Tag Archives: Micahel Rodemeyer

Canadian attosecond researcher wins medal

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)  awarded Dr. Paul Corkum at the University of Ottawa with $1M in funding and the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. Corkum’s work is in the field of attosecond science.

I looked up attosecond to find out that it is one quintillionth of a second or one thousandth of a femtosecond. I found the description of the work a little more helpful (from Attosecond science researcher wins Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal),

Dr. Paul Corkum and his team at NRC used the world’s fastest laser light pulses to capture the first image of an electron, one of the smallest bits of matter in the universe.

And this helped too,

Dr. Paul Corkum and his team … used the world’s fastest laser light pulses to capture the first image of an electron, one of the smallest bits of matter in the universe. This manipulation of electrons could lead to breakthroughs in fields as diverse as computing, engineering and medicine.

I’m still trying to find ways to describe nanotechnology and now there’s attosecond science. Not to mention synthetic biology (I’m still not sure I can define the difference between that and biotechnology). Btw, there’s a Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies event, Synthetic Biology: The Next Biotech Revolution Is Brewing on Wednesday, March 25, 2009 from 9:30 am to 10:30 am PST. It will be webcast live and posted on their website a few days later. If you’re in the Washington, DC area and want to attend please RSVP by clicking on the event title link. The event features Michael Rodemeyer from the University of Virginia. He’s the author of a report titled New Life, Old Bottles: Regulating First-Generation Products of Synthetic Biology and will be discussing the US regulatory framework for biotechnology and whether synthetic biology can be contained within that framework.