NanoDays

Celebrate NanoDays with us, March 27 - April 4, 2010!

NanoDays is our nationwide festival of educational programs about nanoscale science and engineering and its potential impact on the future. NanoDays events are organized by participants in the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net), and take place at over 200 science museums, research centers, and universities across the country from Maine to Hawaii.

In 2010, NanoDays will take place from March 27 through April 4. Save these dates and begin thinking about how you can participate!

(If you're not already a part of NISE Net, it's easy to join!)

Why care about nanoscale science?

Affordable clean energy, highly effective medical devices, personalized drugs, new environmental cleanup techniques...Many scientists and engineers believe advances in nanotechnology can bolster the U.S. economy with products like these and many others.

Despite this promise, the public knows little about nanotechnology or the research and development being carried out by numerous federal agencies and by universities and corporations right in their own communities.

Who cares about nanoscale science? Educators all over North America! See our list of NanoDays 2009 participants.

What could YOU do for NanoDays?

NanoDays activities often bring university researchers together with science museum educators, creating unique learning experiences. NanoDays engages people of all ages in a miniscule world where materials have special properties and new technologies have spectacular promise.

Many NanoDays celebrations will combine simple hands-on activities for young people with events exploring current research for adults. One popular activity involves visitors working together to build a giant balloon model of a carbon nanotube. (Real carbon nanotubes, which are 1/50,000th of the width of a human hair, have extraordinary strength and unusual electrical properties that make them useful in electronics and materials science.

Other NanoDays activities demonstrate different, unexpected properties of materials at the nanoscale -- sand that won’t get wet even under water, water that won’t spill from a teacup, and colors that depend upon particle size.

Some NanoDays participants host public forums, discussions about the risks and benefits of particular appllications of nanotechnology. Many participating universities host public tours of their laboratories that work with nanoscale science and technology.

For lots of ideas about what you could do for NanoDays, browse our online catalog.

For signage, background information about nanotechnology, and a selected group of hands-on activities, download our digital NanoDays kit.