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In the 1967 movie, The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman receives the one-word advice “Plastics.” If Hollywood were to remake the movie right now, chances are that one word would be the hot buzzword “Nano” as in “nanotechnology” or “nanoscience.”

Before I begin my series of posts on my research, I thought it might be good to start with some definitions. But I’m not sure I could write a well-balanced introduction and definition of “nanotechnology” better than Prof. Richard Jones of Sheffield University.

And yet, despite this superficial agreement on the transformational power of nanotechnology, whether [...]

Wow, this is cool. Not sure of the technical details, but Apple Computer has evidently been doing some nanoscience research and has a “fur” that manages to cool their new computers. Impressively, they’ve managed to make a flexible thermoelectric material — which is a big breakthrough.

Thermoelectric materials generate electric current from differences in temperature. For [...]

Funny thing about winter travel in the Northeast–you usually return to fresh snow. So of course I returned from last week’s conference to dig out my car and go snowshoeing.

One of the fun things about scientific conferences is that everyone talks about new, unpublished results. The flip side is that it’s difficult for a would-be-blogger [...]

Sorry for the delay, I’ve been at a conference in California for the last week (more on that soon) and writing a pile of manuscripts.

A good friend forwarded me an article in the New York Times on “Tiny Is Beautiful: Translating ‘Nano’ Into Practical.”

Of course I have some nits to pick… For one, I’m not [...]

Silly me, I’ve been writing research papers and neglecting my blog. But others have evidently found it anyway. Nice to see there’s a considerable amount of coverage of science and nanoscience.

This semester at Cornell, I’ve heard two talks that I really liked–both from non-scientists. I discussed one earlier and still need to continue that frame [...]