2016: Sustainable Nano Year in Review

Happy New Year, everyone!

2016 was a very busy year for Sustainable Nano and the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology. Researchers in the Center had nine papers published in scientific journals and have a number of others already submitted for review (you can see a running list of our publications here, including links to many public-friendly blog posts explaining the research).

Here on the blog, we had over 146,000 views for the year, with visitors from 190 different countries! We published 52 new blog posts; about half were written by our undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral trainees, and the other half by faculty, staff, and guest bloggers.

HAADF — A bacteria-nanoparticle hybrid from Bacteria in the Shell, one of our most popular posts of 2016 (image courtesy of Kelsey Sakimoto and Peidong Yang)

Here are a few of our most popular posts of 2016, in case you missed any of them:

How Can You Calculate How Many Atoms Are In a Nanoparticle? by Professor Cathy Murphy
Carbon Nanotubes: the Next Generation of Global Water Purification? by grad student Emily Caudill
What’s With All Those Flaming Cell Phones? by CSN Director Bob Hamers
Bacteria in the Shell: A Nano-bio Hybrid for Solar Energy Capture by grad student Autumn Qiu
Nanomaterials in Bicycles???? by grad student Margy Robinson

All of these new posts had over 500 views, but our most-viewed post all year was a classic from 2014 with over 14,000 visits: The Atomic Difference Between Diamonds and Graphite.

5 - diamond vs graphite structures — Diamond (left) and graphite (right) are both made of carbon atoms. A desire to understand the difference has brought a lot of readers to Sustainable Nano! (image by Materialscientist)

We were also very proud to have had a number of blog posts recognized as ScienceSeeker Editor’s Selections throughout the year: Dr. Hamers’ Flaming Cell Phones and Emily Caudill’s Next Generation of Global Water Purification from the list above, as well as Let’s Talk About Responsible Science Communication… by Professor Christy Haynes, Aerogels: Nanotechnology to Space and Beyond by grad student Merve Doğangün, The Science of Snow by postdoctoral researcher Nicholas Niemuth, and Sunburns and Circuits: How Nanotechnology is Pushing the Boundaries of Computing by undergraduate student John Van Gilder.

Finally, this was a big year for expanding Sustainable Nano’s multi-media empire! First, our Center research was featured on a couple of TV news stories (details here and here). We also premiered two videos about how Fluorescence is Awesome, made in collaboration with ACS Reactions, and this fall we launched the Sustainable Nano Podcast, which has eleven episodes so far and will continue every other week this spring.

Recording for the Sustainable Nano podcast (L-R: Miriam Krause, Qiang Cui, & Rigoberto Hernandez)

Eager for more updates about sustainability, nanotechnology, and life in science? You can follow Sustainable Nano on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. To subscribe to email updates from the blog, just scroll up to the top of this page to find the form.

Thanks for reading the Sustainable Nano blog! We can’t wait to get started on 2017.