a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
Earlier this week I heard a quick piece on NPR's Marketplace called "75 years ago, the transistor ignited the fire of modern innovation," about how the transistor was "born" exactly 75 years ago today: December 16, 1947. It reminded me of a blog post written by CSN graduate student Diamond Jones (now Dr. Diamond Jones!) …
Continue reading "Happy 75th Birthday to the Transistor!"
Did you know that the world’s first computers filled entire rooms? Now we can carry even more computing power than those early machines in the palm of our hands, thanks to advancements in nano- and transistor technology. Transistors are the components in a computer that control the flow of electricity and therefore allow the computer …
Continue reading "Are transistors getting too small? (How small is too small?)"
When talking about chemists, what image comes to your mind? Labs, tubes, beakers, colorful solutions, turning dirt into gold... Yes, yes, those images represent some parts of chemistry in a general way, but did you know that there exists a group of chemists whose main task is to code? (For example, check out this video.) …
Continue reading "A Quick Peek Into Computational Chemistry"
When I talk about artificial intelligence (AI), the usual images that come to mind are from fiction: Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the cyborg from The Terminator, or perhaps the gloomy world of The Matrix. Since March 2016, however, the poster child for real-world AI has become AlphaGo, the computer program developed by Google Deepmind …
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 "Happy Mole Day 2016!"
In 2005, Science magazine published their 125th anniversary issue and posed 25 of the biggest questions “facing science over the next quarter-century”.1 In my previous post, I talked about how, ten years later, the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology is tackling one of those questions: “How Far Can We Push Chemical Self-Assembly?”2 In today’s post, I’m …
Continue reading "2016: The Start of a New… Decade? Part 2"
Much of our work in the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology lies in the realm of chemistry. That is to say, our work seeks to understand phenomena at the molecular level. For example, we want to know what molecules we can add to the surface of a nanoparticle to control how stable it is and how …
Continue reading "How do Scientists Study Complex Chemical Systems?"
Not too long ago, a team of frustrated scientists glanced up from their computer screens and saw the untapped potential beyond their lab doors. They had spent years trying to unravel the mysteries of protein folding, but some just couldn’t seem to be solved. Why not harness the brainpower of the public? The biochemists disguised …
Continue reading "Citizen nanoscientists: Can you design nanomaterials from the couch?"
Sustainable Nano 