The problem with pills Did you know that when you take a pill, the active ingredient in that pill diffuses throughout your entire body? When you have a headache you may take an over-the-counter pain medication, but this drug does not just concentrate in your head, at the location of the pain. The drug also diffuses to other organs and tissues in your body, like … Continue reading Materials for drug delivery
On December 20th, 1951, four glowing light bulbs in Arco, Idaho heralded the first use of nuclear power for electricity generation [1]. Today, twenty-nine countries operate nuclear power plants, and these produce about 14% of the world’s electricity [2]. This electricity comes from a seemingly ideal source: nuclear power is cost-effective, does not rely on fossil fuels, and emits the same carbon equivalent per kilowatt-hour … Continue reading Nuclear chemistry: Lessons from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster
If you’ve watched the movie The Day after Tomorrow, you must remember the climate-related natural disasters that ravaged the human civilization. Though the events depicted in the movie are unrealistic, we are still dramatically altering Earth’s environment and climate through our current energy policies and practices. How can we mitigate some of the effects of man-made global warming? One possible solution is to increase our … Continue reading Harnessing the power of the Sun: How can raspberries and genetically modified viruses help?
In 2004, Konstantin Novoselov, Andre Geim and their colleagues from Manchester, UK and Chernogolovka, Russia reported the existence of graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of carbon that is 1 atomic layer thick. This discovery took the world by surprise because, almost 70 years earlier, physicists had argued convincingly that materials like graphene would be too thermodynamically unstable to exist. Graphene was immediately hailed as the “next … Continue reading Graphene: The coolest material that shouldn’t exist
— The past two decades have brought rapid advances in technology that have greatly influenced our daily lives. But have these technologies introduced new health risks along with new conveniences? Unfortunately, the development of electronic gadgets seems to be outpacing the development of techniques for measuring their effects on our bodies. As a result, it remains difficult to directly test if a new electronic device is dangerous. These limitations have been particularly apparent in our continued efforts to determine whether cell phones harm our brains. Most recently, a study showed that cellular phones result in an increase in brain glucose metabolism on the side of the head where the user is holding the phone1. This finding attracted a great deal of attention from mainstream media2, but no one is certain how to interpret the results. This begs the question: why are these findings difficult to understand, and why have we been unable to conclude once and for all whether cell phones are safe or harmful? Continue reading Cell Phones And The Brain: Can We Tell Whether Cell Phones Are Harmful?
— Synthetic biologists are a new breed of researchers: part-scientist, part-engineer. Building on the work of more traditional biologists, synthetic biologists try to use what we know about biology to engineer new functions into living things, such as producing useful chemical compounds (like drugs) and generating biofuels. The hope is there, but engineering organisms to do these things remains a challenge due to the inherent complexities of living things and their constituent cells. Continue reading Cellular Machines: The Goal of Synthetic Biology
–It’s ten seconds to midnight on New Year’s Eve, but by whose watch? Like all standards, measurements of time are arbitrary, and only as good as the precision of each ‘tick.’ As no clock is perfect, each will eventually speed up or slow down, making that stroke of midnight a bit fuzzy. However, advances in physics and engineering over the past fifty years have decreased that uncertainty with the development of the gold standard of timekeeping: atomic clocks. Continue reading Keeping Time with Atoms
–You are most likely reading this article on a computer, and as you scroll down the page, you may decide to briefly switch over to Facebook or Twitter to type a quick status update. We usually do not stop to think that the ease with which we can do this is due to the seamless flow of charged electrons in our computers. Thus far, utilizing charged electrons to make computers has been endlessly fruitful, allowing us to build smaller and faster computer chips. Unfortunately, we cannot continue improving technology simply by scaling down to smaller sizes because we will eventually reach atomic sizes where our devices will no longer function. As we look ahead into the not-too-distant future, we will need to explore new, innovative technologies that go beyond utilizing electron charge – one such exciting new direction is the field of spintronics. Continue reading For more energy-efficient and higher-capacity computers, think spintronics!
–In many cultures, including our own, bread constitutes a significant portion of the daily diet. However, how often do we stop to think about the unique material properties of the food that we eat and how those properties influence how bread (or any other food) is made? Continue reading Materials Science in the Kitchen: Basic Bread Revisited