Rice students win NASA national design award

...ototype has three stages: a collection unit that ties into the spacecraft's waste-disposal system, an immunoassay process that combines the urine with nanoshells and antibodies, and a photometer that reads the absorbance spectra of the combined solution and feeds a PDA running an analysis program personalized f...

Rice research gets high marks

... are influential, which is not surprising considering the majority is nanotechnology related." It specifically cited research into optically activated nanoshells being used in human cancer trials by Houston's NanoSpectra Biosciences Inc., a company founded on Rice technology. "Rice has only been doing the pa...

nanoshells in Biological News

Study shows nanoshells ideal as chemical nanosensors

'Nanoshells' enhance sensitivity to chemical detection by factor of 10 billion New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science finds that tailored nanoparticles known as nanoshells can enhance chemical sensing by as much as 10 billion times. That makes them about 10,000...

Researchers shed new light on catalyzed reactions

... ago at Rice by nanophotonics pioneer Naomi Halas. nanoshells are about 20 times smaller than a red blood cell, ...researchers to use the nanosensing capabilities of nanoshells to directly follow chemical reactions on the catal...rs to develop spectroscopic methods that used gold nanoshells for chemical detection and analysis. Whereas Wong'...

Rice scientists make first nanoscale pH meter

... a thin shell of metal, usually gold. Many times smaller than living cells, nanoshells can be produced with great precision and the metal shells can be tuned to a...ific wavelengths of light. To form the pH sensor, Halas' team coated the nanoshells with pH-sensitive molecules called paramercaptobenzoic acid, or pMBA. When ...

Nanoparticles, nanoshells, nanotubes: How tiny specks may provide powerful tools against cancer

...s when heated with laser light. What's more, these nanoshells interact with light in specific ways, and can be "...Selective Photothermal Therapy (Abstract 3198) and nanoshells for Combined Cancer Therapy and Imaging in vivo (A..., secondly, near infrared light (NIR). Used alone, nanoshells are non-toxic and can be excreted with no ill effe...

Scientists develop nanotech-laser treatment that kills cancer cells without harming healthy tissue

...recently conducted a similar experiment on mice with cancerous tumors. Instead of carbon nanotubes, the Rice team injected the tumors with gold-coated nanoshells and exposed the animals to near-infrared light for several minutes. The tumors disappeared within 10 days without damaging any healthy tissue. Futu...