Nanoblock (Japanese: ナノブロック Hepburn: Nanoburokku?) is a line of construction toys manufactured by Kawada Co. Ltd, a toy company based in Tokyo, Japan. Nanoblock was first introduced into the Japanese market in 2008 by Kawada Co. Ltd, a toy company based in Tokyo, Japan.[2] Nanoblock is distributed overseas by local companies, including Schylling Inc. in the United States and Mark's Europe in France, Benelux and Portugal. In 2012 imports of Nanoblocks reached 31 countries. In 2010 Nanoblock won an Outstanding Performance Award in the High Target category at the Japan Toy Awards for the deluxe edition set based on Neuschwanstein Castle.[4] The following year Nanoblock won the Grand Prize in the High Target category at the 2011 Japan Toy Awards for model of the Tokyo Skytree.[5] In 2012 Nanoblock won the Brand License Award at the 2012 Licensing of the Year Awards. The Nanoblock range includes original designs as well as licensed sets. Kawada is currently releasing four original series.
The Miniature collection series features miniatures designs of animals, musical instruments and Christmas themes with all sets being around 80 to 150 pieces.[7] The Sights to See series includes designs of world landmarks and notable buildings with sets ranging in size from 200 bricks to 600.[8] The Advanced Hobby series also features notable buildings and landmarks but on a much larger scale with sets in the series being all over 2000 pieces.[9] The largest set is Neuschwanstein Castle deluxe edition at 5,800 pieces.[9] The fourth series are aimed at girls with themes including weddings and birthdays. Kawada has created sets based on various licenses including The Adventures of Tintin, Pokémon, Shaun the Sheep and Sanrio characters including Cinnamoroll, Hello Kitty, KeroKeroKeroppi and My Melody.[11] A series of sets based on Disney characters is sold exclusively at the Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea theme parks.[12] In 2013 it was announced that Kawada were to produce two sets based on Capcom's Mega Man video game franchise as part of the series' 25th anniversary.
[13] In 2015 four sets based on characters from the video game franchise Street Fighter were released.[15] The four characters produced were Ryu, Chun-Li, Guile and Dhalsim. Nanoblocks are similar in design to a Lego brick but are smaller in scale, with the smallest brick being 4 mm × 4 mm × 5 mm. The bricks are 1⁄8 the size of Kawada's Diablock line of bricks.[17] The underside of the bricks are different from Lego bricks in that they use a dividing flange, known as the double-ridged backing system, instead of the tube system that Lego employs.[18] The bricks are made using ABS plastic and there are eleven different brick types, the biggest being an 8×2 brick and the smallest a single stud brick. ^ a b cThomas Nann et al. Nanomaterials and their mesoscopic properties have fascinated many scientists in recent years. The general public associates Nanotechnology probably more with microscopic robots as depicted in Figure 1. Figure 1: Artistic view of a micro-submarine in a blood vessel.
CONEYL JAY / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY To date, there is still a huge gap between applications such as the micro-sub (they only exist in the fantasy of some artists) and what nanoscience and –technology can deliver. More specifically, nanoscientists are able to synthesise a very wide range of mono-disperse (equally sized and shaped) nanoparticles with new and useful mesoscopic properties, but the options to assemble them into a larger nano-architecture are extremely limited. For a number of years, the Nann research group pursued the goal (one amongst others of course) to find a method to link two different, randomly chosen nanoparticles ino one nano-object – a nanoparticle hetero-dimer, the simplest form of a “complex” nano-architecture. The first step towards a hetero-dimer was to control the number of functional/accessible sites on the surface of the nanoparticles. In order to do so, we attached the nanoparticles of choice to a solid substrate to separate a small contact area from the bulk of the nanoparticles’ surface as schematically shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Schematic depiction of “mono-functionalisation” strategy. This idea is not entirely new and is similar to the “Merrifield” peptide synthesis and other solid support synthesis methods in chemistry. However, polymers are unsuitable solid supports for our purpose, because they “wrap” around the nanoparticles, thus creating more than one contact area. The solution was to synthesise a second type of nanoparticle as solid support. Figure 3 shows a transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of gold nanoparticles attached to a solid silica support particle. Figure 3: “Strawberry” particle – gold nanoparticles attached to a silica solid support. Functionalising and cleaving the nanoparticles off their solid support opens up a number of interesting options already: the resulting mono-functional particles (particles with functionality at just one spot) can be used to reversibly dimerise particles, which may have potential applications in biosensing and other areas [1].
The final step linking two different nanoparticles includes first mono-functionalising both types of particles with different surface-functionality and then linking these particles chemically. Figure 4 shows TEM micrographs of a hetero-dimer comprising of a gold and a magnetite nanoparticle. Figure 4 B. shows the corresponding scanning TEM image, where gold atoms are shown inblue and iron in green. Figure 4: Gold/magnetite hetero-dimer. TEM picture from [2]. One might argue that this work comprises a nice academic exercise, but still lacks far behind the vision shown in Figure 1. However, linking two different nanoparticles (or even the same type of nanoparticles) offers a number of advantages that can be exploited for various applications already. For example, by combining a gold and a magnetic nanoparticle, the resulting object has the combined properties of both. This could be used in the area of nanomedicine as multi-modal contrast agent or – if the linkage is reversible – an in-vivo biosensor.