Getting To Know Nanotechnology

These days, some terms like “green” or “indie” or even “Nanotechnology” are starting to become like white noise. We hear them constantly in conversations where people join the bandwagon, so to speak, and begin freely waxing intellectual. Why exactly is an “organic” product automatically more “green” than inorganic product? How can an “indie” film or album still be distributed by a major studio or label? You get the idea.

“Nanotechnology” is a bit like one of those terms now in the health industry and science community. Insiders talk a lot of about Nano encapsulation of medicines and vitamins. There is much controversy over how Nanotechnology can apply to electronics or energy production. And, there are no doubt a host of other lofty ideas involving device physics developing out there. But, what exactly does it mean? Most people can ascertain that it entails working on a very small scale, but can it become as generalized as the aforementioned terms in society?

Well, let’s see. In the Indian Gujarati language, the word “Nano” does indeed mean “little. The SI prefix “Nano” means 10-9. A Nanometer is one billionth of a meter, a Nanosecond is one billionth of a second and so on and so forth. A better way of understanding this incredibly tiny scale, as Jennifer Kahn said in the National Geographic of June 2006, is that “a nanometer is the amount a man’s beard grows in the time it takes him to raise the razor to his face.” Anyway, Nanotechnology is basically the study of controlling matter on a molecular and/or atomic scale. The term was popularized by a man named Eric Drexler who referred to building technologies based on molecular machine systems. 

In the context of science and medicine, Nanotechnology certainly has a bright future. However, it only seems appropriate for controversy over this kind of use to arise out of pharmaceutical application. More and more products are simply employing Nanotechnology to efficiently administer natural vitamins and minerals – ingredients that have already been proven time and again to work gradually without side effects. A Nano encapsulated vitamin only employs the technology in order to increase and accelerate absorption. In other words, you’ll get out what you put in…or something like that.

Hopefully, you learned something here about an exciting and aspiring technology. . In any event, Nanotechnology is certainly a topic to revisit sometime soon At least, you can break out a fact or two if it happens to mysteriously come up in conversation. The ways things are going, it just might.