Welcome to 2019 and the 6th anniversary of Sustainable Nano! This is a big year for the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology: we have an important National Science Foundation review in the spring, and in the fall we will submit the proposal to continue our NSF funding for another five years. In 2018, the CSN had 38 scientific articles published (you can see the full list here), whose authors included undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty members from across 15 collaborating research groups.
2018 was also big year for Sustainable Nano as the CSN’s outreach arm, including celebrating our fifth anniversary and publishing 32 blog posts and six new podcast episodes.
We’re continuing to grow our audience, with 148,000 page views for the blog (up from 125,000 last year). The podcast has grown as well, with almost 5,200 downloads for the podcast (up a bit from 5,000 in 2017 even though we ended up producing fewer episodes). We’re up to 1,617 Facebook page likes and 1,896 Twitter followers — think we can make it to 2,000 in 2019?
And as of fall 2018, we also have a small but growing Instagram page!
But enough stats! What posts were people reading? Our all-time top post continues to be the highly Googlable How do Lithium Ion Batteries Work? A Nanotechnology Explainer by Juli Troianno from 2013. A few of the most popular Sustainable Nano posts written in 2018 were:
- Can gold melt at room temperature? Melting temperature depression! by Meng Wu (traducción al español aquí)
- How can graphene nanotechnology improve smart contact lenses? by Nikki Hoang (traducción al español aquí)
- Nano in your ear! Nanotechnology and hearing by Bob Hamers (traducción al español aquí)
A gold diadem from ancient Greece (4th Century BCE) at the Dallas Museum of Art. (image by Mary Harrsch) 
Smart contact lens (image by Amber Case) 
Stereocilia in inner ear (used with permission from Rask-Andersen et al. 2017)
As for the podcast, our most-downloaded episodes from 2018 were the last two episodes of Season 3:
- Ep 24. Using MRI technology to study nanoparticles
- Ep 25. Finding the Next Fix for the World’s Problems: More from the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station
One cool thing about analyzing these stats is that we see a pattern where our content continues to build audience over time, not just on the day it’s released. So the most-viewed and -downloaded blog and podcast entries tend to be ones that came from earlier in the year, and have had more time to gather readers and listeners.
Thanks to all of you for following along with us, and we look forward to sharing lots more content in 2019 on nanotechnology, sustainability, and life in science.
Sustainable Nano 