0000000000593741
AUTHOR
Margherita Venturi
The challenge of contemporary society on science education: The case of global warming.
The big problems that contemporary society needs to address (e.g. climate change) challenge our traditional idea of education and require to revise the goals of science education research. Such problems are indeed so complex as to require a wide range of competencies to be engaged in producing and implementing solution strategies. Science education is forced to take into account the many dimensions that characterize contemporary science and to face the task of bringing together the potential of all the different perspectives (Tasquier & Nonni, 2011). An example of this kind of research, concerning environmental problems, will be briefly described and its first encouraging results illustrate…
Autonomous artificial nanomotor powered by sunlight
Light excitation powers the reversible shuttling movement of the ring component of a rotaxane between two stations located at a 1.3-nm distance on its dumbbell-shaped component. The photoinduced shuttling movement, which occurs in solution, is based on a “four-stroke” synchronized sequence of electronic and nuclear processes. At room temperature the deactivation time of the high-energy charge-transfer state obtained by light excitation is ≈10 μs, and the time period required for the ring-displacement process is on the order of 100 μs. The rotaxane behaves as an autonomous linear motor and operates with a quantum efficiency up to ≈12%. The investigated system is a unique example of an artif…
Responsible Research and Innovation in Science Education: the IRRESISTIBLE Project
The EU funded IRRESISTIBLE-project (Project Coordinator: Jan Apotheker, University of Groningen, Netherlands) develop activities designed to foster the involvement of high school and elementary students and the public in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). In the project, awareness about RRI is raised in two ways: increasing content knowledge about research by bringing topics of cutting edge research into the program; fostering a discussion among the students on RRI issues about the topics that are introduced. Responsible Research and Innovation focuses on six key issues: Engagement, Gender equality, Science education, Ethics, including societal relevance and acceptability of researc…
A Comparison of Shuttling Mechanisms in Two Constitutionally Isomeric Bistable Rotaxane-Based Sunlight-Powered Nanomotors
To find out how best to optimize shuttling of the macrocycle in a particular class of photochemically driven molecular abacus, which has the molecular structure of BR-I6+ in its Mark I prototype (Ashton et al., Chem. Eur. J. 2000, 6, 3558), we have synthesized and characterized a Mark II version of this kind of two-station rotaxane comprised of six molecular modules, namely (a) a bisparaphenylene[34]crown-10 electron donor macrocycle M and its dumbbell-shaped component which contains (b) a Ru(ii)-polypyridine photoactive unit P2+ as one of its stoppers, (c) a p-terphenyl-type ring system as a rigid spacer S, (d) 4,4′-bipyridinium (A12+) and (e) 3,3′-dimethyl-4,4′-bipyridinium (A22+) electr…