When I was a kid there was no mention of nanotechnology. If there was, I wouldn't have understood what they were talking about anyway and neither would anyone else. Today, while we may not understand exactly what nanotechnology is, a lot of us have some familiarity with the term. We know that we are talking about building very small things, things that are created on the atomic scale. If we look up the term nanotechnology in Webster's online dictionary, we get the following definition:“the art of manipulating materials on an atomic or molecular scale especially to build microscopic devices (as robots) ” When nanotechnology first was discovered, the tools for manipulating atoms were not available. Today we have some tools and can do some things, but the really great nano inventions await us in the future.

When I was in high school we had microscopes, these microscopes as powerful as they were, could never see anything on the atomic level. To see atoms you need the very powerful and expensive electron microscopes that are available today. One of the things you need to move atoms around is something with a very, very small point. It was announced this month that an incredible new point was developed that is only one atom wide. This task of developing such a fine point seemed to be an impossible one, but as happens some times, it came to fruition. You would never be able to see the tip with the human eye. There are many proposed uses for nanotechnology. One of these uses is clean energy. To this end a conference was held at the Baker Institute. The object of the conference was to figure out the role of nanotechnology in the development of energy sources. These energy sources have goals of being affordable, clean, cheap and universally available.

One of the goals of nanotechnology is creating stronger and lighter materials. The automobile industry is looking at this with great interest. If the weight of a car could be cut in half by using carbon nanotubes or some other material, automobiles would not only get a great increase in mileage, but would help the environment by using less material. There are probably many military uses for stronger materials, as there are uses for it in space and many other areas. Just imagine spacecraft that are reduced in weight by many thousands of pounds. This would also help in conserving fuel until some other system, other than rockets, is being used. One of the first things to come out with that used nanotechnology changes the characteristics of clothing. The first thing was pretty mundane, but useful. It was a process that used nanotechnology to prevent clothing from staining and it works flawlessly. A second process that is used on clothing and cloth, makes it bullet and knife resistant. The clothing looks normal, but as soon as force is applied to it, such as a bullet hitting it or a knife being thrust into it, the material hardens and prevents the bullet or knife from piercing the material. It is being said that scientists have just about perfected a way of using nanotechnology to make a material that will be invisible. This is the stuff you would only see in a fairytale a few years ago.

One of the things that nanotechnology is really good for is creating filters. They can be made to block the smallest of particles. This has many uses. One that comes to mind right away, is creating a filter that would clean all the contaminates out of water. Clean water has become a problem in a lot of the emerging nations. Pollution is a big problem and filters that are made to the nanoscale might just be what the doctor ordered to cure the problem. Another use for filters with tiny holes are to block gases and biological agents. One of the problems that we had when we invaded Iraq, was that our soldiers were forced to wear extremely heavy and hot biological suits. If we had suits made from nanomaterials, they would be much lighter and flexible and might even be a lot cooler. It just might be possible to run tiny tubes of coolant through the fabric to keep the temperature down.

Nanotechnology is responsible for the creation of new medical devices that are revolutionizing medicine. A new machine is just coming out that is now able to perform several different tests that would have required several machines and it does it better and with much less radiation than ever before. It is said that it will use about 1/1000^th the amount of radiation that just one of the machines would have. This is one area where we are going to see tremendous leaps and here is the best part, the new machine will cost hundreds of times less than a machine like a CT Scan, the prices of those expensive medical devices will come down and that means the tests they perform will be less costly. The machine I mentioned will perform the several tests for only about $1,000. This is far less than the amount of the individual tests that it replaced.

Another area where nanotechnology is going to change things is in lighting. Incandescent lighting wastes a lot of energy. Most of the energy is lost in heat. Florescent lighting is more efficient, but it is still wasteful and it annoys a lot of people, because the light is usually not the most comfortable of colors. Scientists are using nanotechnology to develop a new type of light that is cheaper to build and cheaper to run and just might turn out to be a lot more comfortable to use. A new nanoscale silver for dressings of wounds that is anti-bacterial, has been developed. Batteries are now being manufactured that use nanoscale materials. The batteries deliver more power faster and this is with reduced heat. Another area where nanotechnology is being used is in cosmetics and things like sunscreens. Supposedly this technology is said to have made these products more efficient, but I don't know of any definitive proof of this yet.

A new way of making coatings for glass that is supposedly more scratch resistant is being manufactured using nanotechnology techniques. It is being used on eyeglasses, mirrors and all glass surfaces. So what is the ultimate goal of all this nanotechnology? Scientists think that the ultimate thing that can be accomplished will be to build a machine or structure from the ground up. This may seem a little far fetched to us right now, but this may become the way things are built in the future. Someday there may be a machine that operates like the ink jet printer. It will just squirt atoms out of the head and move back and forth, until it has constructed some device. The future is surely going to be an interesting place.