NanoBlog

Cornell hosted a number of symposia in the past, and the slides and video are available on archive. The symposia are about old but the information looks like a good reference.

• 2004 Nanomagnetics - From Discovery to Systems
• 2005 Nanoelectronics - From Discovery to Systems
• 2006 Nanophotonics - From Discovery to Systems

IOP Science has posted the Engineering metallic nanostructures for plasmonics and nanophotonics review paper and its open access. It looks quite interesting and hope to begin reading it shortly.

Dr Francesco Fornetti provides an informative and well done webinar on Wide Bandgap Semiconductor Materials & Microwave PAs. The lecture describes materials properties needed for high frequency operation and focuses on GaN HEMT structures. It is a very good introduction to high frequency GaN transistors. The slides and other references are available at the Explore RF web site.

In this video, researchers from the University of South Wales describe their work building A Single Atom Transistor. A single P atom was deposited on Silicon with high precision to make this transistor. For more details follow the second link in this paragraph. Access to the paper is presently free.

Wiley is publishing the new Advanced Healthcare Materials journal this year. It focuses on materials science as applied to human healthcare. The first issue is open access.

It that time of the year again. The Stanford Center for Processional Development enrollment deadline is March 21. There are several very good nanotechnology courses on the course schedule this semester. Look for the MAT SCI section of the schedule.

The Periodic Table of Videos web site has posted the Nyholm Lecture by Martyn Poliakoff. Professor Poliakoff won the award for teaching. In this lecture, he talks about teaching & education, how making video has changes his life, and tries to provide some measure on how effective this type of video is for educating people. He thinks the videos are very effective, but finds it is very hard to measure. He says, the key to their success is the two way trust between him and Brady Haran, the video journalist, plus a lot of dedicated hard work they both contribute.

Agilent Technology is hosting its second annual nanomeasure 2012 symposium June 19-20 at Stanford University. Registration is $200 before May 1, and $250 there after. A call for papers is now open and the deadline is March 15.

Professor Martyn Poliakoff won the Ron Nyholm prize this year for his contribution to education. In this video on Ron Nyholm, professor Poliakoff describes the prize and pays a really wonderful tribute to Dr. Nyholm. Dr. Nyholm was a Austraian chemist who refined the Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion (VSEPR) Theory that describes the shape a molecule takes based on the number of valance bonding electrons.

The 2011 MRS Fred Kavli Distinguished Lecture award was given to Mark E Davis from the CalTech. His talk Fighting Cancer with Nanoparticle Medicine - The Nanoscale Matters was very interesting and informative. His team built a chain of organic nanoparticles 40-50 nm in diameter that holds a drug and a gold nanoparticle for tracking. The particle is the right size and has the proper shape to enter a cell. Once in the cell, the nanoparticles in the chain break apart to release the drug and kill the cancer cell. This nanomedicine is in clinical trials for lung cancer and works well. His latest research replaces the drug with an RNA to turn of the genes in the cancer cell so that the cancer stops working and then dies.