PULLMAN – Jameson Root, a materials science and engineering graduate student and lab manager for the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) at WSU, worked with youngsters as part of the Palouse Discovery Science Center’s Nanocamp being run by Kathy Dawes.
The students were asked to try to crush salt crystals, sugar grains, and an artificial sweetener to make them as small as they possibly could. When they examined the crystals through the SEM, they learned that the smallest pieces seen were still around 1,000 nanometers in size compared with the pre-crushed size on the order of 500,000 nm. These “tiny” particles were compared with multi-walled carbon nano-tubes, a “real” nano-material that were also measured in the SEM with diameters of 10-20 nm.
The camp is one of several week-long science camps the center is offering this summer.
