artsy!

So cool! I have thus far resisted following the TED talks (and all of their many offspring), but this looks really neat:

(via boingboing)



Kate Nichols is an American painter who was an "artist-in-residence" at the Alivisatos lab in Berkley (I blogged about some of their work this summer).

She used nanoparticles made in the lab to produce what she calls "structural color," aiming to emulate the iridescence found naturally in butterfly wings.

In the above photo, she's used silver nanoparticles with microscope slides. The size-dependent plasmon resonance of the nanoparticles is what gives the piece the iridescent colour. Here's a electron micrograph of the nanoparticles used in the piece:



Man, I am totally going to go bug my boss about using some of our samples in an art piece.

Actually, the Art Gallery in Edmonton (which was recently completely rebuilt, Frank Gehry-style- check out some pictures of it) recently had a really cheesy exhibit where they had the microelectronics fabriciation facility at school build them some sort of NEMS device on a Si wafer and put it on display. You couldn't see anything other than the shiny piece of silicon and no one other than me had any idea the coolness it represented. That made me slightly embarrassed for nanoart. This makes me excited.

reblogging, this time from mitch et. al

Azmanam over at Chem Blog[1] deserves the gold star of science for their ongoing series of organic chemistry demos. Azmanam picks demos that are visually awesome, easy and quick to do, and in general fairly safe.

This week it's the reduction of a silver(I) complex to form colloidal silver coating a round-bottom flask. Which is totally how mirrors used to be made. I am so using this for Christmas presents!

Azmanam, your name is crazy, but your posts are spiffy. Keep up the great work!

[1] For serious, having 2 blogs named "Chem Blog" (from Mitch Garcia and the blogger emeritus Kyle Finchsigmate is a lil' too confusing. And the names are both drier than an unpacked column. Blog war, anyone?