Sustainable Nano Summer Update

Sustainable Nano is taking a bit of a break for the summer, but science doesn’t stop! Activities for the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology include our Research Experience for Undergraduates and Research Experience for Veterans programs, which bring undergraduate students from around the country to do research in CSN labs for 10 weeks each summer.

REU-REV students — Our 2017 REU/REV students suited up for a tour of the clean room at the Minnesota Nano Center (see here for a blog post about the tour from last summer).

Keep reading below for some recommended reading about other summer science, both from the CSN and other researchers.

Plasmonic metals: solar cells enhanced with gold nanoparticles
Nanotechnology addressing challenges in sustainability! Graphene based filters remove salt from seawater in the lab
Associate director Christy Haynes was asked to adapt her recent Sustainable Nano blog post into an editorial for Analytical Chemistry
Are There Nanoplastics in Your Personal Care Products?
CSN researchers developed a carbon dot synthesis activity that can be used from high school through college (the first author on this paper, Susan Pham, is a REU student from last summer!)

Carbon Dots — Nanoscale carbon dots made from citric acid and malic acid fluoresce under UV light. (reprinted from Pham et al. (2017)¹ with permission from the American Chemical Society)

Stay tuned for more new Sustainable Nano posts coming soon, including several by our REU/REV students! Meanwhile, what other nanoscience stories have piqued your interest this summer?

REFERENCE

1. Pham SN, Kuether JE, Gallagher MJ, Hernandez RT, Williams DN, Zhi B, Mensch AC, Hamers RJ, Rosenzweig Z, Fairbrother H, Krause MO, Feng ZV, & Haynes CL. “Carbon Dots: A Modular Activity To Teach Fluorescence and Nanotechnology at Multiple Levels.” Journal of Chemical Education (2017). doi: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.6b00995