Over the weekend, I stumbled across Nano Tube, an online compendium of useful, funny and plain weird short films based around nanotechnology. It’s a competition being run by ACSnanonation, which invites entrants to capture what nano is, how its best visualised or where its heading in under 3 minutes, in exchange for the chance to win $500 cash.
As it turns out, I’m pretty late in the day to be catching on to the Nano Tube – it was actually launched January – this however left me with rich pickings to trawl through so i'm not too upset! Browsing the ‘most viewed’ category, the downside soon became apparent as I got sucked in and ended up losing a good couple of hours messing about on it (ah well, all for a good cause...or something!). So, by way of justifying the whole thing to myself I've pulled together some of the highlights of the show below:
If you're looking for something slick…With pretty decent animations for an amateur video comp, ‘An Introduction to Nanotechnology’ is pretty good. Unfortunately it’s in many ways akin to a video you’d see at school (very informative but a bit dry – sound familiar?) but gets a gold star nonetheless.
Slightly odd but strangely addictive (and actually pretty informative) is ‘Small can be big - a french cheesy perspective’. With a cheesey cheesey cheese theme, this short film attempting to explain how exactly nanoparticles have such a large surface area isn’t the most technical piece of cinematography and it does feature some pretty odd French accents, but is pretty entertaining and strangely addictive once you fix onto those ever shrinking blocks of cheese…
Funny... 'The Nano Song'. Plain genius, it does exactly as it says on the tin – ‘Everything you need to know about the wonders of nanotechnology... as a musical... with puppets...’ Ok, so maybe it doesn’t tell you everything you need to know, but it’s a great one for introducing kids to the concept, and any video that manages to cross Sesame Street with science (it features its very own purple Oscar the Grouch-esque character!) has to be compulsory viewing!
Plain Strange... 'The room at the bottom' Following a scientist's fantastical journey into a realm of nanoscale dimensions, the grandaunt students behind this entry attempts to explore popular fact and fiction of nanotechnology in the style of "Alice in Wonderland." Featuring a mad scientist exploring a Transmission Electron Microscope powered nanoworld (which he enters with the aid of some dry ice, bubbling test tubes in various colours and lots of goo - naturally), before being attacked by a beautiful lady who turns into a cluster of evil nanoparticles and eventually saved by his colleague with a big jar of ‘nano-ß-gone’; this video is pretty strange through and through, but scores 10/10 for imagination!
And Finally… in the last couple of days a late entry has appeared from none other than SAFENANO’s friend Nanoman (as in Andrew and Alex Maynard’s ‘The Adventures of Nanoman’) …now, without trying to introduce bias to your vote in any way (would I ever!), its gotta be worth a tick from the nanoEHS community! Click here to vote…
So there you are – some useful, some funny and some plain weird, but all in all a pretty decent effort from ACS to encourage public engagement, and good distraction to accompany your morning coffee break!
Think you could do better? The competition is open for submissions until the 15th March – click here for more info on how to get involved.