We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.
Alfred Nobel and several recipients of his namesake Peace Prize alike contributed to warfare and violence in numerous ways—a fact that some find ironic. Yet, Nobel lived at a time when scientists didn’t consider themselves responsible for how others used their inventions, and he held a view of destructive-weaponry-as-deterrent that presaged the Cold War philosophy of Mutually Assured Destruction, so perhaps there was a method to his M.A.D.-ness. As for the others I discuss in my article below, only history can judge.
In 2007, astronaut Lisa Nowak thrust NASA “diapers” into the media spotlight when police in Orlando, Fla., charged her with the attempted kidnapping of U.S. Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman. Although the space agency’s absorption garments were soon the butt of late night talk show monologues everywhere, they were also an elegant solution to an unpleasant engineering challenge—so elegant, in fact, that the story of the moonstruck astronaut inspired at least one company to ape NASA’s design.
According to the Simpsons, the Merciless Pepper of Quetzalacatenango is grown by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum deep in the jungle primeval. Homer resorted to coating his mouth with candle wax to beat the heat of this so-called Guatemalan Insanity Pepper. In this article, I’ll try to give you some better options while I answer the piquant question…
Grade schools teach that there are three or four states of matter—solid, liquid, gas and possibly plasma. Nature is much fuzzier than that, however. Depending who you ask, there may be more than a dozen states of matter, along with numerous substates such as glass.
Yes, glass. Scientifically speaking, glass is a highly viscous, noncrystalline substate of matter. It is like a liquid that cools without becoming crystalline. Our everyday silica glass is but one example; many substances, including metals, become glassy under the right conditions.
Physical chemists have struggled for decades to crack the true nature of glass and understand what happens at the transition to and from the glassy state. In 1995, Nobel laureate Philip Anderson called it the “deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory.” Now, C. Austen Angell, a chemistry professor at Arizona State University believes he has translated the Rosetta Stone of glassy substances: water.
A glassy riddle: solving the mystery of water glass
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• The science of setback
• Angell helps solve mystery of ‘glassy’ water