As of today (March 9), my contract to help with Nanotechnology Island comes to an end.  It’s been really great working with Dave, Gordon, Louise, Ani, Lloyd, and Ray at NPL.  I think we’ve all learned a lot.  I’ll still be around - you can keep track of me by following my personal blog.

Sincerely,

Troy

The third project in the Exploring Nano series is now complete! It combines music and narration synchronized with pictures and animations to explain graphite, graphene, nanotubes, their history and their properties. To visit the exhibit in Second Life, click here.

Note:  The exhibit has actually been around for a while - the main thing that’s just happened is that the musical soundtrack was completed.

I just finished a new exhibit for the main building on Nanotechnology Island, titled “What is a nanometre?”  It’s fairly self-explanatory:

The sim north of Nanotechnology sim (named ‘SciLands’) has some new residents…

BBC Radio has a popular weekly science show called The Naked Scientists. They cover some recent science news, people can call in with science questions, there’s a fun “kitchen science” segment, they interview special guests… it’s quite entertaining. Starting this Sunday (2 March), The Naked Scientists will broadcast live into Second Life! You can listen to and discuss the show with fellow science enthusiasts at the Naked Scientists mansion.

When: Sundays at 1800 UK Time, which is usually 10:00 AM Pacific Time (SL time)

Where: The Naked Scientists Mansion, in the middle of the sim named ‘SciLands’

SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/SciLands/102/129/26

I just finished a funky music video showing the highlights of Nanotechnology Island. I’d embed it here, but WordPress.com is ultra-careful about security so they don’t support embedded Animoto videos yet. To see the video, click here.

UPDATE:  Based on some feedback, I made a second video, which you can see if you click here.

You may have noticed that many of the exhibits on Nanotechnology Island aren’t life size - they’re much larger than life, so you can see them easily.  It seems that when those exhibits were being enlarged, some poor creatures strayed too close to the enlarging machine…

For example, there’s a giant bacterium with a flagellum (the tail-like thing) that’s currently climbing the outside wall of the main building.  It looks like it got sliced open, so you can see inside - there’s no nucleus!  The DNA just floats around inside the cell.

If you’re brave, there’s also a secret cave under the Tower of Ten…

I should really be more careful around giant hungry ants!

Nature Publishing Group has hosted a number of talks in Second Life.  This coming Monday they’ve got a nanotechnology-related talk that might interest you.  Full details are available on their website (click the link).

Note: Like The NanoShow, the Nature speakers use Voice Chat in Second Life, so be sure to have that enabled.

When you first arrive at the top level of the Tower of Ten, you see a cute blue car.

If you look closely, you’ll see that the driver-side airbag is deployed (on the right side because it’s a British car).  Have you ever wondered what triggers an airbag?  How does the car know when it’s probably in an accident?

The answer is that the car has an accelerometer - a device which senses changes in the car’s speed.  If the speed changes too fast - wooompf!  The airbag deploys.  The accelerometer is typically on a chip that’s about 1 centimetre (10 mm) across.  There’s a model of an accelerometer module near the car model (pictured above).

Modern accelerometers often use tiny “Microelectromechanical Systems” (MEMS) like the one pictured above, which is about 0.1 millimetres across.  A full explanation of how it works is given on the sign beside the exhibit in the Tower of Ten.  (Surely you didn’t think I was just going to reveal everything here!)

The final exhibit is a model of the silicon unit cell.  This pattern of silicon atoms is repeated throughout pure crystals of silicon, which are used in making everything from transistors to solar cells to MEMS.  This concludes my four-part tour of the Tower of Ten.  Click Here to visit the Nanotechnology sim now.

On the third level of the Tower of Ten, we find exhibits about water at various scales.

The first exhibit you’ll see when you arrive at the top of the stairs is a model of the water molecule, with its central oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms sticking out at an angle. Interestingly, the water molecule is roughly one nanometre across! To the left of the water molecule are two puffy ice crystal clouds. Cirrus clouds (the wispy ones way way up in the sky) are made of ice crystals.

To the right of the water molecule are some models of snowflakes, which are large intricate ice crystals.

The exhibit on the East side is a set of models of water nanoclusters, which are small groups of water molecules that sometimes form. Different arrangements occur depending on the conditions (e.g. temperature or pressure).

Last week, we started exploring the Tower of Ten on Nanotechnology Island, starting on the bottom level.  Today, we’ll climb up the stairs to the next level…

…which has exhibits about the human body!  First of all, there’s a full-size human.  He’s about 1.7 metres tall.  Then there’s a cross-section of human skin, which is about 3 millimetres deep (and a millimetre is a thousandth of a metre).

On the other side, there are models of red blood cells, the cells that carry oxygen around the body.  They’re about 7 micrometres across (where a micrometre is a millionth of a metre).

Lastly, there’s an exhibit with a (conceptual) model of a haemoglobin molecule - the molecule which does the actual carrying of oxygen.   (The four oxygen-carrying “haeme groups” are shown in more detail.)  Haemoglobin is about 3 nanometres across (where a nanometre is a billionth of a metre).  Nanotechnology is technology which lives at that scale.

The signs beside the exhibits have interesting facts on them.  (Did you know that the total surface area of all your red blood cells is more than 3/4 of an acre?)  To learn the other cool facts, just teleport there now.