NASA Scientist Honored for Spaceship Biosensor

John Bluck
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Phone: 650/604-5026 or 604-9000
E-mail:


November 10, 2005
RELEASE: 05_61AR


NASA Scientist Honored for Spaceship Biosensor

A microscopic sensor that can monitor spaceship water quality and also
detect biohazards and even diagnose cancer is part of an extensive portfolio
of inventions for which a NASA scientist today will receive an award.

Jun Li, a research scientist at the Center for Nanotechnology, NASA Ames
Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley, will be honored by
Nanotech Briefs magazine representatives during a ceremony in Boston.
Nanotechnology is the creation of materials, devices and systems through the
control of matter on the nanometer scale. A nanometer is one-billionth of a
meter.

"We are delighted and proud of this achievement," said Meyya Meyyappan,
director of the Center for Nanotechnology at Ames.

Li's carbon-nanotube biosensor may well be used to monitor water quality on
NASA's next planned spaceship, the Crew Exploration Vehicle that the space
agency plans to fly to the moon, Mars and beyond. Carbon nanotubes are
extremely tiny tubes measured in nanometers. Scientists say nanotechnology
someday could lead to changes in almost everything from computers and
medicine to automobiles and spacecraft.

Li won his prize in the 'Innovator' category, in Nanotech Briefs magazine's
first annual awards. The biosensor is an electronic chip - about the size of
a stamp - that can detect multiple pathogens, which include various bacteria
and viruses. This chip also can diagnose diseases in patients. Some of Li's
inventions may even enable deaf people to hear and blind people to see,
according to the scientist.

Another invention developed by Li and his colleagues to improve the cooling
of computer chips resulted in a second award in the contest's technology
category. This second award will be presented to Nanoconduction Inc.,
Sunnyvale, Calif. A licensing arrangement with NASA gave Nanoconduction the
right to use the invention, which is a composite material made of carbon
nanotubes and copper.

"When you run your personal computer, its main computer chip gets very hot,"
Li noted. "Normally, in your computer you have a heat sink, which is a block
of copper with fins and a fan to cool the chip. The computer chip is
attached to the heat sink, but the contact is very poor," Li explained.

"So we invented a hair-like structure for the intersection of the chip and
the heat sink. These tiny, whisker-like hairs made of carbon nanotubes are
grown directly on the heat sink surface," Li said. In addition, researchers
added copper between the 'whiskers.' The copper fills only the lower portion
next to the copper heat sink's surface. The additional copper layer helps
anchor the feet of the carbon nanotubes in place and spreads heat laterally,
according to Li.

"The carbon whiskers stick out like a brush, and make better contact with
the computer chip to improve cooling of the chip," Li explained. The award
also recognizes other inventions that he developed with his colleagues at
NASA Ames, including a process to 'wire' multiple computer chip layers
together using carbon nanotubes instead of copper.

"Using the new process, manufacturers will be able to add more cake-like
layers of components to silicon chips to increase computer capability," Li
said. Because copper's resistance to electricity flow increases greatly as
the metal's dimensions decrease, there is a limit on how small copper
conductors can be, as well as how much current they can carry. In contrast,
extremely tiny carbon nanotubes can substitute for copper conductors in
smaller computer chips. Carbon nanotubes are much more robust than copper
wires and can carry much more current.

In addition, Li's developments include implantable electrical-neural devices
for potential uses in deep brain stimulation. Stimuli from these devices
could help Parkinson's disease patients as well as those suffering from
epilepsy. In the future, such implanted devices possibly will be able to
read neural signals and input them into a computer or vice versa, according
to Li. Implantable computer chips may help restore patients' impaired
functions such as hearing and vision, he ventured.

Li has published more than 50 peer-reviewed technical papers and filed more
than eight patents. More information about the awards and NASA
nanotechnology can be found on the World Wide Web at:

http://www.nanotechbriefs.com/nano50_winners.html

http://www.ipt.arc.nasa.gov/junli.html

http://www.cict.nasa.gov/assets/pdf/...sors_A_web.pdf

and

http://www.cict.nasa.gov/assets/pdf/...hips_A_web.pdf

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Jacques :-)

www.spacepatches.info