Record-Breaking High-Res Optical Technique

Record-Breaking High-Res Optical Technique

  11:33:00 PM    Science Lover

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Conventional wisdom holds that optical microscopy can't be used to "see" something as small as an individual molecule. But science has once again overturned conventional wisdom. Secretary of Energy, Nobel laureate and former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) Steven Chu led the development of a technique that enables the use of optical microscopy to image objects or the distance between them with resolutions as small as 0.5 nanometers -- one-half of one billionth of a meter, or an order of magnitude smaller than the previous best.

Graph on top shows that with the active feedback 
system off there is a resolution drift of about 0.3 pixels 
or 19 nanometers, but with the feedback system on 
resolution is maintained at better than 0.01 pixels, 
or about 0.64 nanometers. Image on bottom shows 
individual Cyanine (Cy) fluorescent dye molecules – 
Cy3 and Cy5 - used to label 20 base pairs of double-
stranded DNA. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

"The ability to get sub-nanometer resolution in biologically relevant aqueous environments has the potential to revolutionize biology, particularly structural biology," says Secretary Chu. "One of the motivations for this work, for example, was to measure distances between proteins that form multi-domain, highly complex structures, such as the protein assembly that forms the human RNA polymerase II system, which initiates DNA transcription."

Secretary Chu is the co-author of a paper now appearing in the journal Nature that describes this research. The other authors are Alexandros Pertsinidis, a post-doctoral researcher and member of Chu's research group at the University of California (UC) Berkeley, who is now an assistant professor at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, and Yunxiang Zhang, a member of Chu's research group at Stanford University.

According to a law of physics known as the "diffraction limit," the smallest image that an optical system can resolve is about half the wavelength of the light used to produce that image. For conventional optics, this corresponds to about 200 nanometers. By comparison, a DNA molecule measures about 2.5 nanometers in width.

While non-optical imaging systems, such as electron microscopes, can resolve objects well into the subnanometer scale, these systems operate under conditions not ideal for the study of biological samples. Detecting individual fluorescent labels attached to biological molecules of interest using charge-coupled devices (CCDs) -- arrays of silicon chips that convert incoming light into an electrical charge, has yielded resolutions as fine as five nanometers. However, until now this technology has been unable to image single molecules or distances between a pair of molecules much less than 20 nanometers.

Chu and his co-authors were able to use the same CCD-fluorescence technology to resolve distances with subnanometer precision and accuracy by correcting a trick of the light. The electrical charges in a CCD array are created when photons strike the silicon and dislodge electrons, with the strength of the charge being proportional to the intensity of the incident photons. However, depending upon precisely where a photon hits the surface of a silicon chip, there can be a slight difference in how the photon is absorbed and whether it generates a measurable charge. This non-uniformity in the response of the CCD silicon array to incoming photons, which is probably an artifact of the chip manufacturing process, results in a blurring of pixels that makes it difficult to resolve two points that are within a few nanometers of one another.

"We have developed an active feedback system that allows us to place the image of a single fluorescent molecule anywhere on the CCD array with sub-pixel precision, which in turn enables us to work in a region smaller than the typical three pixel length-scale of the CCD non-uniformity," says Pertsinidis, who is the lead author on the Nature paper. "With this feedback system plus the use of additional optical beams to stabilize the microscope system, we can create a calibrated region on the silicon array where the error due to non-uniformity is reduced to 0.5 nanometers. By placing the molecules we want to measure in the center of this region we can obtain subnanometer resolution using a conventional optical microscope that you can find in any biology lab."

Chu says that the ability to move the stage of a microscope small distances and calculate the geometric center (centroid) of the image makes it possible to not only measure the photo-response non-uniformity between pixels, but also to measure the non-uniformity within each individual pixel.

"Knowing this non-uniformity then allows us to make corrections between the apparent position and the real position of the image's centroid," says Chu. "Since this non-uniform response is built into the CCD array and does not change from day to day, our active feedback system allows us to image repeatedly at the same position of the CCD array."

Pertsinidis is continuing to work with Chu and others in the group on the further development and application of this super-resolution technique. In addition to the human RNA polymerase II system, he and the group are using it to determine the structure of the Epithelial cadherin molecules that are responsible for the cell-to-cell adhesion that holds tissue and other biological materials together. Pertsinidis, Zhang, and another postdoc in Chu's research group, Sang Ryul Park, are also using this technique to create 3D measurements of the molecular organization inside brain cells.

"The idea is to determine the structure and dynamics of the vesicle fusion process that releases the neurotransmitter molecules used by neurons to communicate with one another," Pertsinidis says. "Right now we are getting in situ measurements with a resolution of about 10 nanometers, but we think we can push this resolution to within two nanometers."

In a collaboration with Joe Gray, Berkeley Lab's Associate Director for Life Sciences and a leading cancer researcher, postdocs in Chu's research group are also using the super-resolution technique to study the attachment of signaling molecules on the RAS protein, which has been linked to a number of cancers, including those of the breast, pancreas, lung and colon. This research could help explain why cancer therapies that perform well on some patients are ineffective on others.

In addition to its biological applications, Pertsinidis, Zhang and Chu in their Nature paper say their super-resolution technique should also prove valuable to characterize and design precision photometric imaging systems in atomic physics or astronomy, and allow for new tools in optical lithography and nanometrology.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

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Alzheimer's Disease : Analyzing Structural Brain Changes

Alzheimer's Disease : Analyzing Structural Brain Changes

  5:20:00 PM    Science Lover

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In a study that promises to improve diagnosis and monitoring of Alzheimer's disease, scientists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a fast and accurate method for quantifying subtle, sub-regional brain volume loss using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Serial MRI brain scans, taken six months apart, show progression from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease, with significant atrophy (blue) and ventricle enlargement (orange/red). (Credit: University of California, San Diego, UCSD)

The study will be published the week of November 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

By applying the techniques to the newly completed dataset of the multi-institution Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), the scientists demonstrated that such sub-regional brain volume measurements outperform available measures for tracking severity of Alzheimer's disease, including widely used cognitive testing and measures of global brain-volume loss.

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Potential Treatment for Huntington's Disease

Potential Treatment for Huntington's Disease

  1:58:00 AM    Science Lover

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Investigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham), the University of British Columbia's Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics and the University of California, San Diego have found that normal synaptic activity in nerve cells (the electrical activity in the brain that allows nerve cells to communicate with one another) protects the brain from the misfolded proteins associated with Huntington's disease. In contrast, excessive extrasynaptic activity (aberrant electrical activity in the brain, usually not associated with communication between nerve cells) enhances the misfolded proteins' deadly effects.

Normal synaptic activity in nerve cells protects the brain from the misfolded proteins associated with Huntington's disease, researchers have discovered. (Credit: iStockphoto/Sebastian Kaulitzki)

Researchers also found that the drug Memantine, which is approved to treat Alzheimer's disease, successfully treated Huntington's disease in a mouse model by preserving normal synaptic electrical activity and suppressing excessive extrasynaptic electrical activity. The research was published in the journal Nature Medicine on November 15.

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Computational Method Points To New Uses, Unexpected Side Effects Of Already Existing Drugs

Computational Method Points To New Uses, Unexpected Side Effects Of Already Existing Drugs

  12:59:00 AM    Science Lover

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Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and the University of California, San Francisco have developed and experimentally tested a technique to predict new target diseases for existing drugs.

Bryan Roth, M.D., Ph.D. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of North Carolina School of Medicine)

The researchers developed a computational method that compares how similar the structures of all known drugs are to the naturally occurring binding partners -- known as ligands -- of disease targets within the cell. In a study published this week in Nature, the scientists showed that the method predicts potential new uses as well as unexpected side effects of approved drugs.

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Chronic Spinal Cord Injury

Chronic Spinal Cord Injury

  11:45:00 AM    Science Lover

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Scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine report that regeneration of central nervous system axons can be achieved in rats even when treatment delayed is more than a year after the original spinal cord injury.

Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - San Diego)

"The good news is that when axons have been cut due to spinal cord injury, they can be coaxed to regenerate if a combination of treatments is applied," said lead author Mark Tuszynski, MD, PhD, professor of neurosciences and director of the Center for Neural Repair at UC San Diego, and neurologist at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Health System. "The chronically injured axon is not dead."

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Clues To Reversing Aging Of Human Muscle Discovered

Clues To Reversing Aging Of Human Muscle Discovered

  12:46:00 AM    Science Lover

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A study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has identified critical biochemical pathways linked to the aging of human muscle. By manipulating these pathways, the researchers were able to turn back the clock on old human muscle, restoring its ability to repair and rebuild itself.

Young, healthy muscle (left column) appears pink and red. In contrast, the old muscle is marked by scarring and inflammation, as evidenced by the yellow and blue areas. This difference between old and young tissue occurs both in the muscle's normal state and after two weeks of immobilization in a cast. Exercise after cast removal did not significantly improve old muscle regeneration; scarring and inflammation persisted, or worsened in many cases. 

(Credit: Photo by Morgan E. Carlson and Irina M. Conboy, UC Berkeley)

The findings will be reported in the Sept. 30 issue of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, a peer-reviewed, scientific publication of the European Molecular Biology Organization.

"Our study shows that the ability of old human muscle to be maintained and repaired by muscle stem cells can be restored to youthful vigor given the right mix of biochemical signals," said Professor Irina Conboy, a faculty member in the graduate bioengineering program that is run jointly by UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, and head of the research team conducting the study. "This provides promising new targets for forestalling the debilitating muscle atrophy that accompanies aging, and perhaps other tissue degenerative disorders as well."

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Discovery Brings New Type Of Fast Computers Closer To Reality

Discovery Brings New Type Of Fast Computers Closer To Reality

  1:10:00 AM    Science Lover

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Physicists at UC San Diego have successfully created speedy integrated circuits with particles called “excitons” that operate at commercially cold temperatures, bringing the possibility of a new type of extremely fast computer based on excitons closer to reality.

Alex High and Aaron Hammack adjust the optics in their UCSD lab. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - San Diego)

  
Their discovery, detailed this week in the advance online issue of the journal Nature Photonics, follows the team’s demonstration last summer of an integrated circuit—an assembly of transistors that is the building block for all electronic devices—capable of working at 1.5 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. That temperature, equivalent to minus 457 degrees Fahrenheit, is not only less than the average temperature of deep space, but achievable only in special research laboratories.

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Believing Is Seeing: Thoughts Color Perception -- Implications From Everyday Misunderstandings To Eyewitness Memory

Believing Is Seeing: Thoughts Color Perception -- Implications From Everyday Misunderstandings To Eyewitness Memory

  7:58:00 AM    Science Lover

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Folk wisdom usually has it that "seeing is believing," but new research suggests that "believing is seeing," too – at least when it comes to perceiving other people's emotions.

Researchers showed experimental participants still photographs of faces computer-morphed to express ambiguous emotion and instructed them to think of these faces as either angry or happy. Once an ambiguous look was interpreted, it biased subsequent perception. (Credit: Courtesy of Piotr Winkielman, UC San Diego)

An international team of psychologists from the United States, New Zealand and France has found that the way we initially think about the emotions of others biases our subsequent perception (and memory) of their facial expressions. So once we interpret an ambiguous or neutral look as angry or happy, we later remember and actually see it as such.

The study, published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, "addresses the age-old question: 'Do we see reality as it is, or is what we see influenced by our preconceptions?'" said coauthor Piotr Winkielman, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. "Our findings indicate that what we think has a noticeable effect on our perceptions."

"We imagine our emotional expressions as unambiguous ways of communicating how we're feeling," said coauthor Jamin Halberstadt, of the University of Otago in New Zealand, "but in real social interactions, facial expressions are blends of multiple emotions – they are open to interpretation. This means that two people can have different recollections about the same emotional episode, yet both be correct about what they 'saw.' So when my wife remembers my smirk as cynicism, she is right: her explanation of the expression at the time biased her perception of it. But it is also true that, had she explained my expression as empathy, I wouldn't be sleeping on the couch."

"It's a paradox," Halberstadt added. "The more we seek meaning in other emotions, the less accurate we are in remembering them."

The researchers point out that implications of the results go beyond everyday interpersonal misunderstandings – especially for those who have persistent or dysfunctional ways of understanding emotions, such as socially anxious or traumatized individuals. For example, the socially anxious have negative interpretations of others' reactions that may permanently color their perceptions of feelings and intentions, perpetuating their erroneous beliefs even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Other applications of the findings include eyewitness memory: A witness to a violent crime, for example, may attribute malice to a perpetrator – an impression which, according to the researchers, will influence memory for the perpetrator's face and emotional expression.

The researchers showed experimental participants still photographs of faces computer-morphed to express ambiguous emotion and instructed them to think of these faces as either angry or happy. Participants then watched movies of the faces slowly changing expression, from angry to happy, and were asked to find the photograph they had originally seen. People's initial interpretations influenced their memories: Faces initially interpreted as angry were remembered as expressing more anger than faces initially interpreted as happy.

Even more interesting, the ambiguous faces were also perceived and reacted to differently. By measuring subtle electrical signals coming from the muscles that control facial expressions, the researchers discovered that the participants imitated – on their own faces – the previously interpreted emotion when viewing the ambiguous faces again. In other words, when viewing a facial expression they had once thought about as angry, people expressed more anger themselves than did people viewing the same face if they had initially interpreted it as happy.

Because it is largely automatic, the researchers write, such facial mimicry reflects how the ambiguous face is perceived, revealing that participants were literally seeing different expressions.

"The novel finding here," said Winkielman, of UC San Diego, "is that our body is the interface: The place where thoughts and perceptions meet. It supports a growing area of research on 'embodied cognition' and 'embodied emotion.' Our corporeal self is intimately intertwined with how – and what – we think and feel."

Also coauthors on the study are Paula Niedenthal and Nathalie Dalle, both at the Universite Blaise Pascall, Clermont-Ferrand, France.

The research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant to Winkielman and Niedenthal and a University of Otago Research Grant to Halberstadt.

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World's Smallest Semiconductor Laser Heralds New Era In Optical Science

World's Smallest Semiconductor Laser Heralds New Era In Optical Science

  1:26:00 AM    Science Lover

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Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have reached a new milestone in laser physics by creating the world's smallest semiconductor laser, capable of generating visible light in a space smaller than a single protein molecule.

The schematic on the left illustrates light being compressed and sustained in the 5 nanometer gap -- smaller than a protein molecule -- between a nanowire and underlying silver surface. To the right is an electron microscope image of the hybrid design shown in the schematic. (Credit: Courtesy of Xiang Zhang Lab, UC Berkeley)

This breakthrough, described in an advanced online publication of the journal Nature on Aug. 30, breaks new ground in the field of optics. The UC Berkeley team not only successfully squeezed light into such a tight space, but found a novel way to keep that light energy from dissipating as it moved along, thereby achieving laser action.

"This work shatters traditional notions of laser limits, and makes a major advance toward applications in the biomedical, communications and computing fields," said Xiang Zhang, professor of mechanical engineering and director of UC Berkeley's Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and head of the research team behind this work.

The achievement helps enable the development of such innovations as nanolasers that can probe, manipulate and characterize DNA molecules; optics-based telecommunications many times faster than current technology; and optical computing in which light replaces electronic circuitry with a corresponding leap in speed and processing power.

While it is traditionally accepted that an electromagnetic wave - including laser light - cannot be focused beyond the size of half its wavelength, research teams around the world have found a way to compress light down to dozens of nanometers by binding it to the electrons that oscillate collectively at the surface of metals. This interaction between light and oscillating electrons is known as surface plasmons.

Scientists have been racing to construct surface plasmon lasers that can sustain and utilize these tiny optical excitations. However, the resistance inherent in metals causes these surface plasmons to dissipate almost immediately after being generated, posing a critical challenge to achieving the buildup of the electromagnetic field necessary for lasing.

Zhang and his research team took a novel approach to stem the loss of light energy by pairing a cadmium sulfide nanowire - 1,000 times thinner than a human hair - with a silver surface separated by an insulating gap of only 5 nanometers, the size of a single protein molecule. In this structure, the gap region stores light within an area 20 times smaller than its wavelength. Because light energy is largely stored in this tiny non-metallic gap, loss is significantly diminished.

With the loss finally under control through this unique "hybrid" design, the researchers could then work on amplifying the light.

"When you are working at such small scales, you do not have much space to play around with," said Rupert Oulton, the research associate in Zhang's lab who first theorized this approach last year and the study's co-lead author. "In our design, the nanowire acts as both a confinement mechanism and an amplifier. It's pulling double duty."

Trapping and sustaining light in radically tight quarters creates such extreme conditions that the very interaction of light and matter is strongly altered, the study authors explained. An increase in the spontaneous emission rate of light is a telltale sign of this altered interaction; in this study, the researchers measured a six-fold increase in the spontaneous emission rate of light in a gap size of 5 nanometers.

Recently, researchers from Norfolk State University reported lasing action of gold spheres in a dye-filled, glasslike shell immersed in a solution. The dye coupled to the gold spheres could generate surface plasmons when exposed to light.

The UC Berkeley researchers used semiconductor materials and fabrication technologies that are commonly employed in modern electronics manufacturing. By engineering hybrid surface plasmons in the tiny gap between semiconductors and metals, they were able to sustain the strongly confined light long enough that its oscillations stabilized into the coherent state that is a key characteristic of a laser.

"What is particularly exciting about the plasmonic lasers we demonstrated here is that they are solid state and fully compatible with semiconductor manufacturing, so they can be electrically pumped and fully integrated at chip-scale," said Volker Sorger, a Ph.D. student in Zhang's lab and study co-lead author.

"Plasmon lasers represent an exciting class of coherent light sources capable of extremely small confinement," said Zhang. "This work can bridge the worlds of electronics and optics at truly molecular length scales."

Scientists hope to eventually shrink light down to the size of an electron's wavelength, which is about a nanometer, or one-billionth of a meter, so that the two can work together on equal footing.

"The advantages of optics over electronics are multifold," added Thomas Zentgraf, a post-doctoral fellow in Zhang's lab and another co-lead author of the Nature paper. "For example, devices will be more power efficient at the same time they offer increased speed or bandwidth."

In addition to the three co-lead authors, other co-authors of the paper are Renmin Ma and Lun Dai from Peking University, and Christopher Gladden and Guy Bartal from Zhang's research group.

This work is supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the NSF.

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Spontaneous Assembly: A New Look At How Proteins Assemble And Organize Themselves Into Complex Patterns

Spontaneous Assembly: A New Look At How Proteins Assemble And Organize Themselves Into Complex Patterns

  9:28:00 PM    Science Lover

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Self-assembling and self-organizing systems are the Holy Grails of nanotechnology, but nature has been producing such systems for millions of years. A team of scientists has taken a unique look at how thousands of bacterial membrane proteins are able to assemble into clusters that direct cell movement to select chemicals in their environment. Their results provide valuable insight into how complex periodic patterns in biological systems can be generated and repaired.

PALM is an an ultrahigh-precision visible light microscopy
technique that enables scientists to photo-actively fluoresce
and image individual proteins. This PALM composite of an
E.coli bacterial cell shows the organization of proteins in
the chemotaxis signaling network.
(Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Researchers with Berkeley Lab, the University of California (UC) Berkeley, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Princeton University, used an ultrahigh-precision visible light microscopy technique called PALM - for Photo-Activated Localization Microscopy - to show that the chemotaxis network of signaling proteins in E.coli bacteria is able to spontaneously form from clusters of proteins without being actively distributed or attached to specific locations in cells. This simple organizational mechanism - dubbed “stochastic self-assembly” - is related to the self-organizing patterns first described in 1952 by the British computer scientist Alan Turing.

“It is not widely appreciated that complex periodic patterns can spontaneously emerge from simple mechanisms, but that is probably what is happening here,” said Jan Liphardt, the biophysicist who led this research.

Liphardt holds a joint appointment with Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division and UC Berkeley’s Physics Department. He is the principal author of a paper now available PLoS Biology. Co-authoring the paper with Liphardt were Derek Greenfield, Ann McEvoy, Hari Shroff, Gavin Crooks, Ned Wingreen and Eric Betzig.

Key to a cell’s survival is the manner in which its critical components - proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, etc. - are arranged. For cells to thrive, the organization of these components must be optimized for their respective activities and also reproducible for succeeding generations of cells. Eukaryotic cells feature distinct subcellular structures, such as membrane-bound organelles and protein transport systems, whose complex organization is readily apparent. However, there is also complex spatial organization to be found within prokaryotic cells, such as rod-shaped bacteria like E. coli.

“It has remained somewhat mysterious how bacteria are able to organize and spatially segregate their interiors and membranes,” said Liphardt. “Two cells which are biochemically identical can have very different behaviors, depending upon their spatial organization. With new technologies such as PALM, we are able to see exactly how cells are organized and relate spatial organization with biological function.”

PALM and the Chemotaxis Network

In the PALM technique, target proteins are labeled with tags that fluoresce when activated by weak ultraviolet light. By keeping the intensity of this light sufficiently low, researchers can photoactivate individual proteins.

“Since individual proteins are imaged one at a time, we can localize and count them, and then computationally assemble the locations of all proteins into a composite, high-precision image,” said Liphardt. “With other technologies, we have to choose between observing large clusters or observing single proteins. With PALM, we can examine a cell and see single proteins, protein dimers, and so forth, all the way up to large clusters containing thousands of proteins. This enables us to see the relative organization of individual proteins within clusters and at the same time see how clusters are arranged with respect to one-another.”

Liphardt and his colleagues applied the PALM technique to the E.coli chemotaxis network of signaling proteins, which direct the movement of the bacteria towards or away from sugars, amino acids, and many other soluble molecules in response to environmental cues. The E.coli chemotaxis network is one of the best-understood of all biological signaling systems and is a model for studying bacterial spatial organization because its components display a nonrandom, periodic distribution in the cell membrane.

“Chemotaxis proteins cluster into large sensory complexes that localize to the poles of the bacterial cell,” Liphardt said. “We wanted to understand how these clusters form, what controls their size and density, and how the cellular location of clusters is robustly maintained in growing and dividing cells.”

Using PALM, Liphardt and his colleagues mapped the cellular locations of three proteins central to the chemotaxis signaling network - Tar, CheY and CheW - with a mean precision of 15 nanometers. They found that cluster sizes were distributed with no one size being “characteristic.” For example, a third of the Tar proteins were part of smaller lateral clusters and not of the large polar clusters. Analysis of the relative cellular locations of more than one million individual proteins from 326 cells determined that they are not actively distributed or attached to specific locations in cells, as had been hypothesized.

“Instead,” said Liphardt, “random lateral protein diffusion and protein-protein interactions are probably sufficient to generate the observed complex, ordered patterns. This simple stochastic self-assembly mechanism, which can create and maintain periodic structures in biological membranes without direct cytoskeletal involvement or active transport, may prove to be widespread in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.”

Liphardt and his research group are now applying PALM to signaling complexes in eukaryotic membranes to see how widespread is stochastic self-assembly in nature. Given that biological systems are nature’s version of nanotechnology, the demonstration that stochastic self-assembly is capable of organizing thousands of proteins into complex and reproducible patterns holds promise for a wide range of applications in nanotechnology, including the fabrication of nanodevices and the development of nanoelectronic circuits.

This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, Energy Biosciences Program, the Sloan and Searle Foundations, and National Institutes of Health grants.

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Explanatory ‘Nano Song’ becomes mega-hit on Youtube

Explanatory ‘Nano Song’ becomes mega-hit on Youtube

  12:23:00 PM    Science Lover

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Vocalist Glory Liu poses with a muppet

How would you explain “nanotechnology” to a science novice? A group of US-based students from the University of California, Berkeley, have answered this call with a pint-sized video - part Sound of Music, part Muppets, part science class. Its online reception, though, has been anything but small!

The Nano Song features music and lyrics by 27-year-old Ryan Miyakawa, a pianist-composer and engineering graduate student. Glory Liu - a classics and political economy major with three years of classical music training - lends voice to the lyrics, cheerfully explaining nanotechnology to a band of puppets: “A million nanometres that are lined up in a row/Are just about as long as a single flake of snow….”

Image via CrunchBase

The piece went online on February 22, when the group submitted it to the American Chemical Society (ACS), as part of its competition to explain nanotechnology in no more than three minutes.

Fame wasted no time. By early March, The Nano Song had spread virally, with mentions by PhysOrg.com, Scientific American, WIRED, and boingboing. When YouTube featured the video on its home page, it quickly racked up over 3,00,000 hits, along with a mountain of comments from viewers, like: “‘Nano Song’ is rocking the globe!”

“I turned comments off after the first 200,” says Miyakawa.

Nanotechnology is a hot topic in science and engineering, but experts in the field have trouble explaining it to the uninitiated, he notes.

“Therefore, I wanted to do something fun that would be acceptable to the public,” he says.

To Miyakawa, a silly yet edifying song seemed to be in order. He spent a day composing a tune - using music software to lay down a big orchestral sound - and writing lyrics with across-the-board appeal.

The refrain goes: “Nano, nana, nano/ What a wonderful surprise/That ordinary is extraordinary/When you make it nano size!”

Turning the snappy ‘Nano Song’ into a video was challenging; complete with its troupe of students and alumni, who built and manipulated puppets for the shoot.

The Nano Song is currently the top-rated and most-viewed contest submission, with more than 12,000 views on the ACS site.

To see the video itself, ‘behind the scenes’ photos of its making; or to download an MP3 of the song, visit www.nanosong.com.
Simply copy and paste the following code into your blog and show off your page rank to your readers. The following code will appear as

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