Nano Days 2010 « FrogHeart

Posts Tagged ‘Nano Days 2010’

Comment(s) on proposed Canadian nanotechnology legislation (part 2); Nano Days 2010 update; public engagement and the US National Nanotechnology Initiative

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

In response to my request, I received a comment from nanoAlberta about Peter Julian’s (Canadian MP) proposed nanotechnology legislation from Joel Burford this morning (Mote: There are square brackets to indicate where I’ve added some links),

nanoAlberta as part of Alberta Innovates – Technology Futures, a provincial corporation, is not a regulatory body and looks to the responsible Federal and Provincial departments for regulatory guidance on safe handling and adoption of nanotechnologies. As part of the community of interests, nanoAlberta has supported the beta site launch of the GoodNanoGuide http://goodnanoguide.org/tiki-index.php?page=HomePage for best practices on worksite safe handling of nanomaterials and encourages work such as:

Dr. David Cramb, University of Calgary – Dr. Cramb is researching the dynamics of nanoparticles directly in organisms and the environment with the aim of developing a predictive model of nanoparticle behavior in biological and environmental matrices. [my interview with Dr. Cramb is here]

Dr. Greg Goss, University of Alberta – Dr. Goss has initiated a research program to investigate the potential toxicity/specificity of manufactured nanomaterials. The overall goal of this research is to predict the relative toxicity of specific manufactured nanomaterials and allow for the development of solid science based guidelines for risk prediction and regulatory guidelines. [project was mentioned in my postings here last year]

nanoAlberta also encourages the local nanotechology community’s participation in national and international efforts assesing the ethical, environmental, economic, legal and societal issues of nanotechnologies with organizations such as the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development), and the ISO (International Standards Organization).

Thank you, Joel and nanoAlberta.

Peter Julian interview Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Comments: Nano Ontario

Nano Days update

As part of the national Nano Days events (March 27 – April 4, 2010) which take place across the US as part of a public outreach/engagement effort, the University of Albany’s ‘Nano College’ is visiting the local mall. From the news item on Nanowerk,

The exciting world of nanotechnology will be on display at Crossgates Mall in Albany this week as the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (“CNSE”) of the University at Albany presents a unique “Nano in the Mall” series as part of NanoDays 2010, a nationwide effort to showcase the emerging field of nanoscale science and engineering.

The annual celebration of NanoDays, which runs from March 27 through April 4, encompasses a week of community-based educational outreach events to raise public awareness of nanotechnology.

Beginning on Monday, March 29 and continuing daily through Friday, April 2, CNSE faculty will offer educational displays, interactive exhibits and informational programming on the second floor of Crossgates Mall each day from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

NOTE: The ‘Nano College’ is more properly referred to as the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE).

Nano Days will host over 200 events being organized by museums, research centres, and universities across the US.

This ‘nano mall event’ reminded me of a ‘science and technology in the mall event’. I managed to convince the company I was working for to participate in the National Science and Technology Week that’s been taking place in Canada for at least 16 years (this year’s event takes place Oct. 15 – 24, 2010, no more details yet but you can look at the page here).

We set up a booth in what was at that time was one of the most frequented malls in Canada and showed off technology that all my co-workers considered too dull for public consumption (software that enabled the establishment of Wide Area Networks for financial institutions using legacy hardware).

We enjoyed a steady stream of visitors from the moment we set up until we packed up. It turned out that people were curious about what was happening when they swiped their debit or credit cards. Yes, I enjoyed my co-workers’ (naysayers’) shock.

It seems pretty obvious that most people are not going to turn out for a lecture at a university but they will take a few minutes at the mall to check out what you’re doing. Unfortunately, the National Science and Technology Week organizers no longer employ contractors to organize these kinds of events and rely instead on volunteers from the institutions who don’t have the time (and often the imagination) to locate their ‘science outreach’ events in places where the general public gathers.

Public engagement and the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI)

There’s a guest writer over at the 2020 Science blog today, David H. Guston, director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University (ASU). I believe there are three such centers in the US funded by the National Science Foundation with the other two being located at the University of California Santa Barbara and Cornell University.

Guston provides an informal overview of the history of nanotechnoloyg public engagement in the US. From the post,

Since the early days of NNI, as well as since the 2003 Act, public engagement with nanotechnology was supposed to be on the agenda. The early reports by NSF on the societal aspects of nanotechnology refer to the productive role that public engagement can play, and the relevant passage from the 2003 Act 2(B)(10)(d) authorizes:

“public input and outreach to be integrated into the Program by the convening of regular and ongoing public discussions, through mechanisms such as citizens’ panels, consensus conferences, and educational events, as appropriate.”

Bluntly, however, public engagement has not been implemented as robustly as it might have been.

His perspective is quite interesting to me as I’ve always thought the Americans are more advanced in their efforts than we are here in Canada and despite Guston’s dismay over their situation (and I sympathize with his position) his post confirms my opinion.

Tomorrow: a nano haiku

Tags: 2010 National Science and Technology Week, Arizona State University, Canada, Center for Nanotechnology in Society ASU, CNSE, College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, Dr. David T. Cramb, Dr. Greg Goss, Good Nano Guide, ICON, International Council on Nanotechnology, Joel Burford, Nano Days 2010, Nano in the Mall, nanoAlberta, nanotechnology, nanotechnology legislation, Peter Julian, public engagement, public outreach, Rice University, University of Albany, University of Calgary, Unviersity of Alberta, US National Nanotechnology Initiative
Posted in nanotechnology, public engagement, regulation | 1 Comment »

Nano Days at Smithsonian; curators in newsrooms; amateur science; Moore’s law and hexagonal boron nitride

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Nano Days don’t start this year until Mar. 27, 2010 but the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC has already announced its programme. From the news item on 7thspace.com,

The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History presents NanoDays 2010, a nationwide festival of educational programs about nanoscale science and engineering, March 27 to April 3.

…

During NanoDays, the Lemelson Center offers visitors of all ages the opportunity to learn about nanotechnology through activities and experiments in Spark!Lab, the center’s hands-on invention and science space. Activities include constructing a giant model of a carbon nanotube entirely from balloons, measuring height in nanometers and creating a liquid crystal display that changes color as well as other nanotechnology-related experiments.

“Nanotechnology is a perfect example of how something very small can have such big importance,” said Arthur Molella, director of the center. “At the Lemelson Center, we believe that the tiniest spark of an idea can have widespread impact on everyday life.”

For more details about the Smithsonian plans for Nano Days 2010, please go here.

During my discussion about Macmillan Publisher’s new venture, DynamicBooks, digital textbooks that can be changed however the reader chooses (see my Mar.1.10 post for details), I got a little introspective and pointed out that I do much the same by mixing, matching, stitching together, analyzing, and excerpting material from elsewhere and jamming it together into a post here.This musing brought back to mind an article by Mike Masnick on Techdirt, The Role of Curation in Journalism. From the article,

Unfortunately, for the most part, newspapers seem to look down on “curating” as if it’s some sort of lesser form of journalism, and this is a sticking point that they’re going to need to get past if they want to understand how people engage with the news today. These days, everyone is a curator of the news in some fashion: they share news, comment on it, post about it, etc. But they also look to the “pros” to add more value to it as well. But if the traditional press looks down on this function, they won’t do a particularly good job of it. It’s sometimes tough for a press who used to want itself to be “the final word” on every story to admit that others may have reported it better/faster, as well as the fact that sometimes it’s better to involve the community, rather than treating the community as riffraff waiting for the word from the god-like journalists.

Masnick’s article is a commentary about this article, Towards the Google newsroom, a revolution for media by Media Hacker which proposes a new model for newsrooms. There’s an excerpt in French but the English translation of the full article follows directly after.

Moving from evolving journalism practices to evolving science practices, there’s an article on citizen scientists in The Tyee (online ‘zine) by Carrie Simmons, Maria Ionova, and Jess Brady which discusses the rise of greater participation in science-gathering by amateurs. From the article,

Many scientists agree that citizen involvement is important for both the scientific community and the public. Dr. Micheal Shermer is a proponent of open source science — the basis on which software like Folding @ Home works. For scientists, Shermer says opening up has many advantages.

“The more access more scientists can have to analyzing data, the closer to truth we’re likely to get,” he said. Conducting science in an open, transparent way can help the public learn to place more trust in science.

“Basic research in physics, chemistry and biology — I think it’s better the better to have it open for anyone to examine,” said Shermer. “It takes the secrecy away from it.”

The software mentioned is a protein-folding software, which allows citizen scientists to simulate protein folding (problematic protein folding has been implicated in diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s) and gather data for scientists. I have blogged about this type of data gathering endeavour before notably as ‘participatory science’ here and as ‘science data collection for everybody’ here.

I have not focused on ‘hard’ science in a while, so on to hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN). Scientists at Rice University (Texas) may have found a way to beat Moore’s Law. From the news item on Azonano,

Rice University researchers have found a way to stitch graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) into a two-dimensional quilt that offers new paths of exploration for materials scientists.

The technique has implications for application of graphene materials in microelectronics that scale well below the limitations of silicon determined by Moore’s Law.

…

Layers of h-BN a single atom thick have the same lattice structure as graphene, but electrically the materials are at opposite ends of the spectrum: h-BN is an insulator, whereas graphene, the single-atom-layer form of carbon, is highly conductive. The ability to assemble them into a single lattice could lead to a rich variety of 2-D structures with electric properties ranging from metallic conductor to semiconductor to insulator.

Do read the article if you’re interested in a very clear explanation of the science.

Tags: carbon nanotubes, citizen science, curation in journalism, curatorial journalism, digital textbooks, DynamicBooks, Google newsroom, graphene, h-BN, hexagonal boron nitride, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Macmillan Publishers, Moore's Law, Nano Days 2010, nanotechnology, participatory science, Pulickel Ajayan, Rice University, science data collection for everyone, Smithsonian Institute, Smithsonian Museum, SparkLab
Posted in nanotechnology, public engagement, science, science communication, writing | No Comments »

When is a billion not a billion?; Nano Days 2010 is coming soon; acupuncture and nanotechnology

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

My NISENet (Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network) February 2010 newsletter arrived earlier this week with a bumper crop of news and tips. (Go here if you want to find out more about the organization.) I was particularly interested in this bit by Anders Liljeholm,

Did you know that in different countries the word “billion” can mean different amounts? In English, one billion is one thousand million, but in most countries in Europe “billion” means one million million, what we Americans would call one trillion.

This is the kind of detail that’s important when translating or when you’re talking to someone who was educated in a European system. In regular usage it’s an error that most likely won’t have much impact but when you’re dealing with the nanoscale (or financial services) it could make quite a difference. You can read more about it here.

Nano Days 2010 will run from March 27 to April 4. From the NISE website,

NanoDays is our nationwide festival of educational programs about nanoscale science and engineering and its potential impact on the future. NanoDays events are organized by participants in the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net), and take place at over 200 science museums, research centers, and universities across the country from Maine to Hawaii.

I’m not aware of any Nano Days programs in Canada but do let me know if you have any information about some Nano Days programming here.

The nano haiku from the newsletter,

Mil millones de
gracias to Amparo
for her “billion” help.

by Vrylena Olney, Museum of Science, Boston.

Finally, there was a news item on Nanowerk about how scientists in China are learning more about acupuncture points with the use of a synchrotron. From the news item,

Chinese scientists are using the country’s most expensive ever science project, a light-emitting synchrotron, to solve the mystery of acupuncture points.

The Shanghai-based synchrotron, which uses super-powerful X-rays to resolve the structure of matter down to the level of atoms, has detected evidence that acupuncture points differ from other parts of the body.

Zhang Xinyi, deputy director with the synchrotron radiation research center at Fudan University, said, “We are trying to figure out the three-dimensional structure of the acupuncture points with the light resources.”

You can read more here.

Tags: acupuncture, China, Nano Days 2010, nano haiku, Nanoscale Informal Science Network, nanotechnology, NISENet, synchrotron
Posted in health and safety, nanotechnology, poetry, public engagement | No Comments »

FrogHeart

Posts Tagged ‘Nano Days 2010’

Comment(s) on proposed Canadian nanotechnology legislation (part 2); Nano Days 2010 update; public engagement and the US National Nanotechnology Initiative

Nano Days at Smithsonian; curators in newsrooms; amateur science; Moore’s law and hexagonal boron nitride

When is a billion not a billion?; Nano Days 2010 is coming soon; acupuncture and nanotechnology

Pages

Archives

Categories

Chinese scientists are using the country’s most expensive ever science project, a light-emitting synchrotron, to solve the mystery of acupuncture points.
The Shanghai-based synchrotron, which uses super-powerful X-rays to resolve the structure of matter down to the level of atoms, has detected evidence that acupuncture points differ from other parts of the body.
Zhang Xinyi, deputy director with the synchrotron radiation research center at Fudan University, said, “We are trying to figure out the three-dimensional structure of the acupuncture points with the light resources.”