a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
Have you ever thought about what you’d be like without a skeleton? Our skeletons give us our structure and also allow us to move. Without the bones that make up our skeleton we’d just be a mass of tissues that couldn’t move. In much the same way, cells have something called a cytoskeleton to give …
Continue reading "Snapshots of the Cytoskeleton"
How do we "see" nanoparticles when they're too small to view with a normal microscope? In this episode we interview Kelly Zhang, a graduate student in the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology who recently published a paper about a new way to use NMR technology (like MRI for chemistry) to study the behavior of molecules that …
Continue reading "Ep 24. Using MRI technology to study nanoparticles"
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 …
Engineered nanoparticles (NPs) are now components of thousands of consumer products, including personal care products, sporting goods, solar panels, and next-generation batteries. In fact, demand for electric car batteries (built using lithium-nickel-cobalt nanosheets) might cause lithium prices to skyrocket in the coming decade, and completely change the way in which the element lithium is recovered …
Continue reading "Engineered Nanoparticles Change Shape in Soil and Groundwater"
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 …
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"
I recently had an article published in the journal Environmental Science: Nano along with seven co-authors from the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology. The title is “Formation of supported lipid bilayers containing phase-segregated domains and their interaction with gold nanoparticles.”1 At first glance that title may be confusing, but I promise it will all make sense …
Continue reading "What’s in a scientific publication’s name? One research article title explained"
What happens to cells when they come into contact with nanoparticles? Researchers in the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology are trying to answer this question in a lot of different ways. The effect of exposing organisms to nanoparticles is not as simple as life or death. In one recent study1 we explored the molecular changes that …
Continue reading "Using Gene Expression to Learn About Nanoparticle Toxicity"
If you’re like me, you might already have a pile of old electronics in your basement, waiting for you to figure out what to do with them. You haven’t put them out with the trash, because you know it’s a good idea to keep them out of landfills… But why is that? Researchers have known …
Continue reading "Why Shouldn’t We Toss Lithium-Ion Batteries in the Trash?"
Scientists have known for some time that nanomaterials can stick to cell membranes and, in some cases, damage the membrane in the process. But what exactly do nanomaterials stick to on the cell membrane? A particular type of molecule called lipopolysaccharides (LPS) may provide a key to answering this question.1 Many of us take notice …
Continue reading "How Do Nanoparticles Stick to Bacteria? Or, How Are Cell Membranes Like Velcro?"
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