NISE Network Blog

Institutions reporting as of April 23, 2009: 50

Beck Tench, here, your friendly NISE Net Online Community Manager. I'll be blogging NanoDays report results as they come in over the next couple of months and visualizing that data so that we can better understand how NanoDays played out across the country. (By the way, don't forget to submit your report by May 1st to be entered into a drawing for a free ASTC registration and travel stipend.)

Nano radio
Playing in unseen smallness
Can anyone hear?

by Karen Pollard of the Science Museum of Minnesota

Kim Duncan recently posted a nice adaptation of the Shrinking Robots! program for children's museum audiences.

Get your party hats on, because April 25th is the birthday of nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler! Among other things, Drexler coined the term “grey goo” in his 1986 book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology to describe what might happen if hypothetical nanoscale assemblers self-replicated out of control and ate up everything else on the planet.

I just got an email from Jayatri Das from The Franklin Institute about one of their NanoDays events targeted specifically to girls. The event, Girls Exploring Tomorrow's Technology (GETT), is designed to engage girls (grades 6 - 12) in science and introduce them to women who are actively involved in STEM careers.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) just posted an interesting and very readable article by a graduate student who traveled to China to make nanostructured thin films for solar cells.

Here's one easy way to learn about some new nano applications. Industry analyst Marlene Bourne hosts a 5-minute podcast series called the Bourne Report on "next generation science, cool technologies, and real products" that often features nanotechnology. You can find the full archive here.

In addition to the post-doc positions open at the University of Wisconsin - Madison MRSEC, the Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara is looking for a postdoctoral scholar to conduct research on the history of nanotechnology. The deadline for submitting applications is June 15th, and they'd like to have the postdoc start by October 1st.

A quantum dots haiku, by Kim Duncan:

quantum dots glowing
all colors of the rainbow
Could they be toxic?