What's In Your Underwear?

I bet you were expecting these to be stain resistant too, but the key application of nanotech underwear is medical sensing according to Business Week.

The tight elastic waistband of underwear “has tight contact and direct exposure with the skin and it allows for direct sweat monitoring via the chemical-sensing electrodes. And it seems elastic is a hardy textile. Engineers at the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering discovered that even after aggressive testing by stretching, folding and pulling, the chemical sensors printed on the elastic still retained their sensing ability and could detect hydrogen peroxide and NADH — two compounds that sensors in “smart’ systems will need to recognize.”

According to Professor Joseph Wang, from the Department of NanoEngineering at the University of California,

If, for example, an injured soldier went into shock, enzymes on the electrode would sense rising levels of the biomarkers lactate, glucose and norepinephrine. This would cause the concentrations of products generated by the enzymes to change — higher hydrogen peroxide, lower norepi-quinone, higher NADH and lower NAD+. This would cause the built-in logic structure to output the signal “1,0,1,0″ which indicates shock and could trigger a pre-determined treatment response.

The obvious problem seems to be how to transmit the data back to base without constantly bathing ones reproductive parts in microwave radiation, and of course keeping any medical supplies fresh in what is a notoriously warm and humid part of the anatomy.

Still, it should make an interesting and amusing change after sitting though years of conference speakers demonstrating the stain resistant properties of nanotech textiles using a glass of red wine (and sometimes ruining a carpet in the process).

Luna's Trimetaspheres

Arrowhead Research announced today that it had sold off the IP of one of its subsidiaries, Tego, to Luna Innovations in exchange for $430,000 less legal and transaction fees in exchange for a cut of any proceeds. Luna of course have been looking at buckyballs for improved MRI contrast agents – careful here! it’s a tricky subject –  for quite a while using the wonderfully named trimetaspheres.

The basic idea is great. You can take a nasty toxic substance such as gadolinium that happens to show up very well in MRI scans, and encase it in a fullerene cage so that all the patients body sees is carbon. However as with much to do with fullerenes, producing anything that works at a cost that is even vaguely competitive tends to be far tougher that originally envisaged.

So what we are seeing is an ongoing migration of various bits of nanotech IP towards companies that can turn them into a useful application. This particular bit of IP came from Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc whose plans for global domination included hoovering up every bit of carbon related IP they could fund and worrying what to do with it later.