Nano-Obama

At the University of Michigan, professor John Hart has used nanotechnology to create images of Barack Obama, the next president of the United States. Each Obama face is made up of 150 million vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes grown at really high temperatures and imaged with a scanning electron microscope.

Carbon nanotubes are tiny hollow cylinders of carbon that are tens of thousands of times smaller than a human hair, but several times stronger and stiffer than steel. Interested in seeing more images? Click here! And, read about how they are made here! Apparently, there have been no nanoMcCains made as of yet....

Source: Nanotechnology Nanobama

Stained Glass Purifies Air

A team of experts at Queensland University of Technology have found that stained glass windows - the ones painted with gold - help purify the air when lit up with sunlight. People in medieval times were already using nanotechnology to produce colors with gold nanoparticles of different sizes. Numerous church windows across Europe were decorated with glass painted with gold nanoparticles. For centuries, people have appreciated the beautiful works of art, but little did they know that these windows also made the air cleaner!


The tiny gold particles would be energized by the sun and were able to destroy pollutants in the air. Sunlight enhances the magnetic field on the nanoparticles up to 100 times, which causes nearby pollutant molecules in the air to break apart. This process produces small amounts of carbon dioxide, which is safe and environmentally friendly. Since this technology is solar-powered, it opens a lot of exciting possibilities for scientific research in renewable energy!

Source: Air-purifying Church Windows Were Early Nanotechnology

Medieval Artefacts Glimmer with Metal Nanoparticles

Researchers from Spain have discovered what makes lustre (a metal/glass mixture produced in medieval times) shine. Researchers have found that lustre is made up of a thin layer of densely packed copper and silver nanoparticles in a glassy matrix. In medieval times, lustres were made in a wide variety of colors, such as red, brown, green, and yellow.

Trinitat Pradell and her colleagues used Rutherford backscattering spectroscopy and other techniques to show that the metallic shine of lustre comes from these nanoparticles. To understand the physical and chemical process involved in making lustre, Pradell's group have reproduced lustre layers following the procedures listed in historical records. These metal/nanoparticle/glass layers will also be useful to today's material scientists because they have many interesting non-linear properties.

Source:Metal nanoparticles lend glimmer to medieval artefacts | Nature

Colorful Fossils

Professor Andrew Parker, a scientist at the Natural History Museum, has discovered a way to discover the iridescent colors in animals from fossils of extinct animals. Tiny structures on the surface of the animal fossil cause sunlight to be split (like a prism) into the colors of a rainbow. Colors that result from these tiny structures are known as iridescent colors, like the colors that you see on a CD. These colors are very different from the chemically generated colors found in paints, skin, hair, or animal fur.

The tiny structures act as a diffraction grating (which is a reflecting surface covered in small parallel grooves), and exists in a lot of things naturally. You can find them in the antennae of seed srhimp, in the wing of a butterfly, and also in 515 million-year-old Burgess Shale fossils (shown right).

In the past, any color given to the skin, feathers, or fur of extinct animals have mostly guesswork, but now with this new discovery, we can pinpoint more accurately the color of extinct animals. But the next question that Parker wants to answer is: "Why were the animals at that time so colorful? When did the first eye exist on Earth and what happened when it did?"

Source:Colouring in the Fossil Past