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National Nanotechnology Day is an annual event featuring community-led events and activities on or around October 9 to help raise awareness of nanotechnology, how it is currently used in products that enrich our daily lives, and the challenges and opportunities it holds for the future. This date, 10/9, pays homage to the nanometer scale, 10–9 meters.
The theme for this year's National Nanotechnology Day is nanotechnology’s role in understanding and responding to climate change and improving the health of the Earth and its people.
Whether at home or outside, there are many ways to explore advances in nanotechnology and how it is impacting our everyday lives! Planning for various events and activities is underway at schools, universities, and various organizations around the country.
Here are a few suggested activities around this year's theme:
- Host image, video, or illustration contests related to nanotechnology and its role in understanding and responding to climate change.
- Organize lab tours and open houses.
- Coordinate outreach events with demonstrations about nanotechnology. Check out some resources here.
- Create and share an image, video, illustration, or infographic about nanotechnology: what it is, why it is important, and examples of nanotechnology applications.
- Host a Science Café or an informal discussion on nanotechnology. If you are a K–12 student or teacher, you could invite a scientist from a local college or university.
- Sign up for free remote sessions to see nature at the nanoscale using nanotechnology tools, such as a scanning electron microscope. With the assistance of an experienced engineer, you can control these tools over the Internet in real time!
Learn about nanotechnology’s role in understanding and responding to climate change:
- Explore the enabling potential of a career in nanoscience and “doing good” with a career in environmental nanoscience and nanotechnology, with these video presentations from Virginia Tech’s NanoEarth program.
- Read about nanomaterials in the environment, where they are found, and how we can use nanotechnology to find them in the “Environment” issue of Nanooze, a magazine about science and nanotechnology for children. Also, learn about how nanotechnology helps to make, store and use energy in the “Energy” issue of Nanooze.
- Take a close look at shark skin; single-celled algae called diatoms; single-celled marine plants called coccolithophores; and other marine organisms under a scanning electron microscope. (The study of diatoms, for example, is important to understand climate change.)
- Explore these engineering activities & challenges and whiteboard animation videos for K–12 students from the Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (headquartered at Rice University).
Try these fun activities:
- Explore ways nanotechnology is providing solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change: Various nanomaterials or products containing nanomaterials are being used or tested to create cleaner and renewable sources of energy. Check out the following science experiments, which demonstrate how some of these nanomaterials work as well as provide examples of renewable sources of energy: Solar Cells: Juice from Juice; Silicon Solar Cell Efficiency; Solar Ovens – Understanding Energy Transfer.
- 100-Billion Nanometer Dash: Run #100BillionNanometers (100 meters) and share your pictures and videos on social media with #NationalNanoDay! Print a Certificate of Achievement and a Gold Medal for you or anyone who runs with you.
If you have other activities that combine nanotechnology with understanding climate change, we’d love to share them. Please let us know at: nnd@nnco.nano.gov. Also, if you have questions about National Nanotechnology Day, please feel free to contact us at: nnd@nnco.nano.gov.
Planned Activities for National Nanotechnology Day 2022
Information about Previous National Nanotechnology Days:
* About the National Nanotechnology Day illustration: This image shows a river surrounded by mountains. Or does it? Actually, it’s an image taken with an electron microscope of the surface of a thin film. When you use a microscope, you can zoom in and see things you wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye. With an electron microscope, you can see things all the way down to atoms. In this image, the details of the surface of the film are not quite at the atomic level yet, but they are close, and these details look a lot like the bird’s-eye view of a landscape. This image was one of the winners of the 2021 Plenty of Beauty at the Bottom image contest, hosted by the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure in honor of National Nanotechnology Day. Credit: Zacary Croft and Oscar Valenzuela, Graduate Students at Virginia Tech.
