Developments in nanotechnology are attracting the attention of scholars of science communication who can play a strategic role in understanding technology adoption by the public. This paper begins to address a critical gap in that research by studying the impact of visual images on lay American audience associations with nanotechnology. An inductive qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews about participants' general knowledge of nanotechnology and their reactions to two different visual images of nanotechnology revealed 10 themes, which were sometimes valenced positively or negatively: science, (medicinal) machines, technology, very small, sky, motion, (childhood) toys, bodily blood, injecting (disease), and foreign (insect). We argue that these findings illustrate a specific “visual” domain of “science” images, that this domain is organized to contain polarities, and that this leads to volatility in public attitudes but also flexibility in responses to a range of visual images of new sciences such as nanotechnology.
Simple devices that contain alkanethiolate monolayers sandwiched between conducting films were prepared by fixing a gold film to the surface of an alkanethiolate monolayer (on a gold substrate) with silver paint. These devices, and similar devices that did not contain alkanethiolate monolayers, were tested as resistors in d.c . circuits. The devices that contained octadecanethiolate monolayers had resistances of approximately 1012 Ω, 10 orders of magnitude higher than the resistance of devices that contained no monolayers. Sulfur- terminated alkanethiolate monolayers were prepared by treatment of carboxylic acid-terminated monolayers with vapours of thionyl chloride followed by vapours of hexane-1,6-dithiol. Attempts to use the sulfur-containing groups at the surface of this monolayer as 'molecular glue' to attach a flexible gold film to the surface of the monolayer were unsuccessful.
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