The University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, is home to North America's first undergraduate program in nanotechnology. As part of the Nanotechnology Engineering degree program, a scanning probe microscopy (SPM)-based laboratory has been developed for students in their fourth year. The one-term laboratory course "Nanoprobing and…

Many philosophers and sociologists of science have tried to understand the profound changes that have occurred in science, engineering and technology. In the first part of this paper, I present the work of one such scholar: Jerome Ravetz who, in collaboration with Silvio Funtowicz, has characterised what he calls "postnormal science".…

This article describes experiments for an undergraduate instrumental analysis laboratory that aim to observe individual double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) molecules using fluorescence microscopy and atomic force microscopy (AFM). dsDNA molecules are observed under several different conditions to discuss their chemical and physical properties. In…