Skip to main content
Public engagement resources for the Monday April 8, 2024 Solar Eclipse
Learn more >

Nano Bite: May 2009

Welcome to the May Nano Bite, the monthly e-newsletter for the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net).
 
What's new in the network?  
Thanks to everyone who participated in NanoDays for making it such a success! NISE Net Online Community Manager Beck Tench has begun blogging about NanoDays report results, and making interactive visualizations of the data.  Find out which activities were most popular during NanoDays 2009 and play with some of the latest visualizations here. (And if you haven't done so already, please fill out your NanoDays report—it's really easy) 
 
  I'll be posting information about specific NanoDays 2009 celebrations on the Nano Bite blog, including the Lawrence Hall of Science SoCal Road Trip, Jayatri Das's NanoDays at the Girls Exploring Tomorrow's Technology event, and the Port Discovery Children's Museum events with the NanoExpress.  Browse through to get ideas for next year, and send me an email if you're interested in sharing your events.
 
Many new NISE Net partners are finding ways to use their NanoDays materials year-round.  Kim Duncan recently posted a nice adaptation of the Shrinking Robots! program to use during a "science story time" at the Madison Children's Museum
 
What else?
Evaluation reports on nisenet.org
Wondering what visitors might get out of the Exploring Measurement: Human Body activity?  Or the Tiny Teacups activity? Check out the formative evaluation reports (click here for Exploring Measurement report and here for the Tiny Teacups report)!  Those evaluation reports, plus tons more, are now up on the nisenet.org catalog. 
 
Also up on nisenet.org? Tools and Guides!
You’ll find a newly launched Tools & Guides section in the nisenet.org catalog with lots of cool stuff, including universal design guidelines for programs, a one page guide for partnering with nanobusinesses, a guide for hosting a science café, two versions (the Greta and the Tim) of a Nano 101 powerpoint presentation to help train staff, and Spanish-language translations of some of our NanoDays materials. There are lots of useful items for you there, so dig in and then leave us some comments about what was helpful, what worked and what didn't, and where you wish there was more information.
 
Happy Birthday!
If you're looking for something to celebrate, Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynman’s birthday is May 11th. In 1959, Feynman gave a lecture titled There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom about the manipulation of matter at the atomic scale.  In that talk, Feynman considered whether "ultimately—in the great future—we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down!  What would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?"  Not something many people were thinking about then, but a pretty big deal to us now.  Check out Tim Miller’s Nano 101 staff training powerpoint for a bit more information about Feynman, read the full text of the talk here, or look up Feynman’s bio on the Nobel Prize website.
 
Nano Jobs
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.
 
Interactive Zooms
Some of you had problems opening our digital zooms, but it looks like all the glitches are now fixed, which is great news because the zooms are super cool.  Developed by the Visualization Lab team at the Exploratorium, the zooms are interactive media pieces that highlight relative scale and other key nanoscience concepts.  There are two of them: Zoom into a Human Hand and Zoom into a Nasturitium Leaf, and they're both available for download here.  You can watch someone playing with one of the zooms at the Montana State University NanoDays here.
 
Nano Haiku
Nanoscale provides
infinite inspiration—
send me your haikus!
 
Send haikus my way at [email protected]. I'll post them to the Nano Bite blog and feature one a month in the newsletter.