From the monthly archives:

February 2010

How to study for a career in nanotechnology

February 24, 2010

Students often ask me for advice on how to study for a career in nanotechnology, and as you might imagine, providing a good answer is challenging. “Nanotechnology” refers to a notoriously broad range of areas of science and technology, and progress during a student’s career will open new areas, and some are yet to be [...]

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Chemists deserve more credit:
Atoms, Einstein, and the Matthew Effect

February 17, 2010

Chemists understood the atomic structure of molecules in the 1800s, yet it is often said that Einstein established the existence of atoms in a paper on Brownian motion, “Die von der Molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme Gefordete Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten Suspendierten Teilchen”, published in 1905.
This is perverse, and has seemed strange to me [...]

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Cell-free synthetic biology

February 12, 2010

Synthetic biology doesn’t require cells, and in several ways, cells are liabilities.
Cells can make engineering difficult. Cell membranes and bacterial walls stand between new genes and the machinery needed to transcribe and translate them. They are barriers to liberating gene products. They contain systems that are complex products of eons of evolutionary history, not systems [...]

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Exploiting strong, covalent bonds
for self assembly of robust nanosystems

February 6, 2010

Atomically precise self-assembly of complex structures can be engineered by providing for multiple binding interactions that

Cooperate to stabilize the correct configuration, in a thermodynamic sense, and

Do not stabilize any other configuration, in a kinetic sense

Roughly speaking, in the correct configuration, the parts fit together to allow all the binding interactions to operate simultaneously, and the [...]

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