Although no one can surely tell the potential of this concept, nanotechnology is slowly becoming a part of our lives that no one can ignore. The fact that the technologies that come with it are being used in everyday happening of our lives just send out a message that this is a not concept that will go away anytime soon rather one that will stay here and advance the more.
No one can surely also tell the future of such a delicate part of science. The only certain thing is that there are more news and developments everyday. Organizations that have discovered that they can benefit from nanotechnology are pouring in large sums of money and funding scientists to develop it more. But on the other side governments and other organizations who think of it as a hazard to the society are opposing it everyday and hindering any advancement. This only means that the future of nanotechnology is controversial and we can only wait to see what it has in store.
Although still not so clear how this new invention will possibly directly affect the human body, its effects on the human health and in the health industry at large area already being experienced. Nanotechnology is widely being used in many hospitals. For instance, research is being done on a special type of nanoparticles which can help cure cancer by directly delivering the cancer terminating drugs to cancer cells in the body. Nanotubes are already being used since decades ago too. It is almost as if nanotechnology will have an effect on many health sectors and this only seems to have a positive effect on mankind on a large scale though not widely implemented.
It is also already clear that nanotechnology has a major effect on technology. Devices employing the use of microparticles are being deployed to use in every industry everyday.
One hugely potential dangerous effect of the advancement of nanotechnology is the possibility of nanobots evolving and developing their own artificial intelligence and thus overtaking the human race in the near decades, this is an almost sure possibility if the current advancements are not controlled. The evidence for this is that everyday scientists are coming up with more automated machines that can think or even perform some tasks out of their own thinking and thus there is this unfortunate possibility that they could use this intelligence to damage and threaten humans.
One last risk that nanotechnology poses is one of polluting the environment and this has lead to the establishment of some control bodies by governments and concerned organizations. The nanomaterials that are created in the process are known to kill some useful bacteria and this can alter the way ecosystems are run with much potential dangers.
Origin of Nanotechnology There are a lot of conflicting theories about the origin of nanotechnology and who exactly was responsible for inventing it. Obviously, like any other area of science there was that person who came along the concept in his research or practices and introduced it to the world then there were consequent developments by many other contributors. But when scrutinizing and detailing the facts about nanotechnology it becomes clear that actually there was specifically no one who was
When analyzing the facts about nanotechnology, it will become apparent that not one person was accountable for this revolutionary invention. The only sure thing about its origin is that there was a mention of the concept by physicist Richard Feynman in December 1959 in his talk at an American Physical Society gathering.
In his talk, Feynman explained the possibility of the creation of a process to control individual nanoparticles by employing one set of apparatus to control another relatively sizeable set. His explanations would later contribute immensely to the actual definition that Professor Norio Taniguchi from the by Tokyo Science University would give one and a half decades later in 1974.
The whole nanotechonology concept was later taken up by Dr. K. Eric Drexler who through many speeches and lectures popularized the concept. He explored the controversial definition using the guidelines of his predecessors and published a book with his work in 1986 by the title Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology.
It is through his research and works that the word nanotechnology acquired its current meaning and definition.
The first book by Dr. Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology is believed to be the first book that covered and explored the topic of nanotechnology well and so he is largely associated with the invention and origin of the concept.
The invention of nanotechnology brought along two very important developments which are used widely even today. These are the coming of age of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) and nanotubes and the emergence of the cluster science concept.
The first observations and size measurements of nano-particles was made during the first decade of the 20th century. They are mostly associated with Richard Adolf Zsigmondy who made a detailed study of gold sols and other nanomaterials with sizes down to 10 nm and less. He published a book in 1914.[1] He used ultramicroscope that employes the dark field method for seeing particles with sizes much less than light wavelength. Zsigmondy was also the first who used the term nanometer explicitly for characterizing particle size. He determined it as 1/1,000,000 of millimeter. He developed the first system classification based on particle size in the nanometer range.
There have been many significant developments during the 20th century in characterizing nanomaterials and related phenomena, belonging to the field of interface and colloid science. In the 1920s, Irving Langmuir and Katharine B. Blodgett introduced the concept of a monolayer, a layer of material one molecule thick. Langmuir won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work. In the early 1950s, Derjaguin and Abrikosova conducted the first measurement of surface forces.[2]
There have been many studies of periodic colloidal structures and principles of molecular self-assembly that are overviewed in the paper.[3] There are many other discoveries that serve as the scientific basis for the modern nanotechnology which can be found in the "Fundamentals of Interface and Colloid Science by H.Lyklema.[4]
In 1965 Gordon Moore observed that silicon transistors were undergoing a continual process of scaling downward, an observation which was later codified as Moore's law. Since his observation transistor minimum feature sizes have decreased from 10 micrometers to the 45-65 nm range in 2007; one minimum feature is thus roughly 180 silicon atoms long.
Also in 1974 the process of atomic layer deposition, for depositing uniform thin films one atomic layer at a time, was developed and patented by Dr. Tuomo Suntola and co-workers in Finland.
The first use of the concepts found in 'nano-technology' (but pre-dating use of that name) was in "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on December 29, 1959. Feynman described a process by which the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules might be developed, using one set of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, and so on down to the needed scale. In the course of this, he noted, scaling issues would arise from the changing magnitude of various physical phenomena: gravity would become less important, surface tension and van der Waals attraction would become increasingly more significant, etc. This basic idea appeared plausible, and exponential assembly enhances it with parallelism to produce a useful quantity of end products. The term "nanotechnology" was defined by Tokyo University of Science Professor Norio Taniguchi in a 1974 paper[2] as follows: "'Nano-technology' mainly consists of the processing of, separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or by one molecule." In the 1980s the basic idea of this definition was explored in much more depth by Dr. K. Eric Drexler, who promoted the technological significance of nano-scale phenomena and devices through speeches and the books Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1986) and Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation,[3] and so the term acquired its current sense. Engines of Creation is considered the first book on the topic of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology and nanoscience got started in the early 1980s with two major developments; the birth of cluster science and the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM). This development led to the discovery of fullerenes in 1985 and carbon nanotubes a few years later. In another development, the synthesis and properties of semiconductor nanocrystals was studied; this led to a fast increasing number of metal and metal oxide nanoparticles and quantum dots. The atomic force microscope (AFM or SFM) was invented six years after the STM was invented. In 2000, the United States National Nanotechnology Initiative was founded to coordinate Federal nanotechnology research and development and is evaluated by the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Nanotechnology (sometimes shortened to "nanotech") is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with structures sized between 1 to 100 nanometre in at least one dimension, and involves developing materials or devices possessing at least one dimension within that size. Quantum mechanical effects are very important at this scale, which is in the quantum realm.
Nanotechnology is very diverse, ranging from extensions of conventional device physics to completely new approaches based upon molecular self-assembly, from developing new materials with dimensions on the nanoscale to investigating whether we can directly control matter on the atomic scale.
There is much debate on the future implications of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology may be able to create many new materials and devices with a vast range of applications, such as in medicine, electronics, biomaterials and energy production. On the other hand, nanotechnology raises many of the same issues as any new technology, including concerns about the toxicity and environmental impact of nanomaterials,[1] and their potential effects on global economics, as well as speculation about various doomsday scenarios. These concerns have led to a debate among advocacy groups and governments on whether special regulation of nanotechnology is warranted.
. . . .. It says on the program that today I am going to reflect on the future. That, I suppose, is a good example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I am not sure how to do that. None of us really has any privileged way of looking into the future. Our best shot at futuring usually involves some kind of extrapolation of present trends. And yet, even if we can only hunch that the future will have some connection to past and present, it is not easy to discern which of the many present trends ought to be extrapolated. The future has a way of falsifying our best guesses.
To talk of the future, then, is always to talk about the present in an oblique way. How can we understand the present?
. . . . What I would like to do today is to reflect on some thoughts that have been suggested in the work of Gianni Vattimo, a contemporary Italian philosopher. Vattimo (The Transparent Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) describes our situation in the late 20th century as the emergence of what he calls a "society of generalized communication." Our time has been marked by the proliferation of communication media. In our time, Vattimo suggests, everything has become an object of communication.
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. The research details how pairs of textile fibers covered with zinc oxide nanowires generate electricity in response to applied mechanical stress. Known as "the piezoelectric effect," the resulting current flow from many fiber pairs woven into a shirt or jacket could allow the wearer's body movement to power a range of portable electronic devices. The fibers could also be woven into curtains, tents, or other structures to capture energy from wind motion, sound vibration or other mechanical energy.
. . . . . The two fibers scrub together just like two bottle brushes with their bristles touching, and the piezoelectric-semiconductor process converts the mechanical motion into electrical energy," said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "Many of these devices could be put together to produce higher power output.
The first detailed results of electric power generation with a new technique that could drive implantable medical devices, sensors and portable electronics without the need for bulky batteries or other energy sources. . . . . .Instead of batteries, electricity for such devices would come, for instance, from muscle contraction or other body movements, according to Zhong Lin Wang and colleagues.
Their report, scheduled for the Aug. 9 issue of the ACS journal Nano Letters, describes experimental observation of electric power production with "nanogenerators" fashioned from a single zinc oxide nanowire and a nanowire belt. In earlier research, Wang's group discovered that zinc oxide nanowires produce electricity via a long-known phenomenon termed the pizoelectric effect. It occurs in certain materials, which change mechanical energy -- from flexing or twisting, for instance -- into electricity.
. . . . The methodology and applications demonstrated in this paper simply open a new field in nanotechnology," the researchers report. In summarizing implications of the new findings, they cite potential harvesting of electricity from mechanical movement energy (such as body movement, muscle stretching and blood pressure), vibration energy (sound waves) and hydraulic energy (blood flow or contraction of blood vessels). The technology might be used in wireless self-powered nanodevices, to charge battery-powered devices and in building larger-scale electric power generators, they add.
