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Friday, February 11, 2011

Nanotechnology, what is it good for?

I’d like to use this week’s post to define nanotechnology. This is a bit of a tall order in a blog post, more like a thesis topic, but I think it’s a useful exercise.

The first problem is that the word itself is so vague, and somewhat controversial. Some people prefer nanoscience, feeling that nanotechnology is tilted to heavily towards applied science. Others, including the institute I work for, use NanoSystems to encompass both nanoscience and nanotechnology. But I’ll stick with nanotechnology because that seems to be more widely recognized.

As for the vagueness, it seems that everything involves nanotechnology these days. It is an incredibly popular buzzword in science and engineering, and products from sporting goods to sunscreen have a bit of nano thrown in. Everything, that is, except for food products. Even technology happy Americans recoil in horror at unpronounceable nanotechnologies showing up on ingredient lists.

Nanotechnology has such a wide reach because there has yet to be a real definition of it. Anyone wanting to sprinkle a little marketing magic on their tennis racket or grant proposal is free to enlist nanotechnology, defining it however they like.

Broadening things even further, products and research can be called a nanotechnology as long as one major component involves processes at the nanoscale. Researchers have not had luck creating entire systems at the nanoscale yet. Linking up processes at such small dimensions has turned out to be trickier than once thought. So constructing nanobots entirely at the nanoscale is still in the realm of science fiction at this point.

Moving past these philosophical points of contention, we get into the meat of what is nanotechnology. The National Nanotechnology Initiative, the U.S. program coordinating Federal nanotechnology research and development, defines it as such, “Nanotechnology is the understanding and control of matter at dimensions between approximately 1 and 100 nanometers, where unique phenomena enable novel applications.” Besides 100 seeming like an arbitrarily round number to use as a boundary, this definition only helps if one knows what a nanometer is.

Again, the NNI helpfully points out that a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, but that is such a mindbendingly small scale to image that points of reference are needed. Nanowerk, a popular website for nanoscience and nanotechnology information, provides one of my favorite ways to describe the nanoscale, “a sphere with a diameter of one nanometer compares to a soccer ball as the soccer ball compares to the Earth.” Also from Nanowerk, 8 to 10 atoms (depending on the element) in a row span one nanometer.

Now that we have a relatively decent idea of what is the nanoscale, why is it important? As the NNI definition alluded to, materials exhibit new and exciting properties at these dimensions. Graphite, made up of carbon atoms, is used in pencils and is pretty brittle. But Graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms, is one of the strongest materials known to man.

There is such a long list of materials that exhibit new properties at the nanoscale that one has to wonder if everything operates this way. The anti-climatic answer is no. The materials that do have different properties get all the press because a story about some material that behaves the same as always isn’t very exciting.

These new properties add up to a revolution in the making with nanotechnology. There are three generally agreed upon waves of innovation. The first is already upon us, electronics like smart phones, tablet computers, and laptops rely heavily on nanotechnology to pack so much computing power into such small packages.

The next wave, which is just approaching shore, is in medicine. Nanotechnology is enabling researchers to design medications that can specifically target diseased cells, providing more effective treatments with fewer side-effects.

The third wave, a bit further off but not out of sight, comes from renewable energy. A handful of promising developments are in the works on this front including biofuels from algae, polymer solar cells, and hydrogen fuel cells.

All this potential adds up to nanotechnology being a very exciting field to work in, definitions are overrated anyway.

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