Color is all about the wavelength of light that comes off an object. A chemical, a pigment called anthocyanin is what makes an apple red. But sometimes an object doesn't have a particular color because of pigment. You can also make something appear to ... Read More...
Tomorrow is Valentine's day and just in time is the "world's tiniest" cupid. Cupid is the little guy who flies around and shoots arrows into folks and makes them fall in love. Now scientists at Brigham Young University have made a tiny cupid out ... Read More...
Cotton is one of those materials that everyone takes for granted. What's nano about that? Scientists from Eindoven University (in the Netherlands) have treated cotton with a special polymer that makes the cotton magical. At room temperature the polymer-treated cotton will hold 340% of ... Read More...
Some materials just hate water. They are known as hydrophobic. Superhydrophobic means they really hate water. Now there is a new class of materials that really hate everything. These are superomniphobic. Scientists at the University of Michigan have made a material ... Read More...
Cotton is one of those materials that everyone takes for granted. What's nano about that? Scientists from Eindoven University (in the Netherlands) have treated cotton with a special polymer that makes the cotton magical. At room temperature the polymer-treated cotton will hold 340% of its ... Read More...
Nature is used as a source of inspiration for a lot of nanometer-scale things that we make. Scientists will examine something in nature, figure out how it works and then try to make something similar. The idea is that a zillion years of evolution has ... Read More...
Scientists at the College of Wooster in Ohio have once again proven that sometimes good things come out of random discovers. So is the case with Osorb a nanomaterial made of glass that helps clean up water. The nanomaterial wich is made from nanometer-scale ... Read More...
When you suck in a lung full of air some of the oxygen winds up being taken up into the blood. But if you take a big slug of air and shoot it directly into your blood (DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME) it ... Read More...
Over the past 50 years, computers have been getting faster and faster which means also we can make them smaller and smaller. Now parts of computers chips are around 30 nanometers---take a hair cut it across its length 1000 times, take one of those ... Read More...
Most of the time when we take medicine most of the medicine winds up doing not much of anything. We take an antibiotic for an infect and only a small number of molecules wind up finding their way to the bacteria that we are ... Read More...
Think nano is new? Think again. The term nanotechnology is relatively new but the idea of manipulating matter at the nanometer scale isn't. Back in the good old days, the really old days of the pyramids, Macchu Picchu and other ancient stuff, artists were doing ... Read More...
It happens to most of us, a fumble and whoops the phone, ipod, something goes into a puddle, a pool, yikes the toilet. Wouldn't it be nice to have our gizmos waterproof? There are a lot of different ways to do that, but making things ... Read More...
Plug it in. Charge it up. We forget there are all different kinds of energy. Your little brother running around is using energy....wasting energy? Light a campfire, that is another kind of energy. Most energy you can convert from one to another. Get on a ... Read More...
The colors in nature are sometimes pigments but other times they are nano-scale structures that don't absorb different wavelengths of light but diffract them. Think rainbows and you realize the sky isn't painted with different colors from Sherwin Williams. Now scientists from Read More...
Making things smaller is one of the important things that we do with nanotechnology. Making transistors (those little switches that make up computer chips) smaller has been going on since they were first discovered 50 years ago. Now scientists in Australia and the United ... Read More...
Dust is not only an annoyance gloaming on to stuff and making us sneeze. It can be dangerous if it gets into the air and there is a lot of it. At the nanometer scale, things are different and things that can burn---burn a ... Read More...
Scientists at IBM report that they are able to store data on the smallest set of atoms ever. They can store a bit of data on just 12 atoms. Probably not ready for your thumb drive (or even your pinkie drive) this new approach ... Read More...
This showed up on one of the nano RSS feeds. It has nothing to do with nano but it is funny and clever. In the quest for renewable energy why not harness the energy hamsters expend running around their wheels. There are hamster-powered floor ... Read More...
Right! Man's best friend, the dog, now has his/her own best friend, 'Dirty Dog, Door Mat'. A nanotech inspired product that according the manufacturer: "Dog Gone Smart's Dirty Dog Doormat is based on its Advanced Microfiber Technology that entraps dirt, mud and water immediately. ... Read More...
Solar panels are pretty common and you find them on houses on top of building all trying to capture a bit of sunshine and make some electricity. Now some research is suggesting that you can make paint that is able to do the same ... Read More...
