Getting a Feel for the Nano World

When it comes to research at the nanoscale, vision is not necessarily an advantage. The subjects are so small, no one can see them. To encourage people with visual impairments to pursue fields in nanotechnology, educators have developed a way to craft accurate, detailed and touch-friendly models of nanoscale objects like carbon nanofibers, allowing the students to "see" those objects for the first time.

While students have learned from abstract models of chemical structures for decades, the new technique creates 3-D versions of objects as they actually are.

Developed by educators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), the models are about the size of a textbook and are formed using rapid prototyping, a process that "prints" 3-D objects. Each model is a scaled-up replica of tweaked data from a scanning electron microscope. The creators hope they will soon be able to apply the same process to data from other instruments, including the patterns of atoms revealed by atomic force microscopes.

The approach was conceived by Andrew Greenberg, education and outreach coordinator for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center on Templated Synthesis and Assembly at the Nanoscale at UW-Madison and for the university's Institute for Chemical Education. He thought of the idea during a visit to the Indiana School for the Blind, which uses 3-D models of chemical structures in the classroom.

Greenberg partnered with two collaborators from the university's Center for Biology Education: undergraduate biochemistry student Mohammed Farhoud, who is skilled with the rapid-prototyping equipment, and the center director, David Nelson.

On March 27, Greenberg and Farhoud presented their novel approach at the 233rd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.

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