Have bacteria ever made you sick? If you answer no I’m not going to believe you. When most of us think about bacteria, we’re reminded of how miserable we were the last time we had strep throat or another bacterial illness. Of course there are many other things that can make people sick, but in … Continue reading
Engineered nanoparticles (NPs) are now components of thousands of consumer products, including personal care products, sporting goods, solar panels, and next-generation batteries. In fact, demand for electric car batteries (built using lithium-nickel-cobalt nanosheets) might cause lithium prices to skyrocket in the coming decade, and completely change the way in which the element lithium is recovered … Continue reading
Gold is one of the most highly desired metals in the world. The precious yellow metal is rare in nature and has been used as a medium of currency and in the making of jewelry since ancient times (Figure 1).1 Believed to be brought to Earth by meteors, gold is truly out of this world!2 … Continue reading
Happy Mole Day from the CSN! This is our third annual post for Mole Day (check out the posts for 2014 and 2015), so it is starting to become a tradition now. In this post, I will show you an example of a real pen-and-paper calculation involving moles that I do sometimes in my work as … Continue reading
Two years ago, I wrote a blog post called Two Ways to Make Nanoparticles, describing the difference between top-down and bottom-up methods for making nanoparticles. In the post I commented, “we can estimate, knowing how gold atoms pack into crystals, that there are about 2000 gold atoms in one 4 nm diameter gold nanoparticle.” Recently, a Sustainable Nano reader wrote in to ask about … Continue reading
“I want to ingest nanogold as an experiment to see if it really does turn your brain into a hyper processor.” – question submitted by a Sustainable Nano reader As a chemist, I cringe at the thought of drinking nanoparticles (or anything) out of a beaker in lab. In fact, my knee-jerk response to your … Continue reading
This post is part of our ongoing series of public-friendly summaries describing research articles that have been published by members of the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology. Vivian Feng, a chemistry professor at Augsburg College, is the first author of this paper, which was a collaboration with undergraduate and graduate students as well as other CSN … Continue reading
