Brian Crane, professor of chemistry and chemical biology, led one study and co-authored a follow-up on a spectroscopic method that detects subtle changes to copper-containing proteins in solution. He and Jack Freed, the Frank and Robert Laughlin Professor of Physical Chemistry, have developed the method together with Petr Borbat, associate director of Cornell’s National Biomedical Center for Advanced ESR Technology.

A billion times smaller than a raindrop is the volume of an E. coli cell. And another million times smaller would be a reactor small enough to study isolated nanoparticles. Add to that the challenge of making not just one of these tiny reactors, but billions of them, all identical in size and shape. Researchers at Cornell have done just that.

A team led by Tobias Hanrath, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, has demonstrated controlled fusion of semiconductor quantum dots within a nanoreactor cage of rusty particles.

On its maiden voyage out of Ithaca, the Ithaca Physics Bus, whose mission is to bring science to the public, brought some 20 exhibits that students in the JunkGenies Greater Ithaca

But despite this importance, existing methods to probe such events, involving strain rates of 10³-10⁵ s^-1, provide only limited or indirect information about the atomic-scale rearrangement that materials undergo.

For example, the skins of many plants and animals have intricate microscale features that give rise to useful properties such as repelling water, adhesion, color-adaptation, camouflage, and resistance to wear or degradation. Try as we have, it is still very difficult or impossible to achieve efficient top–down fabrication processes.

Summer undergraduate research students at CLASSE have been actively influencing the sphere of science education across campus and the community. During their brief time at CLASSE, these students are shaping the research that occurs in laboratory spaces, showcasing their efforts and understanding in conference rooms, and driving the conversations and questions that occur in communal areas. In the laboratory, student devote hours of their time combing through the literature, contributing to the investigation, collecting data, and compiling their results.

What did the Scientists Discover?

Materials were as varied as conjugated small molecules [5,10,18], pharmaceutical molecules [16], metal-organic frameworks [19], cellulose nanocrystals [7], and hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites [2,3,8,9,13] (all in GIWAXS mode) as well as monodisperse nanoparticles [1,14,17],  and block copolymers, polymer membranes, and polymer brushes [4,6,11,12,15] in GISAXS mode. In GIWAXS mode length scales probed are 1-3 nm, in the GISAXS modes 2-20 nm for nanoparticles and 20-80 nm for block copolymers.