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.
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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.
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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.