a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
Happy Nano Day, Everyone! Though you might be looking at me weird if you use the dd/mm dating system, tomorrow (10/9 in the U.S.) is the day to celebrate the scale that’s minuter than micro and more prodigious than pico. So what is Nano Day? Nano Day, or National Nanotechnology Day, is a celebration started …
The size of the materials in nanotechnology is one of the most important factors that power and define the properties of the nanomaterials. But there are many different techniques for measuring that size, and depending on the measurement methods, the results may vary! It doesn’t mean the actual lengths or diameters of the materials change: …
Continue reading "How do we measure the size of nanoparticles in a solution?"
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"
If you’re like me, you often find yourself thinking about random things. For example, just the other day I was thinking to myself, “what’s the diameter of a gold nanoparticle* in light years**?” Unit conversions have been a thorn in my side for as long as I can remember, so I was pleased to discover …
Continue reading "What’s in a Unit Anyway? Part 1: From Protons to Galaxies"
Here at Sustainable Nano, we've published several posts talking about the instrumentation used by researchers in the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology to visualize nanoparticles and cell membranes, such as atomic force microscopy and super-resolution fluorescence microscopy. For this week's post, we're sharing a video produced by the American Chemical Society's Reactions series, called "How Can You See an Atom?" The …
Continue reading "How Can You See an Atom? – ACS Reactions Video"
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