard, “Controlled Propulsion of Artificial Magnetic Nanostructured Propellers.”

From "Controlled Propulsion of Artificial Magnetic Nanostructured Propellers," by Ambarish Ghosh and Peer Fischer

It’s a new kind of nano-swimmer, functionally similar to the rotating flagella found on bacteria.  This caught my eye because at the Advanced Energy Consortium, we’ve been looking for nano-thingies that can propel themselves to explore oil reservoirs.  The authors are more oriented towards biological applications, of course.  I think we’re going to see a number of new flavors of self-propelled nanoswimmers appear (at least I hope so).  The first one came from Ayusman Sen and Tom Mallouk at Penn State a couple of years ago; the videos on Sen’s website are great.  They also just published a great article on their catalytic nanomotors in Scientific American.  I think it’s still on the newstand.