The nano wave

"The main thing to know about nanotechnology is that it's small. Really small. Nano, a prefix that means "dwarf" in Greek, is shorthand for nanometer, one-billionth of a meter: a distance so minute that comparing it to anything in the regular world is a bit of a joke. This comma, for instance, spans about half a million nanometers. To put it another way, a nanometer is the amount a man's beard grows in the time it takes him to lift a razor to his face.

Nanotechnology matters because familiar materials begin to develop odd properties when they're nanosize. Tear a piece of aluminum foil into tiny strips, and it will still behave like aluminum—even after the strips have become so small that you need a microscope to see them. But keep chopping them smaller, and at some point—20 to 30 nanometers, in this case—the pieces can explode. Not all nanosize materials change properties so usefully (there's talk of adding nanoaluminum to rocket fuel), but the fact that some do is a boon. With them, scientists can engineer a cornucopia of exotic new materials, such as plastic that conducts electricity and coatings that prevent iron from rusting. It's like you shrink a cat and keep shrinking it, and then at some point, all at once, it turns into a dog."

-Jennifer Kahn, National Geographic Magazine, June 2006 -

You can see some pictures from the report on this link. Nanotechnology looks like the most amazing phenomenon we will come to witness in the next decades, with possible uses such as killing cancerous cells without the side-effects of chemotherapy. The risks are also great, as with any new technology, and scientists are only discovering the tip of the nano-iceberg. If we have to exert so much energy anyway, it might as well be to push back the limits of human imagination and realisation.