Present at the Future (19 page)

You may have heard people mention nano-, but you may not have heard much about nanotech or nanotechnology. What is it? One of the architects of nanotechnology, British chemist Sir Harry Kroto, defines nanotechnology and nanoscience as “molecules that do things.” Researchers in these new fields work at that incredibly small scale of
molecules and even individual atoms to create new materials, new processes, and new machines that could improve our lives enormously.

It all started with physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. In 1959, Feynman gave a talk at California Institute of Technology entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he challenged his fellow scientists to come up with tiny, molecule-sized machines that can do surgery, libraries that can be stored on the head of a pin (the entire 24-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica), minuscule computers. Why? Because small machines could work more efficiently, using a lot less power, and manufacturing them would be much cheaper. But to realize Feynman’s vision, researchers needed new tools.

A big step into that very small world came in 1990, when re
searchers invented a new kind of microscope, called the atomic force microscope. It has a tiny needle that bumps over atoms the way the needle in an old-fashioned phonograph jumps over the grooves in a vinyl record. This needle also can move atoms and molecules around. Scientists found that they could use the needle to manipulate and rearrange atoms—work on the nanoscale, that is—and make tiny new things. Dr. James Gimzewski is known to his friends as “Jim-Get-Me-Whiskey.” One of his inventions is a “nano nose,” a tiny sensor that can distinguish between different types of whiskey. Gimzewski was then a group leader at IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland, where he pioneered ways to manipulate atoms and molecules to make tiny sensors and machines with the atomic force microscope. Now he’s a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he built his own new microscope.

In the late 1990s, the U.S. federal government began investing large sums of money in labs like Gimzewski’s and other nanotech researchers’. That seed money has about doubled since. One big reason is that nanotechnology could revolutionize electronics by giving us much smaller, more powerful electrical devices that would save a great deal of energy. And we badly need an alternative to today’s silicon chips. In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, predicted that the number of electronic circuits on a silicon chip would double every year—a rate that, as circuitry shrank and got more complex, he updated in 1975 to every two years. Today, it’s about every 18 months. But Moore’s law won’t hold true much longer, because there’s a limit to how small you can shrink electronics before heat from the circuitry on the chip begins to melt the plastic from which it’s made. So a major goal of nanotechnologists at companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Lucent, Intel, and IBM is to shrink computer chips down to the size of a single molecule. But so far, there have been only some demonstrations done in the lab of how to build such a chip. You won’t
find anything available at RadioShack. Both Gimzewski and Horst Stormer, a Nobel laureate in physics who works at Lucent, say that this goal of a working chip the size of a molecule will be very hard to attain. “Right now, we are far, far from this,” emphasizes Stormer.

Sandia National Laboratories’ nanotechnologist Jeff Brinker is approaching the next generation of electronics another way. “I like that 1960s slogan ‘Power to the people,’” he says. “I like developing technologies that anyone can use.” One approach Brinker particularly likes is “smart ink,” which he says that “you write with just like you do with dumb ink.” Loaded into a regular printer, smart ink would allow anyone to design and print out working electronic circuits on everyday printing paper.

While some researchers are focusing on tiny transistors and circuitry, others dream of putting nanosized particles together to make much bigger things that could be incredibly useful. The late Richard Smalley, Rice University chemist, won the Nobel Prize along with his British colleague Harry Kroto for discovering the fullerene, a nanoparticle that resembles a soccer ball because it’s made up of hexagonal molecules. Smalley and Kroto gave the fullerene its name and nicknamed it the buckyball because its hexagons look like those in the geodesic domes that visionary architect Buckminster Fuller unveiled in 1954. (Fuller, who was dedicated to doing more with less, would have appreciated nanotechnology.) Smalley also referred to carbon “nanotubes,” tiny tube-shaped versions of the buckyball, as buckytubes. Despite their minuscule size and the fact that they’re made of carbon, the same stuff that’s in your pencil lead, nanotubes are incredibly strong, yet as light and flexible as straws. They’re an excellent example of how very differently things work at this incredibly small scale.

To understand carbon nanotubes, one prominent nanotechnologist, Cornell University’s Paul McEuen says, “Think of a stack of paper in which each paper is one atom thin, a sort of chicken-wire mesh
of carbon atoms.” Unlike nanoscale circuitry, carbon nanotubes are already in products you can buy: They reinforce your car’s dashboard and tires, making them stronger and longer-lasting, and also go into your skis and the frame of your tennis racquet and your bike.

Besides being strong, Smalley pointed out, carbon nanotubes also conduct electricity. Smalley believed that once we figure out how to align them and make them into long cables, they could transfer energy far more efficiently—revolutionizing energy conservation. Others think that carbon nanotubes could make space travel much cheaper and easier. Arthur C. Clarke, in his 1953 sci-fi novel The Fountains of Paradise, describes a “space elevator.” Such an elevator would have a 24,000-mile long cable, one end anchored on Earth, the other on a satellite orbiting the Earth. Just like an elevator in a skyscraper, people would ride this space elevator into Earth orbit. Carbon nanotubes may be just strong and flexible enough to serve as the elevator cable. (See more about this idea in Chapter 17.)

Meanwhile, some nanotechnologists, such as McEuen, are investigating other uses for carbon nanotubes. McEuen has made “guitar strings” out of carbon nanotubes. Each one is “clamped down at both ends,” he says, “and vibrates just like a guitar string vibrates. There’s the fundamental and the harmonics, just like there are with a regular guitar string.” McEuen wants to use his “guitar string” to weigh and measure atoms and molecules and learn more about their chemical composition: “The heavier a molecule was, the more it would shift the frequency at which the string vibrates. So if you listen for that change in tone, you could infer the mass.” He says, “The way we listen to the nanotube is much the same as the way you listen to a radio broadcast. We take a high frequency signal and we sort of convert it down to a lower frequency where it’s simpler for us to hear. So you could imagine in the future using these nanotubes as a kind of simplified radio receiver, and it might be simpler and use much less power than an existing radio.”

BIONANOTECHNOLOGY

Some nanotechnologists are experimenting with nanowires, incredibly tiny wires that could become part of minuscule transistors and electronic circuitry because they have optical and electronic properties. At Harvard, chemist Charles Lieber has combined them with nanoscale lasers for use in photonics, the process by which silicon-chip circuitry is now made, on a tiny scale. Lieber cofounded Nanosys, a nanotech startup company with, he says, “the modest goal of revolutionizing chemical and biological sensing, computing, photonics, and information storage.”

Lieber thinks that nanowires could be very useful in medicine. He says that one of his nanowires is made of silicon, and its dimensions
are similar to carbon nanotubes. In other words, incredibly tiny! He says that “this very small wire acts as sort of a switch, and then when a biological molecule binds to it, it can change the resistance or conductivity of that wire, either turning it on or off. That provides us with the selectivity to recognize one virus out of a whole soup of many different biological species. The virus binds to an antibody in your blood, and by using chemistry, we have linked antibodies to the surface of the nanowire.

“We’ve been able to demonstrate unambiguously that when a particular virus binds to the wire’s surface, the electrical signal changed. If you could detect a virus at this early stage, when your body’s immune system might be still holding it in check, you could then be treated effectively before the virus began replicating rapidly and became highly infectious.”

Lieber looks forward to “detecting a virus in real time,” or even many viruses simultaneously. That would mean you’d visit your doctor, give a blood or saliva sample—and get your diagnosis right there. You wouldn’t have to wait several days for test results to come back from the lab before you could find out why you haven’t been feeling well. If you turned out to have a serious illness, such as cancer, that early diagnosis could make a huge difference in your prognosis and treatment. On-the-spot diagnosis could save your life—or the life of a soldier who’s been exposed to a chemical weapon or bioweapon on the battlefield, or the health of a swamp or river at risk of pollution.

Nanotechnologists such as Lieber and Brinker have succeeded in making us safer by developing supersensitive sensors to detect anthrax or other biological or chemical warfare agents. One of these supersmart “noses” that Brinker worked on is already in public places, such as airports and public transit systems. Another kind of sensor, called “smart dust,” glitters like a disco ball from the 1970s, and turns from green to red when it detects a pollutant in the environment.

NANO ALL AROUND

You may not have noticed, but nanotech has already produced some new materials that have crept into our lives. You already may be relying on nanotech throughout your day. For instance, when you begin or end your day in your bathroom, you may put on lotions, creams, makeup, and hair dye or hair gel. Some cosmetics companies are putting incredibly tiny nanoparticles in makeup, to help eye shadow and lipstick color last longer, and in face cream, to help it absorb faster and deeper into your epidermis, where it can make a difference in your skin. The world’s largest cosmetics company, L’Oréal, won’t say exactly which of its products are made with nanoparticles, but the company is incorporating nanotechnology into its research in a big way. One Wall Street Journal reporter experimented on her own face with several new antiwrinkle creams. The only one that made a visible difference in the reporter’s before and after photos was a cream made by Lancôme, one of L’Oréal’s more expensive brands.

L’Oréal also studied the nanoscale structure of the wings of the Morpho butterfly, the big beautiful one with bright blue iridescent wings. Researchers discovered that there is no blue pigment at all in the butterfly’s wings; the blue you see is an optical illusion produced by the wings’ molecular structure. The researchers borrowed the secrets of the wings to produce iridescent lipstick and nail polish that will be available soon.

In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel about the future, the hero moves into an apartment where the wallpaper changes color. That prediction is already coming true. Nanotechnology is shrinking electronics that you could either wear or embed into your living room’s wallpaper or sofa cushions. Minuscule electric circuits that change a fabric’s color via LED technology is beginning to find its way to clothing stores. There is already wall fabric that is powered to change color.

So chances are good that when you get dressed, you’re putting on clothes brought to you by nanotechnology. Nanotech is already in trousers and children’s clothes. Maybe you own a pair of those khakis
that simply refuse to stain. If you spill root beer or red wine or even soy sauce on them, the liquid simply rolls off in little balls or droplets, like mercury—leaving your pants clean. Well, that’s thanks to nanotechnology. Like running shoes and today’s silicon chips, your stain-proof khakis were born in a California garage. In the mid-1990s, engineer David Soane left a teaching job at the University of California, Berkeley, to devote himself to invention. He had noticed that most stain-proof cotton requires a plastic coating that makes it hot, stiff, and uncomfortable to wear. Instead of applying a coating to regular cotton, Soane worked at the nanoscale, doctoring cotton molecules to make them more like the skin of a peach. When you wash a peach, the fuzz on the skin causes water to roll right off in droplets, instead of being absorbed. That’s what Soane wanted to see happen on the surface of cotton. So he added tiny hairs, an artificial equivalent of peach fuzz, to cotton molecules. When you or your child spills something on clothes made from Soane’s cotton, the minute hairs prevent the liquid from absorbing into the cotton. You can’t see or feel the tiny hairs; the cotton looks and feels no different from regular cotton, so it’s lightweight and comfortable next to your skin.

And when you need to do laundry? Well, nanotechnologists at Samsung have come up with a washing machine that destroys odor-and illness-causing bacteria, disinfecting your clothes so that, in theory, at least, you need to wash them less often. This washing machine works by using silver. You’ve heard that old tag about the boy “born with a silver spoon in his mouth”? Originally, it referred to good health, not wealth. Silver ions and silver compounds can destroy some bacteria, viruses, algae, and fungi, but without the poisonous side effects of heavy metals such as lead or mercury. Before antibiotics, silver compounds were used as germicides. The new Samsung machine generates nanosized silver ions in water that latch on to and destroy any bacteria in your laundry. Then, during the rinse cycle, the machine coats your load with silver ions, which prevent any bacteria your clothes touch from reproducing.

SELF-ASSEMBLY

If you want to learn how to build something, you find a teacher who has been at it for many years, who has lots of experience. That’s why scientists are turning to nature; nature has billions of years of building experience. She has built countless species of animals both large and small, hard and soft.