4/27 Blog Post 1
Welcome to my blog! My name is Katherine Taylor, I am a sophomore at Transylvania University. I am a Biology major with Psychology and Chemistry minors. I play tennis here at Transy, and am involved in Delta Delta Delta Sorority, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and the Pre-health club. I am from Burlington, Kentucky and live on a tree farm with my family and my 6 year old dog (pictured below).
I am hoping to go into the healthcare field, which is why this class interested me. Nanoscience has applications in many different fields, but has large, despite the word nano, impacts on the future of healthcare. These can include better surgeries, diagnostics, and implants. Additionally, I am not set on being involved with hands-on patient care, and I am working this summer at a clinical trial company for new biotechnologies. While I am unsure on how much nanotech that will involve, the knowledge I gain this May Term will prove useful in whichever area of healthcare I go into. Nanoscience is the future, but it is also prevalent in the past. In class, we discussed the concept of the atom and how even without standardized measurements, the Buddha estimated the size of the atoms 2,600 years ago! Nanoscience relies on the fact that materials behave differently at that size. A single DNA double helix is around 2 nanometers in size, and it behaves differently than it would if it were much larger. This difference in behavior accounts for all of life. Made in 4th Century Rome, the Lycurgus Cup can change colors based on reflected light due to the nano-metals embedded in the glass. While they did not know why it was changing colors back then, the material was no doubt chosen intentionally for its dichromatic qualities. Despite this, nanoscience as a field is incredibly new, relatively speaking. In fact, Richard Feynman's talk in 1959 was really the beginning of the field. A lot has changed since then, including many improvements made to the electron microscopes, and new microscopes that can see smaller. Yet, much is still to be learned. In order to begin to understand nanoscience, we needed to understand the relative size of what we were working with. We did this by measuring the sizes of atoms. We took a copper and an aluminum cylinder, measured the mass and the volume, and worked backwards to determine the size (radius) of a single copper and aluminum atom in each of the cylinders. We then compared our values to literature values, and found we were quite close. For aluminum, we measured 152.6 pm, compared to a literature value of 184 pm. For copper, we measured 141.7 pm, compared to a literature value of 128 pm. It always seemed as though calculating the size of an atom was a complicated quantum physics measurement, unable to be done quickly, but we used incredibly simple equipment (shown in pictures). This was just one small step to begin to understand the vast field!
I loved the picture of your dog to start this off, he is adorable!! I thought it was really interesting how you pointed out how nanoscience has really been observed for centuries but it wasn't until recently that we began to understand it, and now we do not think twice about things being that small. At the time of the Lycurgus cup, they didn't know how and didn't have the equipment to measure things that small but now we use that same technology to make tiny things that run our world! I also really love how you were able to connect topics in nanoscience to things that you have learned about in other classes that you've taken here. Since you are a biology major I am sure there are so many different ways to incorporate nanotechnology into your field of study that you might not have thought was even nanoscience before. I also think it's really interesting that the steps of calculating the radius of an atom is built on so much of the scientific research done before like Planck's constant and molar masses, it really shows how all disciplines of science are connected!
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