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Scientists aren't the only ones who can play around with atoms or hear the sounds cells make if you touch them. Now you can, too. As this ScienCentral News video reports, one nanotechnologist has come up with a way you can see and hear what that invisible world is like.
Science Sound and Light Shows
While others ponder the sound of one hand clapping, UCLA nanotechnologist James Gimzewski says you too can find out what sounds a cell may make, and what it's like to manipulate molecules, the way he does in his lab.
With UCLA media artist Victoria Vesna, Gimzewski came up with a way that anyone can actually be a nanotechnologist for a day. Visitors to the new exhibit, Nano, can use their shadows to move and change the shapes of the images of molecules projected on a wall, while listening to the sounds cells make when they're touched.
The visitors' shadows work like the tool that makes nanotechnology possible, a special new microscope that Gimzewski uses. "All the work we're doing in my lab is revolving around looking at things that nobody can look at, and that nobody looked at before and people didn't even realize were going on," he says. "That world was not accessible to people until fairly recently."
The nanoscale world of atoms and molecules became accessible to Gimzewski and other nanotechnologists thanks to the invention of the atomic force microscope. This microscope has a tiny tip on the end of a cantilever, like a needle on the arm of a record player. As the tip moves over atoms, it builds three-dimensional images of them, which researchers can see on a computer monitor. Gimzewski has used the atomic force microscope to figure out how to use molecules to build tiny sensors and machines, and to study "tiny, tiny little motions in different forms, things moving, turning, vibrating."
The tip of an atomic force microscope can move atoms and molecules. image: James Gimzewski and Christian Joachim
By holding the tip of an atomic force microscope on a cell, Gimzewski has followed how its membrane vibrates and, he says, generates sound. "We gently touch a cell, a living cell and we listen," he says. "They actually produce a kind of music and you can hear it." Gimzewski says he has found that a cell wall vibrates an average of 1,000 times per second that the distance it moves determines the volume of the sound wave, and that the speed of the movement is its frequency or pitch. Living cells seem to whistle like whales singing, while dead cells sound like radio static. Recently, Gimzewski, who calls the study of cell sounds "sonocytology," has been collaborating with medical researchers at UCLA. He hopes that sonocytology might someday help doctors "hear" disease and diagnose their patients much more quickly and easily.
Meanwhile, Gimzewski is eager to convey his excitement about what nanotechnologists can do to as many people as possible, especially young people. He started school wanting to be both an artist and a scientist. Now he's found a way to combine his two passions by collaborating with Vesna. Their current exhibit, Nano, continues through September 6th, 2004 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, furthering Gimzewski's goal of sharing his enthusiasm about science with everyone. "I love it because I get back to my artistic roots as well as my scientific roots," he says. "Fundamentally, in my opinion, there's no difference between the two, and that's what I try to bring through to my students."
Gimzewski and Vesna have described their exhibit in Technoetic Arts (2003). Nano was funded by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the University of California at Los Angeles. Gimzewski has presented his work on cell sounds at the Department of Energy Nanomechanics Workshop (2003). His work on nanomechanics has been published most recently in Physical Review Letters (2003), and funded by the Swiss NCCR Nanoscale Science Program, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the California NanoSystems Institute.
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