The premier issue of ACerS’ new quarterly glass journal has just been put online and - good news - all of the content of this first issue is available for free!

The International Journal of Applied Glass Science has been in development for over a year, and the demand for such a publication is the direct result of the growing call for glass and glass-related materials in the world’s emerging technologies, such as energy, medicine, transportation, construction, environment, optics and defense.

The inaugural issue of IJAGS is organized on the theme of “Modern Aspects of Non-crystalline Solids.” This theme allows editor L. David Pye and his international advisory board to present something of a survey of articles on modern glassmaking, glass science, strength, architecture, aesthetics, photo-electric properties and bioglass materials written by an amazing set of authors including Richard K. Brow, Larry L. Hench, Carol M. Janzten and Rustum Roy.

Here is an abbreviated table of contents:

• Glass Science and Glassmaking: A Personal Perspective (p 3-15)
  Rustum Roy
• How Do Crystals Form and Grow in Glass-Forming Liquids: Ostwald’s Rule of Stages and Beyond (p 16-26)
  Jürn W. P. Schmelzer, Vladimir M. Fokin, Alexander S. Abyzov, Edgar D. Zanotto, Ivan Gutzow
• The Strength of Silicate Glasses: What Do We Know, What Do We Need to Know? (p 27-37)
  Charles R. Kurkjian, Prabhat K. Gupta, Richard K. Brow
• Durable Glass for Thousands of Years (p 38-62)
  Carol M. Jantzen, Kevin G. Brown, John B. Pickett
• Glass and Light (p 63-73)
  Hong Li, Mark J. Davis, Alexander J. Marker, III, Joseph S. Hayden
• Glasses for Photonic Applications (p 74-86)
  Kathleen Richardson, Denise Krol, Kazuyuki Hirao
• Glass Substrates for Liquid Crystal Displays (p 87-103)
  Adam Ellison, Iván A. Cornejo
• Glass and Medicine (p 104-117)
  Larry L. Hench, Delbert E. Day, Wolfram Höland, Volker M. Rheinberger
• Glass in Architecture (p 118-129)
  Mehran Arbab, James J. Finley

Both the print and online versions of IJAGS are produced in partnership with Wiley Periodicals.

The online version of future issues of IJAGS will always be available at no charge to ACerS members through the Society’s website, while subscriptions (or single-article purchases) to either version are available to the public through Wiley.

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Robert Pazik and Constanze Lamprecht are two young researchers who separately work on methods of using nanoparticles as multifunctional drug delivery systems for diseases such as cancer and diabetes. Pazik, who works in chemistry at the Swedish University of Agricultural Science in Uppsala, uses nanoparticles that can be coated with therapeutic drug plus other chemicals that allows the particle to be anchored to a specific site or organ. Lamprecht, a physicist at the University of Linz in Austria, works with carbon nanotubes that can similarly be coated in targeting or therapeutic chemicals. Therapeutic drugs can also be inserted into the nanotubes. Pazik and Lamprecht also discuss the use of magnetic nanoparticle coatings that, when combined with a targeting material, can allow very selective heat treatment of tumor cell sites that also can be reactivated if cancer growth returns.

Pazik and Lamprecht were interviewed at the recent ICACC’10 meeting in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Their work is an example of nanophase drug delivery approaches, a topic that will be the cover story for the March issue of the Bulletin of The American Ceramic Society.

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Via press release, researchers at Oak Ridge National Lab working toward a low-cost DNA sequencing tool for medical diagnostics have proposed using a single-walled carbon nanotube to thread a single strand of DNA from one reservoir to another, analyzing and sequencing the DNA in the process.

In such a device, the negatively charged DNA material, which is immersed in an electrolytic fluid, is propelled through the nanotube by an electric field.

When the current flowing through the nanotube was measured, researchers were surprised by the current of electrolytic ions that was much higher than any prediction.

Arizona State University’s Predrag Krstic and former ORNL researcher Sony Joseph performed atomistic molecular and fluid dynamics simulations at the University of Tennessee’s National Institute for Computational Sciences, located at ORNL.

Krstic and Joseph, in a paper published with their ASU and Columbia collaborators in the Jan. 1, 2010, issue of Science, attributed the mysterious current surge to the “slipping” of water molecules through the perfect and hydrophobic inner surface of the carbon nanotube and to trapped electrical charge.

Understanding such phenomena is key to the development of these single-molecule-detection instruments that would be inexpensive enough to become common in doctor’s offices.

“This is an example of how the front of science is increasingly multidisciplinary, with contributions by experimentalists and theorists in atomic and solid-state physics, chemistry, biology and engineering,” says Predrag.

According to a press release, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, via its Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences Division, is developing a chemical and biological sensor with unprecedented sensitivity.

The device consists of a digital camera, a laser, imaging optics, a signal generator, digital signal processing and other components that can detect tiny amounts of substances in the air.

Researchers believe this new “sniffer” will achieve a detection level that approaches the theoretical limit, surpassing other state-of-the-art chemical sensors. The implications could be significant for anyone whose job is to detect explosives, biological agents and narcotics.

“While the research community has been avoiding the nonlinearity associated with the nanoscale mechanical oscillators, we are embracing it,” says codeveloper Nickolay Lavrik, a researcher in the CNMS. “In the end, we hope to have a device capable of detecting incredibly small amounts of explosives compared to today’s chemical sensors.”

The approach makes use of microcantilevers similar to those used in atomic force microscopy. The microcanilevers serve as microresonators that measure changes in the resonance frequency due to mass changes. Although the concept is relatively simple, assembling a working model is more difficult.

“These challenges are due to requirements of measuring and analyzing tiny oscillation amplitudes that are about the size of a hydrogen atom,” Lavrik reports. He says previous approaches would have required sophisticated low-noise electronic components such as lock-in amplifiers and phase-locked loops, which add cost and complexity.

This new type of sniffer works by deliberately hitting the microcantilevers with relatively large amounts of energy associated with a range of frequencies, forcing them into wide oscillation.

“In the past, people wanted to avoid this high amplitude because of the high distortion associated with that type of response,” says ORNL’s Panos Datskos, a member of the Measurement Science and Systems Engineering Division. “But now we can exploit that response by tuning the system to a very specific frequency that is associated with the specific chemical or compound we want to detect.”

When the target chemical reacts with the microcantilever, it shifts the frequency depending on the weight of the compound, thereby providing the detection.

“With this new approach, when the microcantilever stops oscillating we know with high certainty that the target chemical or compound is present,” Lavrik says.

The researchers envision this technology being incorporated in a handheld instrument that could be used by transportation security screeners, law enforcement officials and the military. Other potential applications are in biomedicine, environmental science, homeland security and analytical chemistry.

Cross-sectional transmission electron microscope image of the functionally graded "smart" coating of hydroxyapatite with nano-silver particles distributed throughout. Credit: NCSU.

A team of North Carolina State University and Oak Ridge National Lab researchers have published a new paper that reports on the possibility of using hydroxyapatite layers seeded with silver particles - customized for each patient - as a coating on joint and bone replacements to help ward off infection.

The interesting idea the group is promoting is to combine two already-known concepts (the benefits of hydroxyapatite to counter rejection while promoting healing and the antimicrobial property of silver) with ion beam-assisted deposition technology to apply varying layers of hydroxyapatite–silver mix.

They tested coatings of functionally graded hydroxyapatite impregnated with nano silver particles (10–50 nm). They report that the amount of Ag (wt.%) on the outer surface of the FGHA ranged from 1.09 to 6.59, which was about half of the average Ag wt.% incorporated in the entire coating.

The group, which published their findings in Acta Biomaterialia, considers their innovation a “smart” material for two reasons. Afsaneh Rabiei, an NCSU associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and one of the paper’s authors explains the first reason saying, ““We call it a smart coating because we can tailor the rate at which the amorphous layer dissolves to match the bone growth rate of each patient,” she says. Rabiei, who is also an associate faculty member of biomedical engineering, notes that this is important because people have very different rates of bone growth (e.g., young people’s bones tend to grow far faster than the bones of older adults).

The second reason they consider it to be a smart material is the variable rate of silver release. According to an NCSU news release, Rabiai says the hydroxyapatite coating allows the silver to be released rapidly after surgery, when there is more risk of infection, due to the faster dissolution of this amorphous layer of the coating. Conversely, the release of silver will continue for the life of the implant but will slow down as the patient heals.

The group also reports adhesion strengths comparable to FGHA without silver. The dominant failure mechanism was epoxy failure, and they report no observations of coating delamination.