a blog by the NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology
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, …
Continue reading "Can nanotechnology help make a better COVID-19 test?"
For many of us, our news feeds and personal conversations have been dominated this week by COVID-19. The disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been in the U.S. for a couple of months, but public awareness has been increasing rapidly and we have reached the point where many university campuses …
Continue reading "COVID-19, Nano, and You"
Some time ago, my labmates and I invented a character named āNano 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 thatās a digression for another blog post. This thought experiment got me wondering, what would the world …
Continue reading "Zack’s Nano Adventure"
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 didnāt work. In fact, it couldnāt work, based on the basic physics of light. Rife was attempting to improve upon the optical …
Continue reading "Royal Rife’s Universal Microscope (and Why It Can’t Exist)"
In this episode, we talk with scientist MG Finn about how viruses are like (and unlike) nanoparticles, and some of the ways researchers want to use viruses to fight disease.
Science and engineering topics appear in many movies ā 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 ānanotechnologyā was coined in 1974 by Norio Taniguchi1, and it began appearing in …
Continue reading "Nano in the Movies"
Sustainable Nano 