In a world where we are taught that bigger is always better, the whole nanotechnology ‘thing’ comes as a bit of a shock, doesn’t it?! On the scale of ‘nano’, you get medical implants patrolling your arteries, computer chips no bigger than specks of dust and clouds of miniature space probes transmitting data from the atmosphere of Mars.

Clever stuff – let’s peer into the microscope to see what the future holds…

To start: Nanotechnology is science and engineering at the scale of atoms and molecules. It is the manipulation and use of materials and devices so tiny that nothing can be built any smaller. Small in this instance means between 0.1 and 100 nanometres (nm) with 1 nm being equivalent to one billionth of a metre!

This is the scale at which the basic functions of the biological world operate. When working with materials on this scale, weird things start to happen. Why? Because there is an increase in surface area compared to volume as particles gets smaller. If 1 nanometre was the width of a pinhead, then 1 metre on this scale would stretch for 1000 kilometres!

Weird quantum effects also start revealing themselves on this scale.

Stay tuned for more…

Source: New Scientist