a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
Sustainability is a hot topic these days, even making its way into advertisements for one of the world’s biggest companies (see below). I would guess that on this very day, you have thought about sustainability, or at least encountered the idea. Maybe you saw a commercial that told you to “go green”, or read an …
Continue reading "What Does Sustainable Have To Do With Nano?"
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"
To me, one of the most interesting aspects of nanotechnology is how close in size the nanoparticles we can make are to the nano-sized components of living organisms. These nano sized proteins, lipids and nucleic acids have evolved to form the network of biological machines to support the abundance of life on this planet. Just as …
Continue reading "Nature’s Nanomachines Harnessed to Enable Healthier Delicious Ice Cream"
Some cells in our body have elongated structures or microvilli at their surface. These microvilli have many functions that help the cell to survive, and some features that make them act like train tracks that shuttle substances along them. We recently captured a movie of nanoparticles hitching a ride on these cellular train tracks. Nanoparticles …
Continue reading "Surfing Particles: taking a ride using living cell machinery"
...and what does that have to do with sustainable nanotechnology? As with all good meals of information, let's start this one off with ice cream! In an effort to grow out of my "slim fit" clothes, I've begun an ice-cream-after-every-dinner diet. Even the cat likes my diet! An added bonus is that I go through …
Continue reading "Why Does Old Ice Cream Get Crunchy?"
Now that you’ve somehow gotten to this blog, you’re probably wondering, “Where am I? What is this ‘Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology’?” Our “center” is actually a group of people who care about our environment and are doing collaborative research to help ensure that our planet will be habitable hundreds of years from now – in …
Sustainable Nano 