It’s been two years to the day since the devastating 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti. The quake’s epicenter was only 16 miles outside of Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital and most populous city. Even two years later, the damage and destruction is still unfathomable. The city and country will be in recovery mode for a long time.

Rensselaer Professor Jose Holguín-Veras was in Port-au-Prince 10 days after the quake. Above and below are some of the pictures he took. While there, he took careful inventory of the relief policies, relief procedures, relief preparations, and relief infrastructure in place. His objective was to analyze what went right, and identify what could be improved in preparation for future disasters.

The impact of the earthquake was certainly amplified by the fact that Haiti is among the world’s poorest nations. Holguín-Veras warns, however, that the main bottleneck and logistical challenges in delivering aid were not keyed to Haiti’s lack of wealth. Instead, the problem was keyed to the very structure, or supply chain, used to funnel water, medicine, food, and other items into the country and into the hands of those in need. Other nations, even the richest nations, are vulnerable to this structural risk. In fact, he saw many of the same bottlenecks and problems in the relief efforts in Japan—a very rich nation—following last year’s big earthquake and tsunami there.

Jose recently spoke to reporters on this topic. Listen to a recording of the press briefing here.

Also, see this story posted today Discovery News about Jose’s research.

Here’s something we posted at The Approach two years ago following the earthquake, which features snippets from a phone conversation I had with Jose.

What you see above is a collection of nanoscale gold on a silicon surface, made by physics Professor Sang-Kee Eah. To get a sense of the size, 1micron, or 1 μm, equals one-millionth of a meter.  The large zebra-striped pattern running diagonally from southwest to northeast is a superlattice, an area where the nanogold assembled into a unique and highly uniform pattern.

If you zoomed in even closer to this particular superlattice, you’d see very small features measuring less than 9 nanometers—or 9 billionths of a meter—in length. This is important. Chips in today’s computers have features measuring about 32 nanometers, and industry and academia are constantly pushing forward to create chips with smaller and smaller features. Chips with features measuring less than 10 nanometers would be a huge milestone. Eah says his new method for creating this type of superlattice, as seen above, could be a part of the technology puzzle that makes sub-10-nanometer chips a possibility.

Below is an interesting video that stitches together many images from a scanning electron microscope of Eah’s superlattice into one long shot:

Professor Jose Holguin-Veras last month spent about two weeks in Tohoku, Japan, surveying the land and conducting countless interviews in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent tsunami.

Holguin-Veras, in the above photo, is pointing to the ruins of a breakwater in Minami Sanriku, a coastal town in Miyagi Prefecture. It’s less than 50km from the small town of Tsukidate, where I lived for three years.

As made obvious from the photo, Minami Sanriku was badly impacted. The breakwater structure, on which Jose is standing, is about 3 meters tall. Sadly, this defensive structure did little to deter the tsunami. Look to where Jose is pointing, at the walkway situated on top of the breakwater. Those towers stand at least an additional 8 meters tall. The debris sitting on top of this walkway shows us – incredibly – how high the tsunami grew and how powerless we can be rendered when nature flexes is muscles.

Jose’s fascinating research involves scrutinizing the response to catastrophic disasters. He was at Ground Zero in New York in the days following Sept. 11, 2011. He was in New Orleans in the weeks following Hurricane Katrina, and in Haiti the week after the tragic Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake. He wanted to visit Japan much earlier than he did, but travel restrictions from the U.S. State Department, on account of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear reactor, prevented it.

Click here and here for more information on Holguin-Veras’ research in this area, and stay tuned for news stories and more Approach posts on his trip to Japan.

It’s a Pb-based perovskite relaxor ferroelectric PFN, with a Perovskite crystal structure that looks like this:

Professor Doug Chrisey and team are working hard to use an adapted version of the above structure to develop a novel ceramic material that enables entirely new ways of thinking about and implementing energy storage systems for large-scale renewables such as wind and solar power. We’ll have a full news story later this week.

Director of the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Core in the Center for  Biotechnology and Insterdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) Scott McCallum used the massive research machines to develop this three-dimensional image of the protein ubiquitin. His research, most recently published in the Journal of Molecular Biology earlier this month, investigates how the motions and compenents of proteins like ubiquitin are involved in the spread of cancer in the cells of the body.

Here’s a wonderful image from the lab of professor Joel Plawsky. What you see is the spontaneous buckling of a thin tantalum (Ta) film deposited atop a nanoporous xerogel. Read more about this research here.

C. Lopez/A. Hirsa

It seems impossible: Two drops of water moving up and down at incredible speeds, prompted by short pulses of sound. Shine a laser through the droplets, and you have a miniature camera than can capture up to 250 images per second.

It’s not at all impossible. In fact, it’s quite feasible that your children or grandchildren will one day have this lightweight, energy-efficient “liquid lens” technology embedded in their mobile phones. You can read all about professor Amir Hirsa‘s efforts toward this goal here, here, and here.

The beautiful above image is a series of time-lapse photos that show the drops of water vibrating at high speeds. With each crest and fall of the droplets is the opportunity for the camera to be in focus. The time between frames is four milliseconds.

M. Platt

When The Clovers crooned about “Love Potion Number 9″ back in 1959, they may have been closer to the mark than they knew. In the picture above, glowing in green is the protein Fatty Acid Binding Protein 9 found in human sperm. Modeled for the first time in the lab of Professor Mark Platt, this protein is activated after it enters the female reproductive tract in a process known as capacitation. Scientists have known since the time of The Clovers and tail fins on Cadillacs that capacitation is required for fertilization, but until now did not know the exact proteins that were involved in the process. Without the activation of Fatty Acid Binging Protein 9 and others that Platt has identified in the capacitation process, we might not be here at all.

G. Ramanath

(This is the first of many “1 × 10^3 Words” – a new, ongoing feature at The Approach where us humble writers  keep quiet and let the sheer magnificence and beauty of science speak for itself.)