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Ask a Scientist: How Do You Work With Nanoscale Materials Since They Are So Small?

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      (Describer) Titles: NSF. Ask a Scientist.

      I'm Saniya LeBlanc, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at George Washington University.

      (Describer) Title: How do you see nanoscale materials since they are so small?

      One way we work with them is we have special microscopes that allow us to "see" something that small. So we use microscopes that shoot electrons at the material, and we can see them that way. Another really neat way that we work with nanomaterials is we have these microscopes where they're like fingers, but the end is really tiny-- the size of the nanoparticles we're looking at. So we use these "nanofingers" and we can then bounce them around on top of the material, so we see what shape that material is, like using your fingers to touch something and imagine what it looks like. Another way we can work with nanomaterials is to apply forces and see what they do. That helps us learn. We can apply an electric field or magnetic field to them. I'm a mechanical engineer, so I like to push them around. We apply mechanical forces to push them in a direction. We can heat them up. All of those things allow us to work with them. We can manipulate nanomaterials and we can understand how they behave to learn more about them.

      (Describer) Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

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      Now Playing As: English with English captions (change)

      Nano expert Saniya LeBlanc from George Washington University discusses how scientists are able to work with such small particles. Part of the “Ask a Scientist” series.

      Media Details

      Runtime: 1 minutes 39 seconds

      Person speaking. Caption: between one and one hundred nanometers.
      Ask a Scientist
      Episode 1
      1 minutes 10 seconds
      Grade Level: 10 - 12
      Person speaking and standing next to a poster board with "Control of matter at the nanoscale" surrounded by logos from different organizations. Caption: of matter at the atomic and molecular level.
      Ask a Scientist
      Episode 2
      1 minutes 27 seconds
      Grade Level: 10 - 12
      Person speaking. Caption: So a nanometer would be ten to the minus nine meters.
      Ask a Scientist
      Episode 3
      1 minutes 26 seconds
      Grade Level: 10 - 12
      Person speaking. Caption: and work on it to manage those risks.
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      Episode 4
      1 minutes 16 seconds
      Grade Level: 10 - 12
      Person speaking. Caption: We can apply an electric field or magnetic fields to them.
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      Episode 5
      1 minutes 39 seconds
      Grade Level: 10 - 12
      Person speaking. Caption: used for both doing diagnostics as well as theranostics.
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      Episode 6
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      Person speaking. Caption: Nanoparticles have been used in sunscreens
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      Episode 7
      1 minutes
      Grade Level: 10 - 12
      Person speaking. Caption: about nanobots replicating and taking over the world.
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      Episode 8
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      Episode 9
      1 minutes 59 seconds
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      Episode 10
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