Nanotechnology
All manufactured products are made from atoms, with the properties of these products based on how atoms are put together. By rearranging coal atoms, diamonds are formed. Similarly, by rearranging the atoms in sand and adding some trace elements, electronic chips are developed. In time, it will be possible to more readily connect the fundamental building blocks of nature. The word "nanotechnology" is used to describe when the characteristic dimensions of any technology that is less than about 1,000 nanometers. The future will bring the production of new manufacturing processes that will allow companies to inexpensively build systems and products that are molecular in both size and precision. Any businesses, old and new, that are interested in, considering and/or already applying this advanced and still relatively unknown technology will have to do extensive research on the benefits and disadvantages and then, if wanting to proceed, develop a complete and thorough strategy of implementation if they wish to have higher chances of future success.
NT uses either top-down processes (lithography) to cut out or add material to a surface, or bottom-up processes in which NT materials self-assemble to create larger structures. Merkle from Xerox Corporation explains that this is a similar process that is done continually by trees. "Trees grow by taking energy from sunlight and nutrients from the soil to build themselves ... They only use what they need, arranging the atoms in complex internal patterns." Further, "trees also self-replicate: They produce seeds that build other trees. Precisely because it's a miracle of biology, lumber costs only a few dollars per pound." In other words, once there is self-replication, a company has a means for a manufacturing process that is intrinsically low cost (In Fouke 47).
Living systems also use self-assembly, adds Merkle (In Fouke ibid), who calls this "selective stickiness." If two molecular parts have complementary shapes and charge patterns, they will have the tendency to stick together to form a larger part. This will help in building "nanotools," which will construct other things. Molecular-scale positional devices will hold molecules in precise position and one-ten-millionth-scale robotic arms sweeping back and forth over a surface will add and withdraw atoms to build structures. This is comparable to constructing a car. First, use nanotools to build an assembler, or a minute, computer-controlled robot that can be programmed to build nearly anything. Then program the assemblers to replicate. Finally, build the product.
The time for "selective stickiness" is brief: A nanotool can move a molecule into position in a microsecond. With a million operations per second and a billion atoms per assembler, it would take approximately 20 minutes for an assembler to build a copy of itself -- or a billion assemblers in 20 hours. A car can be built in a few hours.
The basis of nanotechnology has grown out of several years of research, innovation and enhancements in a number of different fields of science, engineering and manufacturing. Computer circuits are becoming increasingly small and chemicals more complex. Biochemists regularly acquire more knowledge on how to study and control the molecular basis of organisms. Meanwhile, mechanical engineers are continually improving their precision of design and production.
In 1959, Nobel laureate and Caltech physicist Richard Feynman suggested that it should be possible to build machines small enough to manipulate and control things on a small scale. His talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," is widely considered to be the foreshadowing of nanotechnology. Among other things, he predicted that information could be stored with amazing density. Despite the fact that the power of computers was just being recognized, he had the foresight to see this as the future:
... I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can't we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements- -- and by little, I mean little. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across. Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting- -- if they could be made to be more complicated by several orders of magnitude.
He could even imagine how this would be possible:
Up to now, we have been content to dig in the ground to find minerals. We heat them and we do things on a large scale with them, and we hope to get a pure substance with just so much impurity, and so on. But we must always accept some atomic arrangement that nature gives us. We haven't got anything, say, with a 'checkerboard' arrangement, with the impurity atoms exactly arranged 1,000 angstroms apart, or in some other particular...
Nanotechnology, as its name implies, is, at its essence, the science of small things. However, nanotechnology is not so much the study of small things as it is the study of how to use small things to advance technology. "Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. This covers both current work and concepts that are more advanced" (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, 2002-2008). It spans a very
Nano Technology and World of Quantum Physics Nano technology pertains to the restructuring and reconstruction of atomic and molecular nature. It involves studying the phenomena and materials of atomic manipulation to transform and construct new materials, devices, living organisms and improved technological systems that are
Nano Science - Tomalia In the lecture that Dr. Donald Tomalia presented in March, 2009 ("Traveling the Nano Road of Science, Art & Discovery"), he seems to be the most enthusiastic when he is talking about "dendrimers," which are polymers with a central and hollow core and tendrils. Because the core is hollow in a dendrimers it becomes a kind of pouch or cavity, he explains, and other molecules can be
Technology and Global Ecosystem An Analysis of the Implications of Technology and the Global Ecosystem The 21st century promises to usher in innovations in technology that cannot yet be imagined, and the advancements to date have provided many in the world with unprecedented standards of living. Improved methods of transportation and communication, combined with more leisure time than ever in which to spend it has resulted in many people developing a keen
2010; Chorny et al. 2010). This research is still quite new, however, and the question remains as to whether or not nanoparticles can truly serve as a replacement for stents by prohibiting plaque growth through a variety of means, including more targeted and longer-range delivery of pharmaceutical substances that destroy such build-ups and inhibit plaque deposits from forming. The efficacy of this approach has already been preliminarily demonstrated, but
Nanotechnology attempted to show the potential of this new technology and included the wide range of fields that are connected to the concept of the nanometer scale. These include machining, imaging, metrology or measurement, micromachines, instrumentation and machine tools, scanning probe microscopy, fabrication of components, nanoelectronics, molecular engineering, among others. (Journal Review: Nanotechnology) Another important step in the development of this technology in both a practical and theoretical sense was
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