What is nanotechnology?
Most simply put, nanotechnology, or nanotech, is the science that manipulates materials on the molecular or atomic level.
However, nanotech is not just about making things smaller and smaller - because a material's chemical and physical properties can change in the nanoscale, science has different rules. For example, if you drop a book or a ball, gravity will cause it to come crashing to the ground, because it is the force with the most influence and power in our world. However, if you drop a nanoparticle, it will be far more sensitive to turbulent diffusion and suspension than gravity.
The least reactive of the metals, gold (Au) appears golden to our eyes, however on the nanoscale, particles of gold can be red, green, blue, or even purple.
How much is one nanometer?
When you work in the nanoscale, the sizes of the materials you work with range from 1 to 100 nm. This means that on the nanoscale you work with things from the size of half a DNA strand, to the length of one virus - anything in between can be called a nanoparticle or a nanomaterial.
How can we use nanoparticles in medicine?
Once we understand how nanoparticles work, and the different set of rules that they follow, we can create new materials to manipulate scientific properties, such as gravity, and then train them like robots, to function in a way that benefits us. For example, at Macquarie University, a public research University in Sydney, Australia, a group of chemists developed small sensors that were trained to sniff your breath.
What does our breath tell us about our health?
Whenever we are sick, the chemicals and bacteria in our body are out of whack, causing us to smell differently than when we are healthy. However, a human nose does not have the capability to pick up the slight difference in smell, bringing in the need for nanotech.
Macquarie University developed nanotech that detects diabetes in your breath, using acetone-detecting sensors, as acetone is one of the most common warning signs for diabetes.
They found that if one per million particles in your breath have acetone, you are a healthy, diabetes-less human. However, if you have two per million particles in your breath with acetone, you have diabetes.
So, they had to train the sensor to detect a change in one particle per million.
Comments