Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Nanotechnology

Episode Date: February 25, 2023

In Greek, the word for dwarf is “nanos.”  The International Bureau of Weights and Measures adopted the prefix ‘nano’ to mean one billionth.  A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, and it is the scale at which some of the most groundbreaking work is being done in technology and materials science. Learn more about nanotechnology, its applications, and how it works on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the Greek language, the word for dwarf is nanos. The International Bureau of Wights and Measures adopted the prefix nano to mean one billionth. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and it's the scale at which some of the most groundbreaking work is being done in technology and material science. Learn more about nanotechnology, its applications, and how it works on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time. to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. It isn't often that we know exactly when a particular branch of science started, but in the case of nanotechnology, we have a pretty good idea of its precise origin. The birth of nanotechnology dates back to a presentation given by the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman. On December 29, 1959, he gave a presentation to the American Physical Society, which was meeting at Caltech University in California. The title of the presentation was, There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, an invitation to enter a new field of physics.

In his presentation, he presented the theoretical idea that we could build machines on a much smaller scale, that if we could manipulate individual atoms, it would have profound implications for the type of things we could create. Feynman noted that there was no particular reason why we couldn't make atom-scale machines. It was more a function of engineering than physics. But he did note that as things shrank, the challenges involved would become very different than the creation of machines that were accustomed to in our everyday life. For starters, gravity would become less and less important, the smaller you got.

However, other forces, such as the VanderWall forces between atoms, would increase considerably. Feynman had no idea how these new devices could be created. he just knew that there was nothing in the laws of physics which prevented them from being built. At the end of his presentation, Feynman set down two challenges for anyone to achieve. Each challenge would get a $1,000 prize paid for by himself. The first challenge was the creation of a tiny motor that could fit into a cube 164th of an inch or 0.4 millimeters on each side. Surprising everyone, that challenge was accomplished in under a year by William McLean at Caltech.

He created a 2000 RPM motor which consisted of 13 separate parts and weighed 250 micrograms. It wasn't really a technical breakthrough, however. It was more a matter of fine men not being aware of the state of the art in miniaturization and engineering. His second challenge was to scale down written text as to be so small that it would be one 25,000th the size of a printed page. At this level, the entire Encyclopedia Britannica could be put on the head of a pin. This proved to be much more challenging than building a motor. The prize wasn't claimed until 1985 when Stanford graduate student Tom Newman managed to print the first page of a tale of two cities on a pinhead using an electron beam.

Most of the pinhead was completely empty as there was more than enough space to write the rest of the book on it. While writing a book on a head of a pin is interesting, it really wasn't of practical use. So beyond something being really small, what exactly is an animal? as I mentioned in the introduction, a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. And to put that into perspective, the width of an average human hair is approximately a hundred thousand nanometers. The nanometer scale is the scale of atoms and molecules. The diameter of a hydrogen atom is 0.06 nanometers. A gold atom is about a third of a nanometer in diameter. A water model

is 0.275 nanometers, and a strand of DNA is 2.5 nanometers in diameter. Nanotechnology is generally considered to be anything between 1 and 100 nanometers. As nanotechnology just covers anything really small, it also has applications in a wide number of fields. Nanomaterials, nano-electronics, and nanomedicine all fall under the banner of nanotechnology, so it's really more accurate to call it nanotechnologies. The first The first person to use the term nanotechnology was the Japanese researcher Norio Tenaguchi in 1971. He used it in reference to the creation of semiconductors. For decades, nanotechnology was simply theoretical. There was no way to actually see, let alone manipulate individual atoms.

One of the big tentacle breakthroughs which allowed for atomic level analysis was the scanning tunneling microscope. This, for the first time, allowed researchers to view the surfaces of objects down at the atomic level. The development of the scanning tunneling microscope was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1986. Also in 1986, the first atomic force microscope was developed. The atomic force microscope had a resolution below the nanometer scale. And unlike previous microscopes, it could do more than just resolve images at the atomic level.

It also had the ability to measure forces at the atomic level, as well as manipulate individual atoms. In 1989, Don Engler, an IBM researcher, used an atomic force microscope to manipulate individual atoms. He took 35 xenon atoms and arranged them to form the letters, IBM. To be sure, the manipulation and placement of individual atoms was a huge breakthrough. But spelling IBM with atoms was still just a publicity stunt on a par with writing a tale of two cities on the head of a pin. Around this time, one of the most important works of nanotechnology was published by an engineer named K. Eric Drexler.

The book was titled Engines of Creation, the Coming Era of Nanotechnology. In the book, he furthered some of the theoretical ideas originally set up by Feynman in his 1959 lecture. In particular, he developed the idea of nano-assemblers. While an atomic force microscope could manipulate individual atoms, moving individual atoms wasn't really efficient. When working with technology at the nanoscale, you need to build a lot of whatever it is you're building. A single person could never possibly create enough of anything, to be of any use just moving one atom at a time. Drexler's concept of an assembler would be nanoscale robots that could create nanodivises,

including potentially copies of themselves. In theory, such nano-assemblers could do almost anything. In fact, nanotechnology has become the magic wand that many science fiction stories use to explain away any sort of advanced technology. He also addressed a potentially huge theoretical problem with these devices. self-replicating nano-assemblers could replicate unchecked, causing what he called a gray-goo scenario. A gray-goo scenario is where uncontrolled nanobots consume all life on Earth as they self-replicate. As Drechtler described it, quote,

imagine such a replicator floating in a bottle of chemicals, making copies of itself. The first replicator assembles a copy in 1,000 seconds. Then two replicators build two more in the next thousand seconds. The four build another four and eight build another eight. at the end of 10 hours there are not 36 new replicators but over 86 billion. In less than a day they would weigh a ton, in less than two days they would outweigh the Earth. In another four hours, they would exceed the mass of the sun and all planets combined. If the bottle of chemicals hadn't run dry long before.

End quote. While the odds of such a thing ever happening are close to zero, it is another nightmare doomsday scenario to keep you up at night. All the theoretical dangers and benefits of nanotechnology aside, what exactly had has been done in the world of nanotechnology. Most of the current advances in nanotech have been in the realm of material science. One of the big ones has to do with the creation of carbon nanotubes. I've discussed these before in my episode about carbon, but these are forms of carbon where the carbon atoms are connected to themselves in a sheet

that's then rolled up on itself to form a tube. Nanotubes have incredible properties, but as of today, it's only possible to create them in rather short lengths. However, there's more than just types of carbon that are created at nanoscales. Another important nanomaterial are dendomers. A dendomers is a type of synthetic polymer that has a highly branched in three-dimensional structure. The word dendomir comes from the Greek word dendron, meaning tree, which reflects the branch

structure of these molecules. Dendomers are typically constructed from a central core molecule which serves as the trunk of the dendomir. The core is then surrounded by a series of branches, which themselves are subdivided into smaller branches and so on, resulting in a highly branched tree-like structure. Dendomers have a wide range of potential applications in fields such as drug delivery and gene therapy due to their ability to encapsulate and deliver a variety of molecules, including drugs, imaging agents, and genetic material to specific targets in the body.

Another nanomaterial are nanocomposites. Nanocomposites consist of a nanoscale material that's combined with another larger material. The most common nanocomposites nanosaramic matrix composites, metal matrix composites, and polymer. matrix composites. Depending on the material which is created, they can have a host of useful properties, including being stronger, lighter, and more heat-resistant. Quantum dots are also an example of nanotechnology. A quantum dot is a nanoscale structure made of semiconductor materials that can confine electrons in three dimensions. When the size of a semiconductor material is reduced down to a few nanometers, the electrons are forced to exist within a small region of space and then exhibit

unique quantum mechanical properties. The size of a quantum mechanical dot determines its energy level and the color of light that it emits. Small quantum dots emit blue light and larger ones emit red light. Because of their unique optical and electronic properties, quantum dots have many potential applications, including in displays, solar cells, medical imaging, and quantum computing. You actually might have some nanotechnology products in your home. Some articles of clothing have been coated with nanoparticles of zinc oxide which can protect the wear from ultraviolet rays from the sun. Silver nanoparticles are often embedded in bandages to help kill bacteria. Clay nanocomposites are used in some packaging materials to block the flow of gases

such as oxygen and carbon dioxide. Transistors in many new computer chips are now at a scale where individual transistors are measured in nanometers, and special techniques have to be used to create them as they're now smaller than the wavelengths of light that are usually used to create chips. nanotechnology is still in its infancy. Many ideas which were originally floated by Feynman and Drexler have yet to be achieved. While some crude nanoscale machines have been built, nothing close to a true nanobot has ever been constructed. However, there is a great deal of work being done on it. Billions of dollars have been invested in what is considered to be one of the great frontiers of science in the 21st century. And if I were a betting man, I'd guess that many

of the scientific advances will see over the next several decades are going to be in the the realm of nanotechnology. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listeners Sergeant Salt over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, Thanks, Gary. I once met Thor Thompson.

He was sun tanning on float ice above the wreck of Shackleton's endurance. But he doesn't like publicity, so he politely got in his private Zeppelin and sailed away. Well, thanks, Sergeant Salt. While I appreciate your comment, I'm going to have to call you out on this. and I know for a fact that what you described is not true. That's because I know Thor Thompson doesn't need a Zeppelin to be able to fly. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you two can have it right on the show.