If you have heard any of the buzz surrounding new, seemingly ubiquitous engineering and medical breakthroughs promised by nanotechnology, there are some immediate questions that probably come to mind. For instance, what constitutes something being Nano? And what impact does that have on technology? To fully understand nanotechnology, on needs to recognize the importance of the scale in which the technology operates. Nanotechnology works by either using engineering or chemical and biological processes that t
The nanoscale refers to the range of size and the specific scale of the material used in the construction of nanotechnology. It can also be at which the either the chemical or physical reactions of the compounds used or affected take place. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, while the nanometer scale accounts for objects that exist in dimensions between 1 and 100 nanometers. The extreme degree of its size is what gives nanotechnology its revolutionary capabilities. Scientific research has shown that m
The overall effects of a reaction at the Nano-level can systematically change or manipulate the properties of an object. Scientists call this a quantum effect; as multiple and mass changes are made to an object on a molecular scale as small as the nanometer, the changes are compounded to express a new or latent property of the material. This has produced two different methods for using nanotechnologies: using known materials shrunk to the size of the nanoscale for their unique reactions at that level, and a