We could get together a few smart people and come up with solutions to removing blood clots with nano-robots or repairing broken aneurysms. Coiling and tPA are so outdated, why aren't we thinking grand ideas? They most certainly won't come from any of our existing stroke associations.
http://www.rdmag.com/news/2015/05/electricity-generating-nano-wizards-quantum-dots-are-ideal-nanolab?
Just as alchemists always dreamed of turning common metal into gold,
their 19th century physicist counterparts dreamed of efficiently turning
heat into electricity, a field called thermoelectrics. Such scientists
had long known that, in conducting materials, the flow of energy in the
form of heat is accompanied by a flow of electrons. What they did not
know at the time is that it takes nanometric-scale systems for the flow
of charge and heat to reach a level of efficiency that cannot be
achieved with larger scale systems. Now, in a paper published in EPJ B
Barbara Szukiewicz and Karol Wysokiński from Marie Curie-Skłodowska
University, in Lublin, Poland have demonstrated the importance of
thermoelectric effects, which are not easily modelled, in
nanostructures.
Since the 1990s, scientists have looked into developing efficient
energy generation from nanostructures such as quantum dots. Their
advantage: they display a greater energy conversion efficiency leading
to the emergence of nanoscale thermoelectrics. The authors evaluate the
thermoelectric performance of models made of two quantum dots—which are
coupled electrostatically—connected to two electrodes kept at a
different temperature and a single quantum dot with two levels. First,
they using the theoretical approach based on approximations to calculate
the so-called thermoelectric figure of merit, expected to be high for
systems with high energy conversion efficiency. Then, they calculated
the charge and heat fluxes as a means to define the efficiency of the
system.
They found that the outcomes of the direct calculations giving the
actual—as opposed to theoretical—performance of the system were less
optimistic. For most parameters with an excellent performance,
calculated predictions turned out to be surprisingly poor. These
findings reveal that effects that are not easily formalized using
equations are important at the nanoscale. This, in turn, calls for new
ways to optimize the structures before they can be used for nanoscale
energy harvesting.
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