Two dozen of the Capital Region’s best and brightest science students were on campus last week to sink boats, pour molten zinc, and get an inside look into the world of engineering that will hopefully propel them to a future in math and science.

When it comes to identifying, planning for, and achieving career goals, undergraduate students are getting a head start from the Career Development Center at Rensselaer.

Researchers at Rensselaer have developed a new method of compacting carbon nanotubes into dense bundles.

Researchers at Rensselaer and the University of Akron have created synthetic “gecko tape” with four times the sticking power of the actual animal's foot.

The new supercomputer at Rensselaer has been ranked seventh in the world, and it is the most powerful of any system based at a university, according to the 29th edition of the closely watched Top500 list.

The ability of carbon nanotubes to withstand repeated stress yet retain their structural and mechanical integrity is similar to the behavior of soft tissue, according to a new study from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Chunming Zhou, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, was recently honored for his work in film coatings. Zhou received the 2007 International Conference on Metallurgical Coatings and Thin Films Graduate Student Gold Medal Award for his research on Ta nanopillar arrays grown by glancing angle deposition. He was chosen in the fall as one of four finalists who gave presentations to a panel of international judges at an ICMCTF conference in April. Zhou emerged as the winner.

Rensselaer’s Lally School is one of nine new schools to be named to BusinessWeek magazine’s list of top 50 undergraduate business programs.

A delegation from Rensselaer will travel to Europe March 15-22 to meet with leading representatives from government, industry, science, and higher education.

Rensselaer’s Lally School and Albany Law School today announced plans to offer two innovative master’s degree programs in the fields of technology transfer and commercialization.

In a lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, President Shirley Ann Jackson called for a renewed focus on science in key public policy deliberations.

Daniel Gall, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the NSF.

Rensselaer’s annual series of welcoming events called Navigating Rensselaer and Beyond has been awarded the 2006 NASPA Excellence Gold Award.

Brian Schulkin, winner of the first-ever $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize, has invented an ultralight, handheld terahertz spectrometer.

Fusing wet and dry nanotechnologies, researchers led by Nikhil Koratkar, have controlled the flow of water through carbon nanotube membranes with an unprecedented level of precision.

Four entries were recognized today as the winning ideas of Rensselaer’s “Change the World Challenge” competition.

On Sept. 8, Rensselaer announced an in-kind contribution commercially valued at almost $514 million from the Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE). PACE is a joint philanthropic initiative of General Motors, EDS, Sun Microsystems, and UGS Corp. to support key academic institutions worldwide with computer-based design tools to prepare students to compete in the future.

A Rensselaer researcher has made his way into the Guinness Book of World Records by creating “the smallest nanotube brushes with bristles more than a thousand times finer than a human hair.” In collaboration with the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Pulickel Ajayan, the Henry Burlage Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, described the microscopic brushes — each composed of millions of carbon nanotubes — in the July 2005 issue of Nature Materials.

Rensselaer researchers have started a new fundamental research project on the component that is often referred to as the heart of a fuel cell — the polymer membrane. Researchers are testing a new type of polymer membrane, created at Rensselaer, for potential use in proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cell and hydrogen applications.

Researchers at Rensselaer have created a line of brushes whose bristles, made from carbon nanotubes, are so small that a thousand of them could fit inside a strand of hair. The carbon nanotube brushes already have been tested in a variety of tasks that range from cleaning microscopic surfaces to serving as electrical contacts.

One of the first things we learn in chemistry class is that solids conduct heat better than liquids. But a new study suggests that in nanoscale materials, this is not necessarily the case. Using computer simulations, Rensselaer researchers have found that heat may actually move better across interfaces between liquids than it does between solids.

Researchers at Rensselaer have created a line of brushes whose bristles, made from carbon nanotubes, are so small that a thousand of them could fit inside a strand of hair. The carbon nanotube brushes already have been tested in a variety of tasks that range from cleaning microscopic surfaces to serving as electrical contacts.

There’s more than one way to make a nanostructure with unique properties — like encouraging bacteria to exhale it. A Rensselaer alumnus and Professor Pulickel Ajayan explored that process in research conducted last year.

Rensselaer researchers have discovered a simple method for rapidly creating different shapes of carbon nanotube structures. To produce the minuscule structures on a commercial scale, manufacturers are looking for such techniques that make it possible to work with materials several billionths of a meter in size.

At Rensselaer, a researcher and an alumnus are demonstrating how working at the nexus of biology and nanotechnology could lead to the tailoring of bacterial processes for a host of smaller, faster semiconductors and other electronic devices.

Superb conductors of heat and infinitesimal in size, carbon nanotubes might be used to prevent overheating in next-generation computing devices or as fillers to enhance thermal conductivity of insulating materials, such as durable plastics or engine oil. But a Rensselaer research team has discovered that the nanotubes' role as thermal superconductors is greatly diminished when mixed with materials such as polymers that make up plastics.

Professors Pulickel Ajayan and Ganapathiraman Ramanath in the materials science and engineering department have met with success on myriad efforts involving the carbon nanotube. From creating nanowalls and nanostrands to growing them in three dimensions, the work and excitement has been generated in one place: the Rensselaer Nanotechnology Center (RNC).

Researchers have discovered how to weld together single-walled carbon nanotubes that could pave the way for controlled fabrication of molecular circuits and nanotube networks.

For the first time, researchers have created a simplified method for making long, continuous, hair-like strands of carbon nano-tubes that are as much as eight inches in length.

Two Rensselaer researchers have made groundbreaking developments in growing and discovering new properties of carbon nanotubes. Their unprecedented research has been highlighted in some of the most noted scientific periodicals in the nation, including Nature and Science magazines.