Ad astra per asperam

Barabbas: Why can't God make himself plain? What's become of all the fine hopes, the trumpets, the angels, all the promises? Every time I've seen it end up in the same way, with torments and dead bodies, with no good come of it. Huh? All for nothing.

Peter: Do you think they persecute us to destroy nothing? Or, for that matter, do you think that what has battered on your soul for twenty years has been nothing? It wasn't for nothing that Christ died. Mankind isn't nothing. In His eyes, each individual man is the whole world. He loves each man as though there were no other.

Barabbas: I was the opposite of everything he taught, wasn't I? Why did He let Himself be killed instead of me?

Peter: Because being farthest from Him, you were the nearest.

Barabbas: I'm no nearer than I was before.

Here’s An Idea. Smith et al. 2016

Terrible Idea; a comment on Smith et al. 2016. Johnson 2016.

You’re Wrong Too; a response to Johnson 2016. Nelson 2016.

From LED displays to solar cells to handheld devices, nanocrystals have the potential to revolutionize electronic devices. The tiny crystals have diameters 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, providing them with unique electronic properties that can improve devices and potentially shrink technologies down to the nanoscale. However, it can be challenging to efficiently arrange nanocrystals into the exact patterns necessary for such devices.

Researchers at the University of Chicago wrote the symbol for indium phosphide (InP) with indium phosphide nanocrystals; each letter is about the width of human hair. Credit: Dimitri Talapin lab at the University of Chicago.

For simple, nanocrystal films, fabrication isn’t too difficult. Much like paint brushed onto a wall, the tiny crystals can be coated, sprayed or even printed to make uniform and useful films – but there is a limit to their complexity. Now, Dimitri Talapin’s lab at the University of Chicago has developed a method of herding nanocrystals into precise patterns, called direct optical lithography of functional inorganic nanomaterials (DOLFIN).

The picture above, illuminated by UV light, shows roughly 800,000 pixels made from quantum dots, all carefully arranged by the DOLFIN process.   Credit: Dimitri Talapin lab at the University of Chicago