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am_Unition  ·  3511 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Technicians Solve Years-Old Mystery Illness Aboard C-130s

Sure.

I attended a university that was into nanoparticles and biophysics. Here's one cool thing I remember.

Long story short, people are injecting "cloaked" gold nanoparticle structures to a cancer site, which you then zap with a small blast of infrared light. The wavelength should be on the order of the tip-to-tip diameter of the average gold nanoparticle, so longer/larger than what we have as a source in food microwaves, which target the size/wavelength of water. This otherwise-benign radiation excites the gold nanoparticles, which destroy the cells of the tumor, leaving the surrounding tissue unscathed. A polymer coating cloaks the gold nanoparticle from immune system detection, and if I recall correctly, the shape of the gold nanoparticles was spiky, like a 3-dimensional 20-pointed star. So, imagine a star with vertices at each face of a D&D dice.

I gotta sit more colloquiums, across every discipline I can infiltrate. Free knowledge, yo.

Edit: apparently the targeted wavelengths for gold nanoparticle excitation are in the near-infrared, which are quite shorter than water wavelengths. The food microwave wavelength is much longer that I thought, because they're not targeting a molecular resonance, H20 is already so polar that it just rides any EM in the microwave range, rotational excitations converted to thermal energy. K thanks. Sorry.