Science teachers everywhere have had always had to face the question, "Dr. T., when are we going to use this?" In pop culture, it has always seemed to me that the general public is science-phobic, unless they are shopping for beauty products. Then it's "bring on the polypeptides," no matter how dubious the product's claims are.
But a new discovery has promise to deliver a genuine benefit, and brings nanotechnology into real life. Last week's edition of NPR's Science Friday explained that geckos use nanotubes to stick to glass surfaces. Now researchers have "designed a surface with similar structures to create a sticky, strong, biodegradable surgical adhesive bandage that could be used in a variety of medical applications."
Nanotechnology has always been inscrutable to me, requiring too much abstract explanation to make a lasting impression on my long-term memory. This engaging story finally made nanotechnology seem like something that the general public should know about. It highlighted the fact that the everyday phenomenon of geckos sticking to glass actually involves an elegant mechanism that relies on nanoscale pillars, Van der Waals forces and capillary action--something many of us learned about in chemistry and promptly forgot about as soon as the test was over.
The Science Friday interview is fascinating, and a New Scientist article provides more technical details for those who are interested in learning more.
SUCCESS: Spectrogram of Bat Calls, to 48 kHz
(Credit: Michael Tiemann)I don't know about you, but there was a lot of excitement at the Tiemann household when this image popped up on the screen. It meant that nights of field work, evenings of programming, and a weekend of multimedia production all pointed at one, inescapable conclusion: my crazy bat project was a SUCCESS and the promise I made to my daughter was KEPT!!
First things first. If you have been following this blog, you know that a week ago I had the crazy idea of trying to record bats. After finally having an opportunity to use my aforementioned SONY PMC-D1, and after spending another few hours trying to convince myself I had captured something, in the end I felt a bit like one of the members of the Warren Commission looking at the Zapruder film and asking "you want me to make a finding based on this?" If I was going to convince my daughter that we had, in fact, captured and identified bat sounds beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was going to take more than a few suspicious noises of post-processed audio before I could be satisfied that the burden of proof could be met. In the days after my first blog posting, things were looking fairly bleak for the project, but I was determined to prove that with a little technology (a little more than you might suspect), I could, in fact, make good.
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