Latest Nanoshell Stories

In recent years, metal nanoparticles have showed great application prospect in the field of biological imaging, cancer diagnosis and treatment due to its unique optical scattering and optical absorption properties. In many metal materials, gold nanoparticles have caused concerns in the field because of its simple preparation, easy to modify advantages. However, the poor stability in physiological fluids environment and the potential toxicity of gold nanoparticles always restricts its...

Rice University researchers show short laser pulses selectively heat gold nanoparticles Plasmonic gold nanoparticles make pinpoint heating on demand possible. Now Rice University researchers have found a way to selectively heat diverse nanoparticles that could advance their use in medicine and industry. Rice scientists led by Dmitri Lapotko and Ekaterina Lukianova-Hleb showed common gold nanoparticles, known since the 19th century as gold colloids, heat up at near-infrared wavelengths...

Creative engineering produces hollow nanoshell whispering galleries that trap light to improve performance of thin solar films Visitors to Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building may have experienced a curious acoustic feature that allows a person to whisper softly at one side of the cavernous, half-domed room and for another on the other side to hear every syllable. Sound is whisked around the semi-circular perimeter of the room almost without flaw. The phenomenon is known as a...

Rice bioengineers, Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's physician-scientists zap tumors with light-activated nanoparticlesRice University bioengineers and physician-scientists at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital have successfully destroyed tumors of human brain cancer cells in the first animal tests of a minimally invasive treatment that zaps glioma tumors with heat. The tests involved nanoshells, light-activated nanoparticles that are designed to destroy...

Using tiny gold "nanoshells" to deliver just a little heat to breast tumor cells already treated with radiation boosts the killing potential of the treatment "“ not just shrinking the tumor but killing the cancer stem cells, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center and The Methodist Hospital in a report that appears today in Science Translational Medicine.In studies of tumor cells grown in the laboratory and of mice with...

Self-assembly method yields materials with unique optical propertiesScientists from four U.S. universities have created a way to use Rice University's light-activated nanoshells as building blocks for 2-D and 3-D structures that could find use in chemical sensors, nanolasers and bizarre light-absorbing metamaterials. Much as a child might use Lego blocks to build 3-D models of complex buildings or vehicles, the scientists are using the new chemical self-assembly method to build complex...

MIAMI, March 4 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The rapidly growing field of nanotechnology and its future use in cosmetic products holds both enormous potential and potential concern for consumers. Currently, major cosmetic manufacturers have imposed a voluntary ban on the use of nanoparticles in products while they await a ruling from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regarding the safety of this technology. However, these manufacturers know that when ingredients in products such as...

Photothermal technique provides new way to track nanoparticlesStephan Link wants to understand how nanomaterials align, and his lab's latest work is a step in the right direction.Link's Rice University group has found a way to use gold nanorods as orientation sensors by combining their plasmonic properties with polarization imaging techniques.That may make it possible to see and perhaps track single nanoparticles over long periods. It would give researchers new information about materials,...

Nanoparticle could allow diagnosis, treatment in one visitResearchers at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have created a single nanoparticle that can be tracked in real time with MRI as it homes in on cancer cells, tags them with a fluorescent dye and kills them with heat. The all-in-one particle is one of the first examples from a growing field called "theranostics" that develops technologies physicians can use to diagnose and treat diseases in a single...

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a new way to deliver drugs into cancer cells by exposing them briefly to a non-harmful laser. Their results are published in a recent article in ACS Nano, a journal of the American Chemical Society."This entirely novel tool will allow biologists to investigate how genes function by providing them with temporal and spatial control over when a gene is turned on or off," explained Norbert Reich, senior author and a professor in the...