How do we “see” and study nanoparticles in the Clark Fork River
In this case, we take the water collected in Montana, back to our labs in Virginia, where we look at the samples in a transmission electron microscope (that is, a TEM). I’m standing with the very instrument we use in the picture. It huge, with the microscope itself and necessary associated equipment taking up a large size room. It is extremely expensive to purchase (millions of dollars), and using it requires a great, great deal of expertise and training, as you can imagine. The system is so complex that it takes a great deal of knowledge just to keep it running. Yet, these remarkable instruments allow you to “see” with magnification up to a million times or so. That’s good enough to see single columns of atoms, if you can believe that. Nanoparticles may only be a few tens of atoms across, so you need an microscope of this power to see and study them. Thus, a high resolution TEM like this one becomes an essential tool.
August 10th, 2007 at 2:58 am
A most important research topic. A most imposing machine. A most distinguished professor!
It’s all very inspirational !!
August 4th, 2009 at 7:51 am
hello.
how can we understand that a nono particles that we buy is really nano?ofcourse without experince instruments such as tem and sem,i want some simple experiment to find that.
thanks
August 16th, 2009 at 5:42 am
There are light scattering techniques that can be used to detect nanoparticles, and although they cannot give get detail, these instruments are much less costly and complex than a TEM. Yet their cost is still not trivial. So unless you are a scientist who studies nanoparticles, you really have to trust what the manufacturer says about their product, or find reports about the product conducted by an independent agency (academic researchers, government agencies, etc.).
March 9th, 2011 at 5:03 pm
It’s not clear to me how you knew to look for these lead-nano-waste (lnw) at this location? The article makes it sound as though lnw is natural (which I can understand; if a natural/toxic element braks down, it could break down to nano-size), but are you studying the quality of the river water, or the properties of nano-waste? (probably both, right?)
March 10th, 2011 at 10:48 am
Correct, we study both the properties of the nano-waste, and the overall quality of the river water. Wet chemical analysis can tell us the overall chemistry of the water, like what percentage of the water is the element lead, but not how the lead is actually present in the water, for example as dissolved lead ions in the water or as a component of oxide nanoparticles in the water.
Also, you are correct is saying that the lead-nano-waste is natural, as the lead was originally in natural minerals in the ground, which were mined and put near the surface of the Earth where the lead was released, eventually forming new compounds like these nanoparticles.