Sir Harold Walter Kroto shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for the discovery of the "buckyball", the "molecule" shaped like a soccerball made of 60 carbon atoms. Originally from England, Prof. Kroto has been a Professor of Chemistry ... Read More...
Heather Clark is a nanoscientist at Draper Laboratories who works on developing special tattoos made of tiny little nanoparticles to measure blood glucose so that people with diabetes can better measure their blood sugar levels. How cool is that? Tell us a bit about your background.How ... Read More...
Corey Hewitt is a graduate student at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He discovered his passion for science in high school and is now conducting research in the fields of mechanical engineering and physics. He also invented a thermoelectric material called power felt. Tell us ... Read More...
Nanotechnology is all about making materials that take advantage of their unique properties at the nanometer scale. So what’s up with that? Carbon nanotubes are tiny tubes of just carbon that are about two nanometers wide. But carbon nanotubes are fifty-times stronger ... Read More...
Can nanotechnology help to protect soldiers in combat? Maybe some day. Scientists are working on something that they call liquid armor. In the old days, knights would walk around with really heavy clunky armor. That was OK, but it made it hard to do ... Read More...
Nanoscientists use powerful microscopes called scanning probe microscopes to “see” atoms and molecules. In school or maybe at home you probably used an optical microscope. With those microscopes you can see cells. Scanning probe microscopes are a lot different than optical microscopes. Instead of using lenses and light ... Read More...
Think of the shape of a molecule. What image pops into your head? Probably the double-helix shape of DNA. It is so familiar that when you see a double helix, you immediately think of DNA. The double-helix shape of DNA was discovered by Francis Crick and ... Read More...
Do molecules have a real shape or are they just some kind of random blob like a piece of jello? Well, molecules do have shape (even the molecules that make up jello have shape) and their shape is important. Some molecules, like enzymes (which are ... Read More...
The bonds that hold atoms together to form molecules are called covalent bonds. They are pretty tough and not easily made or broken apart. It takes energy to make the bonds and energy is released when the bonds are broken. Trees take light and use it ... Read More...
If you have a certain kind of diabetes you already know this—getting a tiny bit of blood and then testing it for glucose is a daily ritual. People with diabetes have to test their blood a lot because if their blood sugar goes out of ... Read More...
How do we know if a molecule has a shape? Well, there are various ways, but the most direct is to use a very powerful microscope like the atomic force microscope. That is what Seth Darling used to “see” his surfaces and all those shapes ... Read More...
Everything we do in science is always predictable, right? It always comes out the way we plan it. Put it on a piece of paper and it happens? WRONG! Most of the time science is just that: science, research, you set things up and you ... Read More...