Nanotechnologies

I first became acquainted with the term nanotechnology about 6 years ago when I was working as a boatbuilder. The man I worked for had done some reading on the subject. He explained it to me as taking two separate components, placing them together, and allowing them to self-formulate into a fully realized entity. He was talking about, what I now understand as a nanobot; a nano-sized robot that can be used in the medical field. The idea is to inject a nanobot into the body and allow it to seek out and destroy a given disease. This is very “Startrek” and certainly a long way down the road.

When I saw nanotechnologies on our topic list, I immediately knew I wanted to research and find out what nanotechnologies truly meant.

Nanotechnology deals with particles 100 nanometres (nm) and smaller. For reference sake, a human hair is 80,000 nm wide, a red blood cell 7,000 nm wide, and a single strand of DNA is 2 nm wide. Conventional materials exhibit completely different behaviours or properties on a nanoscale. Nanotechnology tries to harness these properties to make new and better products.

For the electronics industry, better products means smaller, faster, more powerful computers, eventually moving toward quantum computers. It also means much smaller and more powerful batteries fully integrated into the transistor. It means larger, but thinner and higher resolution displays. There are many other areas in which nanotech is being considered. At the moment, nano particles are being used in colloidal products like face creams and sunscreen.

It is a fascinating field of discovery, but the literature says most of the applications will not be brought into the larger marketplace for another 10-15 years. There are many difficulties facing the industry especially around health and safety and legislation/regulations.

These are my most pertinent links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology

A great place to start, Wikipedia has multiple links within that will answer all your questions plus there are some really wonderful 3-D graphics to ogle.

http://www.nanotec.org.uk/report/chapter2.pdf

I had trouble linking to this later, after I had written it into my annotated bibliography but, you can manually enter the nanotec.org.uk part and find chapter 2 in pdf report. There is another great diagram explicating the scale we are dealing with in nanotechnology.

http://www.nano.gov.html/facts/faqs.html

This site has some good statistics about how much capital is being poured into the nanotechnology industry. It demonstrates the level of faith many sectors have in this industry. It makes me think the real interest is in nanotech’s military applications.

Darlene Pratt. Edited by Roberta