Nanotechnology spans various research disciplines and has diverse potential applications in consumer products, industry, and medicine. It focuses on three main areas: silicon engineering, medical research, and materials science. Nanotechnology prototypes are easier to produce than perfecting a manufacturing process, and funding is often directed towards solving societal problems. Nanotechnology products range from mundane to exotic, including self-replicating nanobots and space elevators. Many products are in the prototype stage, but thousands are already available in consumer retail. Nanotechnology is a slow and gradual revolution that is largely unnoticed by the everyday shopper.
Nanotechnology is a science that spans many research disciplines, from various engineering arenas to materials science and many of the physical and life sciences, such as physics, chemistry and molecular biology. This makes it a diverse source of potential consumer nanotechnology products, industrial machinery and coatings, and medical devices. Since 2011, nanotechnology research has been used to create everything from cancer treatments with no side effects to stain-resistant pants to car paint jobs that never look like they’ll get dirty.
Nanotechnology education attempts to focus on a broad understanding of science and engineering disciplines, although core fields for research and development tend to concentrate in three areas. The field has direct applications to nanotechnology products in silicon engineering and microchip manufacturing to make computer systems smaller and faster with more memory and higher reliability. It also focuses directly on the field of medical research into treatments for many genetic and environmentally induced diseases, as well as providing new types of medical implants and devices for the treatment of various injuries and degenerative conditions. Molecular nanotechnology is also centered around materials science to develop nanotech products for everything from better armor for soldiers to solar cells made from flexible plastics to injectable gold nanospheres for arthritis and cancer treatments.
A nanotechnology company can be anything from a division of a major oil producer to a small company with a handful of employees that produces carbon nanotubes for microelectromechanical sensors (MEMs) 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The market for any nanotechnology application largely determines whether it will be built and on what quantity scale, as many nanotechnology prototypes produced by government, private, or academic labs never make it out of the lab. Producing a nanotechnology prototype is much easier and often decades away from perfecting a manufacturing process to make thousands of the same product at a set level of quality. This is why medicine, computers, and materials science are major areas producing nanotechnology products, as they are often heavily funded to solve problems that have ever-increasing demands on society.
Research into nanotechnology products embraces both the mundane and the exotic end of the spectrum of needs of modern industrialized society. Nanotechnology has been used to make everything from tennis balls that don’t flatten to better superconducting materials for applications in nuclear fusion research. Scientists are actively pursuing ways to make carbon nanotube cables with nanotechnology that could be used to make a space elevator, carrying people and cargo from the surface of the Earth into orbit at a fraction of the cost of rocket systems. Prototypes for self-replicating nanobot machines could also be tasked with cleaning up oil spills, recycling household waste at the molecular level into useful materials like clothing or fuel, or nanobots could float in the human bloodstream and repair cellular damage to slow the aging processes.
Many of these nanotechnology products are in the prototype and conceptual stages, but all major industrialized nations are investing heavily in nanotechnology research. Thousands of nanotech products are already on shelves in consumer retail, and many common consumer products have been upgraded with nano-engineered coatings or materials. Science has been labeled the second industrial revolution for civilization, but it is a slow and gradual revolution that is happening largely unnoticed by the everyday shopper.
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