May, 2012
High school students turn blackberries into solar cells
May. 21, 2012—How can you squeeze electricity from a blackberry? A number of local high school students can answer this question from personal experience. They have actually made solar cells out of blackberry juice and measured the electrical power that they produce as part of an educational outreach program started this year by the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale...
Steigerwald headed to Capitol Hill as congressional fellow
May. 18, 2012—Andrew Steigerwald is trading a Vanderbilt physics laboratory for the halls of Congress. The post-doctoral researcher has been selected by the Materials Research Society (MRS) and the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society (TMS) as their 2012-2013 Congressional Science and Engineering Fellow. Starting in September he will spend a year working as a special legislative assistant on the staff of a...
‘Extractionator’ could bring cheap and effective malaria diagnostics to millions
May. 9, 2012—Last December a trio of Vanderbilt researchers — Rick Haselton, professor of biomedical engineering, David Wright, associate professor of chemistry, and Ray Mernaugh, associate professor of biochemistry — snagged a $1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a “low tech, high science” method for collecting and preparing the patient samples...
Quantum dots brighten the future of lighting
May. 8, 2012—With the age of the incandescent light bulb fading rapidly, the holy grail of the lighting industry is to develop a highly efficient form of solid-state lighting that produces high quality white light. One of the few alternative technologies that produce pure white light is white-light quantum dots. These are ultra-small fluorescent beads of cadmium...