In the Nano-age of nano-news and nano-buzzwords.

I figure, if I put nano 3 times in the title, it'll find more hits on google. Which is ridiculous, but so is research these days.

I went to a conference today in Oklahoma City. I was attending the nanotechnology section of the conference, which was run by the Oklahoma chapter of EPSCoR, that is Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. Which, first of all, was founded by the DOE in 1991 (after another program from the NSF by the same name which was founded in 1979), and apparently gives out a bunch of money every year, so I'd say that it's hardly experimental anymore . . . unless they're just being redundant. It's the Joyous Bovine institute for happy cows . . . in California

Anyway, I was pretty excited about this, because I'd never been to a conference before, and I was looking forward to seeing the different areas of research in the state, and let me tell you, there was some pretty cool research.

But I was struck about half-way through the day with the realization that the overuse of the word nano really annoys me. It doesn't mean anything specific. And everyone uses it all the time, because it sounds techy. The introductory speaker today explained to us that if we signed up for a drawing, we could win an ipod nano. Cool, right? Well, the lady sitting next to me leaned over and said, "Does that mean it's this small?" putting her forefinger and thumb together to emulate something quite small. I laughed. She was not only the funniest scientist I had met in my first 30 minutes at the conference, but she was also making a nice little commentary on what I would be experiencing for most of the rest of the day. All nano means is 10^-9 (which most of you reading probably already know . . .). And I don't mind so much when the media use it when they are talking about some new tiny something that the researchers out at U of X came up with. I get that the general public probably doesn't understand how to make a quantum dot, so that's fine. My parents hear nano, and they think 'really small.' Perfect. And I also understand that because the media and the public recognize it as a 'really cool' scientific word, sometimes it's just much easier to get noticed--aka funding-- when you use this buzz word. For example, I was actually disappointed when it turned out that the particles I used in my undergraduate thesis were 1 micron instead of 500 nanometers--we had to change the name from nano to microparticles . . .

However, it is quite tiring to hear countless companies talk about how they are developing 'nanotechnology' for the 'nanoindustry' with their nano-bio-electo-yadda. But it's no wonder they do when the conference is labeled so very specifically as the 'nanotechnology conference.' Nanotechnology is a wide range of areas. There's nanoparticles, nanosensor, nanoprisms, nanotweezers, and nanotubes . . . Can the nanoprisms girl talk to the nanotubes guy? Well, yeah, but the specifics of her project might be lost on him. Most of the company presentations were so vague I wondered why I was even there. Some of them seemed so thrown off by the vast topic they just said things like "nanotechnology is the future!" and "we should continue to research in this area." I'm thinking "which one??" and that I don't even know what it is exactly the company works with.

Oh well, I guess that's not really something one can avoid at an academic conference. And the individual research projects were pretty cool to learn about. I am also much looking forward to other conferences in the area. Maybe they will allow for more size variation in different areas of research ;-).