14 DAY TRIAL // A group of investigators at the North Carolina State University (NCSU) announce the development of a new technique for producing golden nanoscale rods in bulk. This material was first developed a few years ago, but producing it at large enough scales to be of practical use proved difficult.
Gold nanorods hold the greatest promise in the fields of physics and medicine, where new biomedical applications and imaging technologies will use these tiny structures to provide doctors with unprecedented views of the diseases they are trying to cure, EurekAlert reports.
“This technique should facilitate the economical manufacture of large volumes of gold nanorods. And that should be good news for both the science community and the biomedical research and development community,” says the senior author of the study, NCSU Professor Dr. Joseph Tracy.
In order to grow commercially-feasible amounts of nanorods, scientists at the university developed a method where they convert gold into nanorods through the use of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C. This substance pulls gold towards it and then deposits it on ready-made carbon nanotubes, as a coating.