Nanotechnology

As the horizons of technology expand, the real world is shrinking into a Global Village; Nanotechnology is the new area of interest in technology. Nanotechnology is an umbrella term that covers many areas of research dealing with objects that are measured in nanometers or billionth of meter. It is a hybrid science combining engineering and chemistry. The goal of nanotechnology is to manipulate atoms individually and place them in a pattern to produce a desired structure. Nano-sized machines called assemblers, that can be programmed to manipulate atoms and molecules at will, would be used to build consumer goods. Some nanomachines called replicators, would be programmed to build assemblers.

Nanotechnology would enable creation of new generation of computer components with enormous storage capacity. But the greatest impact of nanotechnology could be the medical industry. Patients would drink fluids containing nanorobots programmed to attack and reconstruct the molecular structure of cancer cells and viruses to makes them harmless. Nanorobots could also be programmed to perform delicate surgeries.

For environmental clean-up, airborne nanorobots could be user programmed to rebuild the thinning ozone layer. Contaminants could be automatically removed from water sources, and spill could be cleaned up instantly. Nanotechnology was first introduced in 1959, in a talk by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", Feynman proposed using a set of conventional-sized robot arms to construct a replica of themselves, but one-tenth of the original size, then using that new set of arms to manufacture an even smaller set, and so on, until the molecular-scale is reached. if we had many million or billions of such molecular-scale products built from individual molecules - a "bottom-up manufacturing" technique, as opposed to the usual technique of cutting away material until you have a completed component or product -"top-down manufacturing".

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By: Raju KR