Dear All, There will be a PUSPM seminar this Friday, October 9th, in Birck 2001. As usual pizza will be served at 11:30 a.m. and the talk will begin at noon. This week Professor Joel Chevrier from the Institut Néel CNRS/UJF Grenoble France will be giving a talk titled: "Mechanical nanotweezer: can we shake hands with a virus? ". Please see the below abstract for more information. I hope to see you there, Ryan Wagner PUSPM student coordinator Abstract: I shall describe the mechanical nanotweezer we are building. It will be based on a combination of two tuning fork AFM (optic free) and directly operated by hand operator through the use of advanced force feedback interfaces. Anticipated applications will be discussed such as the manipulation of soft materials with a size typically 100nm. Set up and preliminary results will be shown. Performances and limits will be analyzed. Example: can we manipulate a living cell within the elastic regime. No: the tuning fork is too stiff and the cell not enough. Virus might be a better choice.