Under the MOU, A*STAR and NHMRC will commit a total of SGD$4.5m to a joint grant call over the next three years. The grant will fund collaborative research projects between groups in Singapore and Australia, in areas such as emerging infectious diseases, regenerative medicine, non-communicable diseases, bioinformatics and nanotechnology.

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The ICPC Nanonet Project partners are currently compiling the Annual Region Reports on nanoscience and nanotechnology. These will describe the latest developments in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Mediterranean Partnership Countries, and Latin America, and will be published online in May 2012.

These reports offer a unique opportunity to showcase your role in nano research and development with a view to helping form networks as well as identifying similar fields of Interest for collaborative activities. Reports for 2009-2011 are available to download for free here:
http://www.icpc-nanonet.org/content/category/7/20/46/

The partners now invite you to contribute details about your current nanoscience and nanotechnology engagement for the 2012 reports to help foster such collaborations; in particular:

• The name of your organisation
• Your role
• Current focus / applications of your research or activities
• Recent milestones
• Current or planned collaborations

• Activities of regional organizations and networks
• Key themes and topics such as water purification, renewable energy, medicine
• National or regional funding programmes for nanoscience and nanotechnology
• Collaborative research centres or projects
• N&N networks that exist between countries within this region and beyond

Please send any information to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Yes, I changed the title but wondered if this might have applications in NanoFormulation?

Unexpected adhesion properties of graphene may lead to new nanotechnology devices

The new findings -- that graphene has surprisingly powerful adhesion qualities -- are expected to help guide the development of graphene manufacturing and of graphene-based mechanical devices such as resonators and gas separation membranes, according to the Colorado University, Boulder team. The experiments showed that the extreme flexibility of graphene allows it to conform to the topography of even the smoothest substrates.

The CU team measured the adhesion energy of graphene sheets, ranging from one to five atomic layers, with a glass substrate, using a pressurized "blister test" to quantify the adhesion between graphene and glass plates. The experiments showed that so-called "van der Waals forces" -- the sum of the attractive or repulsive forces between molecules -- clamp the graphene samples to the substrates and also hold together the individual graphene sheets in multilayer samples. The researchers found the adhesion energies between graphene and the glass substrate were several orders of magnitude larger than adhesion energies in typical micromechanical structures, an interaction they described as more liquid-like than solid-like, said Bunch.

Read the full press release here...

Researchers at the Technion have discovered the nature of nanometer-thick layers between different materials and found that they have both solid and liquid properties. By doing so, the researchers made a crucial addition to Gibbs' theory which describes the fundamental aspects of the thermodynamics of interfaces.

The recently published paper in “Science” experimentally demonstrates that the formation of a very thin layer (of the order of one nanometer in thickness) at interfaces reduces the interface energy, and promotes adhesion and interface stability. The thin layer is not a conventional state of matter, in that it is neither a solid nor a liquid, but rather something in between.

The results could enable scientists to improve the resilience of the bond between ceramic materials and metals, two types of materials that “do not like” to come into contact. The many real-world applications include cutting tools for metal-working; composites for brake pads; the joins between metal conducting wires and chips in computers; and the application of protective ceramic coatings on jet engine blades.

Gold crystals equilibrated on a polycrystalline sapphire (aluminum oxide) surface.

“Until now, no one had been able to understand why these thin layers exist, or if they were a temporary or an equilibrium state,” explains Prof. Wayne D. Kaplan, Dean of the Department of Materials Engineering at the Technion. “While their existence at interfaces between ceramic crystals and on the surface of ice was known, there was an ongoing debate about the cause of this phenomenon and its properties."

Through a long series of experiments, Dr. Mor Baram proved that a thin layer exists at the interface between metals and ceramic materials, which reduces the interface energy. The research was Dr. Baram’s doctoral work, and was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Kaplan in cooperation with Dr. Dominique Chatain of CNRS in France.

Prof. Wayne Kaplan

“This phenomenon enables us to ice-skate, reduces the mechanical properties of ceramic materials at high temperatures, affects the morphology of crystals in modern polycrystalline engineering materials, and contributes to the stability of modern micro-electronic devices,” says Prof. Kaplan.

The team conducted novel experiments at the Technion using the new “Titan” electron microscope and a focused ion beam (FIB). This included plating sapphire with a thin (0.6 micron thick) film of gold (for comparison, a single strand of hair is 80-100 microns thick), and heating the samples until they reached equilibrium (i.e. until the gold film broke-up into billions of tiny gold crystals on the sapphire). The researchers also included a source of elements on the sapphire known to play a role in forming the layer between different materials (in this case, silicon and calcium). As the samples reached equilibrium, the calcium and silicon moved to the interface between the gold and sapphire, and a thin (0.0012 microns, or 1.2 nanometers thick) layer was created.

The researchers were then able to successfully measure the energy stored between the gold and sapphire in the presence of the thin layer. By doing so, they proved that its presence decreases the energy of the interface, and therefore improves its stability.

Read more here.