Introducing The Future: Nanotechnology

Remember the feeling of playing Jenga with your friends, the stress of when you were trying to pick and rearrange just the right blocks to get the best outcome (basically make them lose)? — Now imagine playing with blocks at an atomic scale of around 10–100 nanometers large.

What is Nanotechnology: Nanotech is the act of designing and manipulating matter at an atomic scale engineered by designing nanomachines.

You might believe that nanotech is some very new and very out their tech but in reality, it’s not. You can even date back Nanotech mentions in movies as far back as the 2000s.

Star Trek: Nanoprobes

Avengers: The Iron Man suit

James Bond: That cool spy tech

Now, these mentions in movies may not exactly be accurate and can portray nanotech in a negative light so let’s Understand where nanotechnology is right now:

Passive Nanostructures:

• Passive nanostructures are exactly what they sound like, it kind of just doesn’t do anything.
• It’s the creation of materials where we control their structure on a molecular level, but the actual structure doesn’t “do” anything. It has material properties that are useful or even revolutionary, but that’s as far as it goes.
• We were stuck in this stage for a very very long time looking but HUZZAH we have moved into the second stage

Active Nanostructures:

• These nanostructures aren’t just passive ones with specific properties, but they make changes to other things. They are active in some way and make changes to other objects or materials.
• This is where we are right now

How it Actually Works

It’s important to note that manipulating atoms is it not the easiest thing to do, first off it’s important to understand how small a nanometer really is. IT’S CRAZY SMALL! LIKE REALLY SMALL!

What does this actually mean? It means that manipulating nanometers is really hard, this is because scientists can’t play with nanometers in their hands they have to use electron microscopes to see and manipulate them.

• Electrons travel through coil-shaped electromagnets to form an electron micrograph (images of a nanoparticle). The microscope is able to see the nanoscale objects because they have a wavelength of 1 nanometer whereas photons have 400–700 nanometers long. Using a stream of electrons means we can really start considering and observing objects smaller than light.

How do we operate at the nanoscale?

Now you understand how we know and are able to actually see objects at the nanoscale there still is that big overhanging question. How do we operate at the nanoscale? Well, we have three different types of nanosystems. Nanomachines, Nanomaterials and Nanochips.

Nanomachines/Nanobots

• No matter how big or small, robots go where we can’t go, do what we can’t do, and do repetitive work that we don’t want to do. These machines will be built with a couple of molecules and will have robotic properties.
• These nanomachines will have some really important applications! Injecting nanomachines in our bodies could fight diseases in blood vessels, map out complex structures in the body, and measure toxic chemicals in the environment all at the molecular level.
• We manipulate the nanomachines using the magnetic field.

Nanochips:

• The smaller an electronic system can be made, the more processing power can fit into a given physical volume, the less energy is required to run it, and the faster it can work
• Microchips are nanotechnologies that we use in all our devices to run
• TV’s, cellphones, laptops, smart-watches, etc. all use nanoscale chips to run computations on.

Nanomaterials

• Nanomaterials have more surface area, more surface area means more direct contact with surroundings.
• Quantum dots use nanocrystals to increase performance over standard LCDs and they emit light instead of filtering it. QD LCDs operate at lower energy costs, making them cheaper for consumers and manufacturers. They are being looked into for the technology of screens. .
• Compared to larger parts, nanomaterials have better conductivity, strength, chemical reactivity.

Applications

Now that you know how these nanostructures work and that they exist lets go into some of the sick applications!

Nano-textiles: The future of clothing

Nanotech has appeared in clothing at the beginning of the 2000s when the fashion industry started using silver nanoparticles are antimicrobial, which means they kill the bacteria that cause bad odours.

There is a lot more new technology beyond antimicrobial nanoparticles coming from the field of nano-fabrics.

Other desirable clothing characteristics that could be achieved with nanotechnology include self-cleaning fabrics, water-repelling textiles, and clothing that can reduce odours by chemically changing the compounds that cause bad odour.

The Future

Nanotechnology still has a really really long way to go with tech development. But sooner or later it will be our reality, and manipulating objects at the nanoscale will be like playing with Lego blocks.