Dr. Mona Nemer, Canada’s Chief Science Advisor, and her office have issued their 2018 annual report. It is also the office’s first annual report. (Brief bit of history: There was a similar position, National Science Advisor (Canada) from 2004-2008. Dr. Arthur Carty, the advisor, was dumped and the position eliminated when a new government by what was previously the opposition party won the federal election.) The report can be found in html format here which…

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An August 24, 2018 news item on ScienceDaily describes a ‘shapeshifting’ water technique, First, according to Rice University engineers, get a nanotube hole. Then insert water. If the nanotube is just the right width, the water molecules will align into a square rod. Rice materials scientist Rouzbeh Shahsavari and his team used molecular models to demonstrate their theory that weak van der Waals forces between the inner surface of the nanotube and the water molecules…

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Manufacturing remains a bit of an issue where nanotechnology is concerned due to the difficulties of producing nanoparticles of a consistent size and type, Electron micrograph showing gallium arsenide nanoparticles of varying shapes and sizes. Such heterogeneity [variation]  can increase costs and limit profits when making nanoparticles into products. A new NIST study recommends that researchers, manufacturers and administrators work together to solve this, and other common problems, in nanoparticle manufacturing. Credit: A. Demotiere, E.…

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Caption: Light hits the 3-D printed nanostructures from below. After it is transmitted through, the viewer sees only green light — the remaining colors are redirected. Credit: Thomas Auzinger [downloaded from http://visualcomputing.ist.ac.at/publications/2018/StructCol/]An August 17, 2018 news item on ScienceDaily announces the work illustrated by the image above, Most of the objects we see are colored by pigments, but using pigments has disadvantages: such colors can fade, industrial pigments are often toxic, and certain color effects…

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It seems that one set of nanoparticles, e.g., silver nanoparticles, in combination with another material, e.g., cadmium ions, are more dangerous than either one separately according to an August 17, 2018 University of Southern Denmark press release by Birgitte Svennevig (also on EurekAlert but dated August 20, 2018), Researchers warn that a combination of nanoparticles and contaminants may form a cocktail that is harmful to our cells. In their study, 72 pct. of cells died…

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In August 2018, I been stumbled across several stories about graphene-based products and a new form of carbon. Graphene jacket The company producing this jacket has as its goal “… creating bionic clothing that is both bulletproof and intelligent.” Well, ‘bionic‘ means biologically-inspired engineering and ‘intelligent‘ usually means there’s some kind of computing capability in the product. This jacket, which is the first step towards the company’s goal, is not bionic, bulletproof, or intelligent. Nonetheless,…

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I did a very quick search for today’s (March 8, 2019) women in science stories and found three to highlight here. First, a somewhat downbeat Canadian story. Can Canadians name a woman scientist or engineer? According to Emily Chung’s March 8, 2019 article on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) online news site, the answer is: no, You’ve probably heard of Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein and Mark Zuckerberg.But can you name a woman scientist or engineer?…

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A soft robotic device powered by popcorn, constructed by researchers in Cornell’s Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab. Courtesy: Cornell University What an intriguing idea, popcorn-powered robots, and one I have difficulty imagining even with the help of the image above. A July 26, 2018 Cornell University news release (an edited version is on EurekAlert) by Melanie Lefkowitz describes the concept, Cornell researchers have discovered how to power simple robots with a novel substance that, when heated,…

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Caption: [Image 1] A carbon fiber covered with a spiky forest of NiCoHC nanowires. Credit: All images reproduced from reference 1 under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License© 2018 KAUSTIt makes me think of small, cuddly things like cats and dogs but it’s not. From an August 7, 2018 King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST; Saudi Arabia) news release (also published on August 12, 2018 on EurekAlert), By combining multiple nanomaterials into…

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I have taken a liberty in the title for this piece, strictly speaking the non-Newtonian goo in the bra isn’t the stuff (ooblek) made of cornstarch and water from your childhood science experiments but it has many of the same qualities. The material in the Reebok bra, PureMove, is called Shear Thickening Fluid and was developed at the University of Delaware in 2005 and subsequently employed by NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) for…

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