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Nanotechnology and Art Strelitzia-like titanium oxide - Simone Battiston and Andrea Leto From listening to Dr. Gimzewski who has had about 30 – 35 years of experience, nanotechnology seems to be a relatively new concept. This week’s readings and lectures focused on the history of nanotechnology and its new and developing applications. The term “nanotechnology” was invented by Norio Taniguchi who was a professor at Tokyo University of Science (Wikipedia.com) in 1974. Nanotechnology is defined as ‘todays science, technology and engineering’ conduced on a nanoscale. Its applications can span from creating tennis balls to medical gauze to silver embedded into socks or   t-shirts to reduce odor and bacteria (McKenna). There are approximately 25,400,00 nanometers in one inch. The scanning tunneling microscope (NanoScience.com),  in my opinion, is the most interesting invention created by using nanotechnology. This impressive microscope has an exceptional...

This week I was lucky enough to attend Janine Oleson’s “Production of Copper” at the Hammer Museum in Westwood. As soon as I walked into the exhibit I saw a large white wall with 3 projectors showing a video. There was also a smaller TV screen which seemed to have a thick slab of plastic covering the screen with a long copper wire running out of the front and it connected to a clay speaker in the corner. In the center of the room was a rug or floor mat on a small podium.   The whole room including all of the pieces For me, the three projectors and the TV with copper wiring were the most intriguing. I really liked how the copper wire wasn’t your ordinary wire which is coated and straight. This wire was raw and close to its purest form. The TV screen was showing the making of this wire and all of the steps it took and how many people it took to construct. Those people were on the wall projectors and they were in a cave talking and discovering their surroundings. They then ...

Phrenologists representation of the brain   What a difference technology can make. In the 19 th  century Francis Joseph Gall collected brains and imagined the brain as a set of different organs governing different faculties of the body. Phrenologists then believed they could read different personalities from feeling the different organs through the skull. At the turn of the twentieth century the microscope allowed Santiago Ramon y Cajul to observe and draw beautiful images of neurons.   Cajul's image of neurons Today we have even more beautiful images of neurons created through the use of florescent staining. Art and science seem to be completely joined here.  This is an image of neurons by Greg Dunn a brain artist.  Artistic representation of neurons Today MRI scans can record and picture the electrical activity in different parts of the brain and so accurately identify which parts of the brain control different human funct...