August 2009

You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2009.

Welcome to SciFusion.org

August 10, 2009 in Bioscience, Energy, Healthcare, Informatics, Nanotechnology, New Agriculture by admin | 3 comments

kids

JOIN US to build Wisconsin’s newest science and technology resources for teachers, students and their communities.

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.

Nanotubes Weigh a Single Atom

August 6, 2009 in Nanotechnology by admin | 2 comments

ScienceDaily (July 23, 2009)

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.

story2_med

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.