Participants in Louisiana Tech’s NanoSCIENCE Day will have the opportunity on Saturday, Oct. 18, to learn about new nanotechnologies and nanoproducts being developed.

The Shell Louisiana Regional Collaboratives Program NanoSCIENCE Day will be from 8 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. Tours and research presentations will be offered, as well as hands-on chemistry presentations, and engineering and science challenges.

‘Over 100 K-12 students and their teachers will see how the future is being created, every day, through nanotechnology research at Louisiana Tech University,’ said Dr. David K. Mills, Center For Applied Teaching and Learning to Yield Scientific Thinking director and Shell NanoSCIENCE Day project director.

Teachers and schools who have partnered with Tech and its Shell Oil Initiatives, professional development summer institutes and workshops are able to participate. Each teacher can bring up to four students to the event. The event is free for participants. All teachers and students who attend will receive free T-shirts, lunch and goody bags.

Mills added that participants would have an opportunity to learn exactly how small is nano-small.

‘The nanoscale takes you to one billionth of a meter,’ Mills said. ‘Nanotechnology refers to the science, engineering, and technology on that tiny scale. It gives engineers and scientists the technology to study and manipulate matter at the atom-sized scale.

‘A nanoparticle 10 nanometers wide contains dozens of atoms. A strand of DNA, for example, is about two nanometers thick. A collagen molecule is about 1.5 nanometers wide and 200 nanometers long. Probably the easiest for most people to imagine is your fingernail, which grows one nanometer every second.’

The event is sponsored by Shell Oil in partnership with the Louisiana Tech GK-12 Program, the College of Applied and Natural Sciences, the Institute for Micromanufacturing, SCIPORT Discovery Center, the University of Wisconsin – MRSEC and the National Science Foundation.

Highlights of the day will include: