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Operating under the umbrella of the Wisconsin Science Literacy Project, SciFusion.org is building and gathering tools, content and resources for teachers to integrate into their classrooms. These resources will help develop the critical thinking skills for a highly literate workforce capable of filling the shortages our society is facing in the Bio Sciences, Health Care, Energy, Nanotechnology, New Agriculture and Informatics.

SciFusion’s first demonstration project is in the exciting fields of Bio Sciences and Health Care, and we invite you to click HERE to read the executive summary for more information.

How can you weigh a single atom? European researchers have built an exquisite new device that can do just that. It may ultimately allow scientists to study the progress of chemical reactions, molecule by molecule.

Carbon nanotubes are ultra-thin fibres of carbon and a nanotechnologist’s dream. They are made from thin sheets of carbon only one atom thick – known as graphene – rolled into a tube only a few nanometres across. Even the thickest is more than a thousand times thinner than a human hair.

Interest in carbon nanotubes blossomed in the 1990s when they were found to possess impressive characteristics that make them very attractive raw materials for nanotechnology of all kinds. “They have unique properties,” explains Professor Pertti Hakonen of Helsinki University of Technology. “They are about 1000 times stronger than steel and very good thermal conductors and good electrical conductors.”

Hakonen is coordinator of the EU-funded CARDEQ project (http://www.cardeq.eu/) which is exploiting these intriguing materials to build a device sensitive enough to measure the masses of atoms and molecules.

Middle and high school students across the country are generally falling behind in life sciences, and the nation is at risk of producing a dearth of qualified workers for the fast-growing bioscience industry, according to a report released Monday.

Students are showing less interest in taking life sciences and science courses, and high schools are doing a poor job of preparing students for college-level science, says the report, funded and researched by Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle, the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the Biotechnology Institute.

The deficiencies will hurt the country’s competitiveness with the rest of the world in the knowledge-based economy, the report concludes.