Can nanotechnology help make a better COVID-19 test?

Did you know that scientists have used nanotechnology to develop a test for the MERS coronavirus? The results of the test can be seen by the naked eye within 10 minutes of interacting with the viral DNA, which can shorten the analysis and interpretation time.1 Current testing for the COVID-19 virus takes hours or days.2 So, …

Zack’s Nano Adventure

Some time ago, my labmates and I invented a character named ā€œNano Personā€ 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 …

Royal Rife’s Universal Microscope (and Why It Can’t Exist)

Royal Rife

In the 1930s, microscope designer Royal Rife made a splash with reports that he had designed a new microscope that could view nanoscale objects such as viruses!1 The only problem was that it didn’t work. In fact, it couldn’t work, based on the basic physics of light. Rife was attempting to improve upon the optical …

Nano in the Movies

Science and engineering topics appear in many movies – think of the gadgets in the James Bond series. Star Trek, Star Wars, and other long-standing science fiction series, of course, are full of futuristic transportation, infrastructure, devices and weapons.   The word ā€œnanotechnologyā€ was coined in 1974 by Norio Taniguchi1, and it began appearing in …