Tag Archives: NISE Network

Reimagining prosthetic arms; touchable holograms and brief thoughts on multimodal science communication; and nanoscience conference in Seattle

Reimagining the prosthetic arm, an article by Cliff Kuang in Fast Company (here) highlights a student design project at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Students were asked to improve prosthetic arms and were given four categories: decorative, playful, utilitarian, and awareness. This one by Tonya Douraghey and Carli Pierce caught my fancy, after all, who hasn’t thought of growing wings? (Rrom the Fast Company website),

Feathered cuff and wing arm

Feathered cuff and wing arm

I suggest reading Kuang’s article before heading off to the project website to see more student projects.

At the end of yesterday’s posting about MICA and multidimensional data visualization in spaces with up to 12 dimensions (here)  in virtual worlds such as Second Life, I made a comment about multimodal discourse which is something I think will become increasingly important. I’m not sure I can imagine 12 dimensions but I don’t expect that our usual means of visualizing or understanding data are going to be sufficient for the task. Consequently, I’ve been noticing more projects which engage some of our other senses, notably touch. For example, the SIGGRAPH 2009 conference in New Orleans featured a hologram that you can touch. This is another article by Cliff Kuang in Fast Company, Holograms that you can touch and feel. For anyone unfamiliar with SIGGRAPH, the show has introduced a number of important innovations, notably, clickable icons. It’s hard to believe but there was a time when everything was done by keyboard.

My August newsletter from NISE Net (Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network) brings news of a conference in Seattle, WA at the Pacific Science Centre, Sept. 8 – 11, 2009. It will feature (from the NISE Net blog),

Members of the NISE Net Program group and faculty and students at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University are teaming up to demonstrate and discuss potential collaborations between the social science community and the informal science education community at a conference of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies in Seattle in early September.

There’s more at the NISE Net blog here including a link to the conference site. (I gather the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Nanotechnologies is in its very early stages of organizing so this is a fairly informal call for registrants.)

The NISE Net nano haiku this month is,

Nanoparticles

Surface plasmon resonance
Silver looks yellow

by Dr. Katie D. Cadwell of the University of Wisconsin-Madison MRSEC.

Have a nice weekend!

Nano haiku and the Good Nano Guide

So hard to imagine
Tiny atoms one by one
Make new properties
Thank you to the folks at NISE (Nanoscale Informal Science Education) Network and, of course, Robin Marks. NISE Network has added a few items to their site that I think are really great. They have an image collection which includes copyright free and scientifically vetted images well worth checking out in their Viz Lab.  Here’s a sample image of a silicon nanomembrane from the collection,
Shelley Scott, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Shelley Scott, University of Wisconsin-Madison

NISE is also offering a nano play, Attack of the Nanoscientist, courtesy of the Science Museum of Minnesota. They have the script and instructions for anyone interested in mounting the play.
The Good Nano Guide (a wiki administered by ICON [International Council on Nanotechnology] at Rice University) which Victor Jones mentioned a few weeks ago in his comments here has been cited  in a commentary on regulating nanotechnology in Nature magazine. The commentary is behind a paywall but you can find an earlier version of the article on Andrrew Maynard’s (he’s one of the authors) 2020 Science blog here.
I finally took a few minutes to check the Good Nano Guide and find it quite interesting. They offer a glossary of terms and a search engine that I used for the term ‘titanium dioxide’ amongst other features. The search engine brought up the standards for using titanium dioxide. It includes current standards and standards being developed by every organization you can imagine (IEEE, BSI, ISO, ASTM, etc.) so it seems quite comprehensive.  I do not find the glossary definitions to be helpful to me (but I’m an amateur and this project is oriented to the science community). I checked out the term nanoparticle and variants and the definitions seem vague.
Finally and because it’s Friday, I couldn’t resist this
tidbit on Nanowerk News about nanotechnology used for cleansing the colon. It originated on Tim Harper’s TNT blog here in one of his June 30, 2009 postings. Harper is associated (I think he’s the principal/CEO/president) with Cientifica, a nanotechnology business consultancy.

Nano ice cream and t-shirts

The NISE (Nanoscale Informal Science Education) Network has sent out a new haiku and more information about Nano Days which will be held from March 28, 2009 to April 5, 2009. First the haiku,

nano wee ‘lil’ thing
shakin’ and quantum leapin’
where you be leadin’?
by Carol Lynn Albert of the Museum of Science, Boston

Yes, Nano Days features a nano ice cream event at the Museum of Science + Life in Durham, North Caroline, US. With the reference to liquid nitrogen, it sounds like what they call ‘molecular’ gastronomy on the Food Network.

You can also order a Nano Days t-shirt here. For more information about Nano Days events or for a kit to create your own events, go to NISE Net.

Nano haiku, nano in Finland, and NanoTech BC ‘pauses’

A haiku from NISE Net News: The Nano Bite (Feb. 10, 2009)

Space Elevator
Take me up into the sky.
It’s a long way down.
by Anders Liljeholm of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry

According to a news item on the Nanowerk website here, Finland has tripled the number of nanotechnology companies in four years. In 2004, there were 61 nanotechnology companies while in 2008, there were 202 active companies. I noticed the item particularly because I came across a notice about a presentation By Kaija-stina Magnusson) part of a series sponsored by Nature magazine) that’s going to be contrasting the social capital aspect of the R&D investments in UK and Finland. If you’re in London (England) on March 12, 2009 and want to attend, you can get the details here.

Sadly, NanoTech BC is curtailing some of its activities for the next while as they deal with funding issues. The Cascadia Symposium won’t take place this spring (April 2009 as originally planned) and the breakfast meetings are cancelled for now. They’re hoping to schedule these activities for Fall 2009. They will be continuing their safe practices project with ICON (International Council on Nanotechnology based at Rice University in Texas) and working on a nanotechnology asset map for Alberta. You can read more details here.

Nano Days 2009 and other nano news

The NISE (nanoscale informal science education) Network has announced that its Nano Days programs for 2009 will take place between March 28 and April 5. From their website,

NanoDays is the NISE Network’s annual celebration of nanoscale science, technology, and engineering. NISE Net encourages its partners and any other community-based educational organizations, such as museums, research institutions, universities, and libraries, to focus their efforts on bringing nano to the public during one week each spring. NISE Net provides access to hands-on activities, downloadable media, and science and education professionals that can all help support institutions as they organize their events

You can check out the website and get more details here.

There was a big announcement from Intel made yesterday about investing $7B US to allow manufacturing of 32 nanometre (nm) chips in their existing plants in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. From a Feb. 10, 2009 news release on the Azonano website,

“We’re investing in America to keep Intel and our nation at the forefront of innovation,” [Paul] Otellini [Intel President and CEO] said. “These manufacturing facilities will produce the most advanced computing technology in the world. The capabilities of our 32nm factories are truly extraordinary, and the chips they produce will become the basic building blocks of the digital world, generating economic returns far beyond our industry.”

Otellini also gave a talk at the Economic Club of Washington, DC on the morning of Feb. 10, 2009. They haven’t posted the webcast yet but when they do, it should be here.

The intel announcement is interesting in light of the education program announcements made a few weeks ago which I mentioned here. There does seem to be a general mobilization towards re-establishing the US as a technological powerhouse.

I’ve also seen allusions to the space race of the 1950s and 60s which was instigated when the Russians were the first to explore space. That incident spurred the US to focus on technological goals and I wonder if this economic meltdown might not have some of the same effect as the space race did.