Nanotechnology's potential goes far beyond improved toothpaste

Published on Wednesday 3 May 2006 00:53

NANOSCIENCE and nanotechnology involve studying and working with matter on an ultra-small scale. One nanometre is one-millionth of a millimetre and a single human hair is around 80,000 nanometres in width.

Nature has been doing nanotechnology for a long time, and it has become expert in it. Consider the super-fine hairs on a gecko's feet which allow it to stick to walls and even hang upside down on a glass sheet.

Similarly, working at a scale a million times smaller than a pinhead allows researchers to "tune" material properties, making them behave in different ways from normal, large-scale solids.

Nanotechnology is used to create paint that is particularly hard-wearing. Manipulating substances at the nano-scale has allowed the development of toothpastes with just the right level of abrasiveness.

The technology stretches across the whole spectrum of science, touching medicine, physics, engineering and chemistry.

In the last 15 years, more than a dozen Nobel prizes have been awarded in nanotechnology, from the development of the scanning probe microscope to the discovery of fullerenes, tiny molecules of pure carbon.

One of the defining moments in nanotechnology came in 1989 when Don Eigler used a scanning probe microscope to spell out the letters IBM in xenon atoms.

According to experts in the field, nanotechnology will revolutionise life in the 21st century to the same degree as the steam engine, electricity and the computer did in the past.

However, it is a science that is only really beginning.

Last year Professor David Leigh, of Edinburgh University, announced he and colleagues had invented the first nanomachine that could move something bigger than another nano-sized object.

The device was able to move a drop of water up a 12-degree slope - the equivalent of a conventional motor moving a piston by a millimetre and managing to lift an object twice the height of the 1,815ft CN Tower in Toronto.