and operated by schoolchildren.

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>Students From UCL And Chinese Universities Team Up For A Second LEGO2NANO Hackat
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Students and researchers from UCL’s Engineering and MAPS Faculties, Institute of Making and London Centre for Nanotechnology teamed up with their counterparts at Tsinghua and Peking Universities in China to develop a low-cost and easy-to-use Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). Their goal was to make AFMs accessible to schools, so that schoolchildren can learn about Nano science in the best way possible: by doing their own experiments.


Many of the world’s most pressing problems involve processes at the Nano scale: how to battle new viruses, develop better batteries Cheap Brandon Scherff Jersey , and combat environmental pollutants. To image the Nano scale – which is too small to be seen by the naked eye or even the best optical microscope – the instrument of choice is the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). AFMs feature a tiny needle that scans across a surface, like a finger reading a text in Braille. It can record the shape of the surface with exquisite resolution, allowing even individual atoms to be visualized. Unfortunately, commercial AFMs are very expensive (up to £100 Cheap Montae Nicholson Jersey ,000), making them inaccessible to users outside the research community.


Despite the high cost, the main components of an AFM are fairly simple: a high-precision movable stage, a small cantilever that bends if it gets close enough to the sample surface Cheap Jonathan Allen Jersey , and an optical system that senses the bending of the cantilever. This simplicity prompted the LEGO2NANO team to start designing a low-cost, open-source version of an AFM, which could be assembled and operated by schoolchildren.


This year, a group of undergraduate and PhD students from UCL met with students from Tsinghua and Peking Universities for a second LEGO2NANO AFM workshop hosted at the Arts and Design Academy at Tsinghua University in Beijing Cheap Ryan Kerrigan Jersey , September 7-13, 2014. Over one week they worked together to construct the hardware for the instrument, write software to control the scanning movement of the AFM needle, and create a user interface. They also built a website to facilitate easy sharing of AFM images. Throughout the week Cheap Jordan Reed Jersey , the students had the opportunity to interact with Dr. En-Te Hwu from Academia Sinica in Taipei, an expert in