Prizes & Anniversaries

Prizes & Anniversaries

What an exciting month it is!

First comes the Nobel Prize for graphene discovery  for two Russian scientists, Geim and Novoselov. It's easy to understand what graphene is - it's a single layer of carbon, just as in the picture. But even though it's just carbon, it's properties are much different: it is the strongest material ever measured, it has a thermal conductivity more than double that of diamond and has a charge mobility that is among the highest of any semiconductor.

Now the fun part - each one of us can repeat the Nobel-worth experiment at home! Equipment needed:  pencil and scotch tape. Procedure: Rub the pencil on the sticky side of the tape. Rub together the sticky sides of the tape (one with pencil one clean). Repeat the second step many times. You'll end up with graphene flakes on your tape (unfortunately you won't be able to see them with your eyes, but you can try with a microscope). You can also see on youtube how to proceed (movie here)


How it works: graphite in your pencil is carbon, actually they are layers of carbon one on top of the others. The bond between carbon layers are very weak and you can easily break them with the scotch tape. The layers will stick to the glue and if you repeat the process, you end up separating thinner and thinner pieces, eventually arriving at the single layer.
Ah, almost forgot - price of the final product: several hundreds dollars per gram. That's the way to get rich, especially since they are companies willing to buy TONS of this material (there's this really nice article in Nature Nanotechnology Selling graphene by the ton)
Why would anyone like to buy tons of a material that's so expensive? So, in fact, they are some chemical methods to produce it much cheaper and it's used very often in the macroscopic objects (for instance in polymers composites) to make them stronger, change their electrical or thermal properties and so on..


But the rumor has it that they don't hire girls for post-docs, since, well... they tend to get pregnant.. :s shame on you guys!!

Then, we celebrate the 25th anniversary of discovery of  fullerenes.
Fullerenes are a bit forgotten nowadays, still they were the first of the carbon nanomaterials, which are such a hit right now.


Buckminsterfullerenes, because that's how they were called by their discoverers,  are molecules made of 60 carbon atoms, with a structure of a football (the icosahedral, which are 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons on the surface). The funny name was inspired by the geodesic domes designed by the architect Buckminster Fuller. Now we are all familiar with the shape of a buckyball and it seems almost impossible that it took scientists almost 5 years to measure the shape of it. And during those five years they were papers claiming that C60 molecules were actually  planar (including my fav: 'C60: a deflated soccer ball?')


In the end the fullerenes weren't that successful, as it was hoped, they didn't find that many applications as carbon nanotubes or graphene.
Anyway their discoverers were awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996.


So we had a Nobel for buckyballs, then 14 years later for graphene and I'm wondering how the nanotubes could have gone unnoticed!!!

Technarte, Bilbao

Technarte, Bilbao

I think I'm obsessed with all this art thing!!

Maybe that why I got so excited after seeing the info about the Technarte conference in Bilbao. It's all about art and technology, bringing together artists, researcher, professors and so on.. It might be an exciting event, see more on http://www.technarte.org/en/index.php

ArtNouveau

ArtNouveau

Result of today's tests

Congress on Energy and Environment Engineering and Management, Mérida, Spain

Congress on Energy and Environment Engineering and Management, Mérida, Spain

Mérida from 25th to 27th May 2011,  will be home of  The 4th International Congress of Energy and Environment Engineering and Management (CIIEM). It is organized by teachers belonging to the Areas of  Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre (Portugal) and the School of Industrial Engineering of the Extremadura University (Spain) and it is adressed to academic, researchers, engineers, consultants and firms from the Energy and Environment Sectors.

It will cover six mayor areas:
        . Energetic Installations

        . Renewable Energies

        . Environmental Management. Environmental Engineering

        . Environmental Education

        . Materials for energy. Clean Materials.

        . Energetic and environmental Project Management

For more information see the webpage here.

ModernArt

ModernArt

With a little help of Alejandro

CienciAmérica.com

CienciAmérica.com

CienciAmérica.com is a webpage launched at 16th of August is aiming at communicating scientists from both of the Americas. It was set by a neurobiologist from Cornell Univ., Timothy  DeVoogd, in collaboration with Galileo University of Guatemala and US Department of State.  It will serve as a platform to exchange information on research, funding and possible collaborations, as well as providing science training for students and teleteaching. The website works in English and Spanish.
I believe it's a great idea to establish a repport between the two sides of the continent, hope it will work as Facebook for scientists ;) bringing in fun and reminding uss that we can learn so much from each other.