a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
Most of us are familiar with the concept of “side effects.” This is when something that is designed to be helpful ends up having some harm that goes along with it. For patients with cancer, anti-cancer drugs can be life-savers – literally. The benefits of using these drugs are apparent to anyone whose cancer has …
Continue reading "Can We Make Nanoparticles More Sustainable?"
You walk past a body products store on a weekend shopping trip and are immediately overtaken by fragrance, your nose saturated with floral, sugary and tropical scents. Intrigued by the promise of a candle sale, you venture in, perusing the soaps, mists, and candles. About ten free samples later, you find some products labeled ‘aromatherapy’ …
Continue reading "Combining the Old With the New: using nanotechnology to enhance ancient medicines"
Some time ago, my labmates and I invented a character named “Nano Person” as a way of giving some frame of reference for the nano-scale. Nano Person fights nano-crime as well as societal biases and restrictive mindsets, but that’s a digression for another blog post. This thought experiment got me wondering, what would the world …
Continue reading "Zack’s Nano Adventure"
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 …
In this episode, we talk about a recent research study that looked at how one type of battery nanomaterial affects bacteria called Shewanella oneidensis. We interview Mimi Hang and Ian Gunsolus, who were co-first authors of the study as graduate students in the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology.
As a fan of sci-fi, I recently watched two classic movies: the original Star Wars (which you’re probably familiar with) and Ghost in the Shell (a post-cyberpunk Japanese animation). Both movies had a very interesting commonality: human-machine hybrids. But what does this have to do with nanotechnology? In the Star Wars movies, the only thing …
Continue reading "Bacteria in the Shell: A Nano-bio Hybrid for Solar Energy Capture"
Along with eight colleagues (most from the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology) I recently co-authored an article in the American Chemical Society’s Chemistry of Materials journal titled “Impact of Nanoscale Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide (NMC) on the Bacterium Shewanella oneidensis MR‐1.”1 Just as the name suggests, we analyzed how nanoscale NMC, an important material in some …
Did you know that under the right conditions, bacteria can divide every 20 minutes?1 (That’s how bacteria reproduce – one cell splits into two.) That means that 10 bacterial cells can produce 2,621,440 bacteria after only 6 hours! No wonder you can get sick so quickly after eating food contaminated with bacteria. Figure 1 below …
Continue reading "Why do Scientists Care about Bacterial Replication?"
Interested in learning more about the study on NMC nanomaterials and bacteria that was discussed in Monday's post? We've had two more opportunities to discuss this Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology research with the media this week, and it's pretty cool to see how each piece explains the work a little differently. Thank you to KARE 11's Jeff …
Continue reading "More Media Coverage for NMC Paper"
Last Thursday, the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology had a brush with mainstream media exposure: A Twin Cities TV station, KMSP: Fox 9, did a story about a recent CSN publication for the 9 o’clock news! The opportunity to get such broad public exposure for our research was really exciting. In the case of Thursday’s TV …
Continue reading "Our Day of TV News Glory"
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