a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
What inspires people to do science? Perhaps you, Dear Reader, are interested in understanding how the physical world works. Maybe you saw a rainbow, or ocean waves on the beach, when you were a kid, and therefore have a love for optics, physics, or oceanography. Human-made objects can also inspire scientists. Quite a few people …
Continue reading "Art as Inspiration for Science"
Since our early ancestors first learned to make fires, humans have been producing carbon-based nanoparticles. The smoke and soot from their campfires contained nanoparticles known as fullerenes and carbon nanotubes, along with many other combustion by-products. They must have thought the very crude nanoparticle preparations they created were a bit of a nuisance (depending on …
Heinrich (“Heini”) Rohrer, a nanotechnology pioneer, Nobel Prize winner, and personal mentor to me and many other scientists, has died. The field of nanotechnology was largely enabled by Heini’s co-invention of the scanning tunneling microscope along with his collaborator, Gerd Binnig, in the early-1980s. This microscope scans an atomically sharp tip across a surface to …
Continue reading "A Giant of Nanotechnology Falls – Heinrich Rohrer"
You’re looking at an electron micrograph of gold nanoparticles; a snap shot of tiny gold crystals that are 1/10,000th the diameter of a human hair. Nanoparticles just these like may soon transform every aspect of our day to day lives, from the size of our personal electronic devices to the way diagnose and treat cancer; …
Continue reading "Nanoparticles Are All Around Us"
A Biologist and a Chemist Walk into a Lab…then they have to share space and tools and work together…(you thought that was going to be a joke, right?) Let me preface my opinion on this matter by putting it out there: I am a biologist. I work, however, in a chemistry laboratory. I am also …
Continue reading "Science Discipline Drama – past and present"
When Luke Skywalker receives his father’s lightsaber from Obi Wan in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, he learns that it is “not as random or clumsy as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.” Here at our Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, we don’t work with weapons, no matter how sophisticated …
Continue reading "“How do Lasers Work?” or “Not your father’s lightsaber”"
Sustainable Nano 