What the Heck is Opal Anyway?!
January 23rd, 2010 // 6:54 am @ admin
What is opal?
Opal is one of the most beautiful and precious gemstones found on the earth. It is predominantly found in Australia, which makes up 85% of the total opal in the world today. Opal is made over millions of years by water trickling through sandstone and picking up tiny particles of silica on [...]
How Can “Settling” Be Magic & What Does It Have To Do With Photonic Crystals?!
January 22nd, 2010 // 2:52 pm @ admin
“Opal is a crystal-like lattice of objects in space, in this case, silica microspheres”
One of the cool things about NanoScienceKits.org and our nano science kits is something called ‘natural order’ which is the way the photonic spheres settle into a lattice formation in the test tube. It is important for the nanospheres to be almost [...]
Category : Blog & Nanotechnology
What Is Scilica
January 20th, 2010 // 3:52 pm @ admin
Imagine a robot so small it can be intravenously introduced into the human body to detect and destroy foreign invaders; or a battery small enough to be used for a cell phone but powerful enough to start an automobile. Imagine a microprocessor that uses photons to carry information instead of electrons and doing it [...]
Category : Blog & Nanotechnology
How Big Is A Nanometer?!
January 20th, 2010 // 2:02 pm @ admin
Here at NanoScienceKits.org, we work at a very tiny level; the nano level. At the nano level, we work in a measurement called a nanometer. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. A meter is about 39 inches long or 3.28 feet. If you were to write a billion as a number it [...]
Category : Blog & Nanotechnology
The Building Blocks of Opal Explained
January 15th, 2010 // 7:11 pm @ admin
Silicon Dioxide or “Silica” is an oxide of Silicon. Under a scanning electron microscope, silica looks like tiny spheres. Although they range in size and shape naturally, the image below shows silica that is extremely uniform. Imagine trying to stack these little spheres into a pyramid. Because they are the same size and shape it [...]
Category : Blog