Zoom into Nano which is at Vancouver’s Science World from Sept. 24, 2016 – Jan. 2, 2017 has spawned a number of events for the month of October:

October 5 – Nerd Nite; Very Small Things – 7-10pm

October 13 – KPU Lecture – What Can Artists and Filmmakers Teach Us About Scientific Visualization?

TBA – Café Scientifique – Tipping The (Nano) Scale – 6-8pm

The Nerd Nite event was fully booked but on the off chance there might be a reprise, here are a few details from the Nerd Nite Event page,

Nerd Nite is going on a field trip once again! October is going to be a big month with our regular night still at the Fox Cabaret on Oct.26th, but Oct. 5th we’re giving you a second chance to nerd out, this time at Science World! To celebrate the opening of the new exhibit “Zoom into Nano”, we’ll have three talks on different perspectives on nano technology, but best of all, IT’S FREE.

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#1 Invisibly Small Items: Hand-Turned Nano-scale Art

Maarten Meerman 

Bio: Maarten is a rocket scientist and space engineer by day, designing satellites, space missions, and rocket trajectories, and editing space textbooks. He is a member of the Greater Vancouver Woodturners Guild, and he has published articles about innovative woodworking and nanoturning: his work has been covered on CTV News and CBC radio, and in the Surrey Now, Ottawa Citizen and Vancouver Sun newspapers. He is a regular exhibitor at the annual Positively Petite art show in Coquitlam, BC, and he is in demand to demonstrate and teach microminiature skills on his nanolathe in the US and Canada.

#2 Reaching the Nearby Stars 

Kat Kelly

Carl Sagan once said ‘It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses’. This talk will explain how we in fact will be that species by sending nano robotic spacecrafts to our nearest star system to take pictures and send them back to Earth.

Bio: Kat is a Physics and Astronomy student at The Open University and full time Science facilitator at Science World.

#3 Medically Minute

Sarah Simon

A medical lab inside a pill? Cancer sensing nanowires? Arrays of injection needles too small to feel? All of this and more could become part of a routine doctor’s visit through advancements in nanotechnology and nanomedicine. This talk will give an overview of the current state of nanomedicine from a nanoscientist’s perspective.

Bio: Sarah Simon is a masters graduate of Chemistry at UBC, specializing in dye-sensitized solar cells. She currently works as a science facilitator at Science World, BC.

The Vancouver Nerd Nite folks can be found here.

The KPU lecture ‘What Can Artists and Filmmakers Teach Us About Scientific Visualization?’ in the KPU (Kwantlen Polytechnic University) & Science World Speaker Series is free and here’s more from its Science World event page,

The relationship between creative experimentation, artistic representation, and the world of science has always been close, and perhaps no closer than in the past few decades. With the aid of digital advancements in motion picture and computer modelling, the artists and filmmakers of today continue to guide and influence mainstream and even modern scientific perceptions about what the future of invention and ingenuity will quite literally “look” like. This talk will examine what artists and filmmakers can teach us about scientific visualization long before a scientific hypothesis or paradigm can be tested and made material, arguing how the world of visual art positions artists as powerful conceptualizers in bridging scientific discovery to the rest world.

Thursday, October 13
7pm
Science Theatre

Register

Join us before the presentation for a free drop-in workshop using precision photography to capture beautiful images of dynamic fluids. Doors open at 6pm.

The speaker is Dorothy Barenscott (her website), Fine Arts, Faculty of Arts, Kwantlen College. Happily, there are still seats available.

As for Café Scientifique, there’s a title only, Tipping The (Nano) Scale. The date has not been confirmed.

For the curious about Zoom into Nano, I do have a Sept. 27, 2016 posting that announces and gives some details about the exhibit and should you be interested in more nano events, you can visit Science World’s Special Events and Activities page (this is a general events page so you will need to scroll through a number of unrelated listings).

Observations about Zoom in Nano

I thought the show was well put together and engaging. Probably my favourite moment was ‘walking into the heart of a crystal’ although ‘stretching molecules’ also rated pretty high. Also, measuring your height nanometers is a stellar idea.

The show dealt with the problem of describing nanotechnology by avoiding the usual tropes such as describing a billionth of a metre as 1/100,000 of a hair and, instead, concentrating atoms.

Don’t expect to come out of the experience being able to describe nanotechnology. The reason why is that the show successfully demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of the field with ever attempting a cohesive, coherent description. Nonetheless, you can learn from this exhibit (I picked up a few new bits of information and I’ve been researching this stuff for 10 years).

The show’s origin in New York (state) is quite apparent in some of the exhibit descriptions. Sadly, there was no attempt to localize the exhibit, which seems like a missed opportunity since there’s some interesting work being done here in Canada. But, perhaps the events will help fill that void.

One other mild nit, some of the exhibits were not functioning when I visited. Unfortunately they were the first ones I tried to play with. Thankfully, there were plenty of others that worked just fine.

Overall, it’s an engaging, mildly educational show for casual visitors.

Free passes

I have two adult passes and two children’s passes (it’s a package set, which is good until Jan. 12, 2017) that I will give to the first person who correctly answers this question by Thursday, Oct. 13, 2016 4 pm PDT:

Who coined the term ‘nanotechnology’?

You can email me at: nano@frogheart.ca

Good luck!

ETA Oct. 19, 2016: Sorry for the delay but here’s the answer: Norio Taniguchi, professor at Tokyo University of Science coined the term, nanotechnology in 1974.

Congratulations to Matt and his family!