Successful Conference in Timisoara - June 25-26 , 2015

The Magnetic Fluids & Applications meetings are organized in Timisoara since 1980 by the Politehnica University of Timisoara and the Timisoara Branch of the Romanian Academy. The workshop Multifunctional nanoparticles, magnetically controllable fluids, complex flows, engineering and biomedical applications held in the period 25-26 June, 2015 with 16 oral presentations, among them 3 keynote lectures and 5 invited talks, proved to be an excellent opportunity for scientists, representatives of industry, master and PhD students from Germany, Russia, Slovakia, Hungary and the host country Romania to have very stimulating discussions towards cooperation for scientific and technological progress in the field.

The abstracts of oral and poster presentations may be seen here.

Latest Status on MPI Research

Magnetic Particle Imaging Webinar Series

Magnetic Insight is proud to launch the first webinar series on Magnetic Particle Imaging, a unique, ultra-sensitive, high resolution molecular imaging approach that longitudinally detects nanoparticles regardless of depth. Sign up for all three!

Tuesday June 9, 2015 9:00 PST/ 18:00 CET  The Basics of MPI
Tuesday July 7, 2015 9:00 PST/ 18:00 CET  Preclinical Applications in MPI
Tuesday August 4, 2015 9:00 PST/ 18:00 CET  Nanoparticle Development for MPI Applications

World Record Speed of a Maglev Train: 603 km/h

The Central Japan Railway company reports that its magnetic levitation bullet train topped 603 km/h on Tuesday during a test run along a length of test track in the Yamanashi prefecture. This was enough to break its own 12-year-old, 361 mph world record set back in 2003. The train reportedly carried 29 engineers during its run.

Unfortunate is the fact that normal passengers will likely never be able to experience these exhilarating speeds -- unless something goes horribly wrong. The rail company plans to limit the trains to a pokey 313 mph for regular service when they come online in 2027. But even at these speeds, commuters could make it from Tokyo to Nagoya in about 40 minutes (less than half the time today's fastest bullet trains require). The company even has aspirations to export this technology to America -- specifically as a high-speed rail line running between New York City and Washington DC.

Use of Moessbauer Spectroscopy for Careful Assessment of Magnetic Nanoparticles

The use of Mossbauer spectroscopy is a simple and direct way to determine the amounts of magnetite and maghemite in an otherwise unknown sample. Quentin Pankhurst et al wrote a nice paper about how to use it and determine magnetite/maghemite weighting directly from the mean isomer shift of the total spectrum, which means that one can apply a simple model-independent curve-fitting methodology. Compared to the older way of using Moessbauer, this takes an awful lot of the work out of the process.

Check out the paper for yourself here.

How to Reliably Measure the SAR of Magnetic Hyperthermia Materials

Wildeboer, Southern and Pankhurst published recently a paper about the reliable measurement of specific absorption rates and intrinsic loss parameters in magnetic hyperthermia. They also carefully reviewed how to cope with non-adiabatic measurement conditions. This paper might very useful for the novice and more experienced user, as they went pretty thoroughly through the methodologies, and have tried to make some recommendations for both the measurement procedure, and the analysis method, that anyone will be able to follow.

Check out this very useful paper here.

Magnetic Carrier Meeting 2014

Our already 10th International Conference on the Scientific and Clinical Applications of Magnetic Carriers took place in Dresden, Germany from June 10-14, 2014. It was a wonderful gathering of more than 330 participants from 41 countries, where we discussed all the different aspects of magnetic nanoparticles and microspheres, how they can be made, used and applied in new and ever more fascinating ways!

Check out all the details at

       http://magneticmicrosphere.com/meeting-tenth

The research discussed at the meeting has now been published in full-size peer-reviewed papers in the Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (JMMM). Check it out here.

How Good Are We at Making Magnetic Nanoparticles?

In a recent review - called a perspective - Lucia Gutierrez and collaborators wrote a nice discussion of the current state of the art in making magnetic nanoparticles. They write that many different single-core and multi-core magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles are being made for biomedical applications. There are more examples of multi-core magnetic particles than single-core ones, especially since coating of particle aggregates within a matrix will result in multi-core particles. However, it is difficult to control the number of cores, inter-core distances and spatial distribution when generating multi-core particles.

Many parameters of the synthesis procedure may have a strong effect on the particles obtained, including temperature, reagent concentrations, surfactant concentrations, and stirring conditions. This is one of the reasons why scaling-up of some of these synthesis routes is extremely complicated. Indeed, one of the difficulties that particle synthesis faces is in batch-to batch reproducibility. This has led to recent work on alternative reaction platforms that can offer more consistent results. One such platform is the use of microwave irradiation as a heating source.

Check out this interesting paper here.