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Lotus flower. I came into this week having little to no knowledge about nanotechnology, and while I still found myself getting a little lost during the lecture videos, I feel like I learned important information about a topic that is extremely relevant in the scientific world today.   In the lecture video part 3, one topic that really caught my attention was when Professor Gimzewski introduced the compound called titanium dioxide.   This nanoparticle has self-cleaning properties that are also found in the Asian Lotus plant.   When looking at the lotus plant with a reflection electron microscope, you can see that the leaves are not smooth, but instead have small waxy bumps.    This design has been adopted in the nanotechnology field to create surfaces that are water resistant and self-cleaning.   I think this technology can and will be extremely useful in several instances in our society.   Being able to manufacture materials that are self-cleaning would save lo

Something that really sparks my attention from this week’s material is the discussion about the question posed of whether computers have consciousness or not.  I believe this question is something that is still hard to comprehend as of now, but if the technological world keeps making the rapid advancements that it has been in the recent years, this is a topic that will be very interesting to look at.  I think that the idea of consciousness is pretty unclear, but for some reason I have a hard time believing that anything human built machine will ever be “conscious”.  I think the reason that this idea of technology and consciousness is arising a lot lately is because the research on the brain is relatively new.   As discussed in the Lecture video, the technology to study the brain has only been recently discovered, so much of the recent past has been devoted to researching how the brain functions.   I thought it was especially interesting learning about