a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
Did you know that 2019 is the International Year of the Periodic Table? We chemists in the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology are happy to celebrate this all year long! A particularly delicious example of the Periodic Table (image from the Science History Institute) The periodic table as we know it was first published 150 years …
Continue reading "Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Periodic Table: Nano-Style!"
Nano is small. Yet we find that a few nanoparticles can have very large scale effects. How do we make sense of these disparate scales? Several previous blog posts -- such as this, this, and this -- have provided great insight to this question. But as a chemistry professor I know that you can never have too …
Continue reading "Happy Mole Day: 2018 Edition"
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 "How can you calculate how many atoms are in a nanoparticle?"
Ever since the first human being looked up to the starry night, the dream of chasing the stars and space has never stopped. A long way back, in ancient Northern European mythology, the world tree, Yggdrasil, was a holy tree in the center of the universe, connecting the heavens and the earth. In Jack and …
Continue reading "Space Elevator: A Lasting Dream for a Sky-reaching Tree"
Everything is made of atoms. Usually these atoms are strongly connected to one another, in an amazing variety of configurations. But atoms are so tiny, how can we possibly understand the structure of matter at the atomic level? You probably have seen pictures of molecules or materials, zoomed in to the atomic level, which show …
Continue reading "The Atomic Difference Between Diamonds and Graphite"
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