Happy Mole Day! On October 23 we celebrate Avogadro’s Number (6.02 x 1023), an important unit of measurement in chemistry. Every year, the American Chemical Society promotes the week that includes Mole Day as National Chemistry Week (NCW). This year, NCW is October 20-26, and the theme is Marvelous Metals. There are local events being hosted all around the U.S., and you can find a lot of them listed here on Facebook. If you want to learn what makes metals so marvelous, check out this article from in chemistry, the ACS Student Member Magazine.
As for Sustainable Nano, it turns out that lots of nanomaterials are made of marvelous metals! See the list below for a sampling of our posts that deal with metals.
Understanding metal crystal structure
- Nano-crystalline metals and sustainability
- How can you calculate how many atoms are in a nanoparticle?
Gold
- Will ingesting gold nanoparticles make me smarter?
- Can gold melt at room temperature? Melting temperature depression!
- Engineered gold nanoparticles can be like ice cream scoops covered in chocolate sprinkles
- Gold nanotechnology featured on Academic Minute
- Using gold nanobullets for genetic engineering
- Charge and gold nanoparticle toxicity
- What do gold nanoparticles have to do with wrinkly skin?
- Animated Ladybug Super-Zoom-In
Battery metals: lithium, cobalt, nickel, & manganese
- How do lithium-ion batteries work?
- Why shouldn’t we toss lithium-ion batteries in the trash?
- What’s with all those flaming cell phones? A primer on battery safety
- How do nanomaterials from e-waste transform in water? Computational chemistry helps find the answer
- Battery behavior in the biosphere: How we probed nanoscale battery materials interacting with bacteria
More metals: titanium, iron, & copper
Mole Day posts
- Happy Mole Day: 2018 Edition — “Here is yet another back-of-the-envelope calculation to reveal just how small nano is.”
- How many moles of gas are in a Pokémon Gastly? — Mole Day 2017
- Happy Mole Day 2016! — “How many water molecules do I put in a 70 Å x 70 Å x 70 Å box containing a 4 nm gold nanoparticle?”
- Happy Mole Day 2015! — National Chemistry Week color-themed posts
- Happy Mole Day from the CSN! — “let’s explore what this unit actually is…”
Sustainable Nano 