February 26, 2014 • 44 mins
How is the world of nanotechnology different from the macro scale? We look at how nanotech could shape the future of everything from computing to medicine.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast and makes the future, and says I turned
my back for two minutes and they've grown again. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Pocalban, and I'm Joe McCormick. And uh,
(00:23):
you know, guys, I don't want to make a big
deal about this. I know it's a small thing, but
nano scale, am I right? Was wonderful? Man? That that
noise that Joe just made. If anyone's ever ever heard
me shaking my head, and that's exactly yeah. Okay, well
(00:44):
we're glad you put a voice to it. Sorry, anyway,
go ahead. I wanted to talk to thought today about honestly,
come on, I'm trying to get it out now. I
wanted to talk today about the nano scale and and
why things that the nano scale are so special and unusual,
particularly when we think about how we're familiar with material
(01:05):
on the macro scale that's that's in our world in
amounts that we're able to see and pick up and
and manipulate. Yeah, So, if you are interested in the
future or have been within the past decade and a
half or so, you've probably heard a whole lot about nanotechnology,
but you might not necessarily know any of the principles
behind nanotechnology except that it has something to do with
(01:28):
extremely tiny robots that will turn the world into Google, right,
or will make us be able to resist make us superhero.
It's one of the one of the two. Really, it's
either Google or Awesome. Well, it's one of those things
that has been through a lot of hype, and there
has been a lot of It's sort of one of
those magic technologies and people just invoke it like a
(01:51):
magic spell to say that it can do anything. Yeah,
and a lot of media reports kind of simplify it
to the point where, uh, you know, you don't really
understand what they're talking about because it's it's so general
and vague, because you get the feeling that they don't
really understand what they're talking about. They're going, like science, y'all,
and that's yeah, it's like using a placeholder, you know,
(02:12):
just throw nanotechnology in there and everything will be fine.
But it's it's uh, it is fascinating, it is and
it's a true industry. It's not like we're not trying
to downplay this, and so nanotechnology isn't a thing. It's
totally a thing. It's a true industry, and it's an
industry that's really trying to happen, especially if you've read
about any of the huge sort of patent rush that's
been going on over the previous years in nanotechnology. People
(02:36):
are taking out so many patents on ideas for nanotechnology,
you know, devices that they have no way of making
function right now, some of which they might have at
least a way of approaching it. But yeah, that well,
there's so many patents it's possible to see this as
an impediment to actual work getting done in the field.
I will say that, you know, everyone who's listening to
(02:58):
this is likely doing so on a device that is
incorporating nanotechnology because at this at this stage, microprocessors have
transistors and other elements that are on the nanoscale. So
these are things that have been made to such a
a precise degree that it's it's super super tiny, tinier
than we can see using a light microscope. Jonathan, Yeah,
(03:20):
super super tiny. Come on, let's use some real terms here.
Let's back up and say what the heck is the
nano scale, and why should we care about it? Right? So,
a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, so that
that's very difficult to have rightly. Put you this way,
all right, your typical sheet of paper, just a sheet
(03:41):
of paper, a single sheet of paper is about one
hundred thousand nanometers thick. So that edge of a sheet
of paper that can give you that nasty paper cut
that's actually enormous. On the nano scale, red blood cell
would be two thousand, five hundred nanometers across. So you know,
there's there's the micro scale, which is the scale large,
one scale larger than the nano scale, uh, which you
(04:04):
know at that level we can look at stuff using
light microscopes. But the nanoscale we're actually talking about things
typically we're we're talking about stuff that's around a hundred nanometers,
are smaller in size. I mean, you're kind of it's
it's not exact. There's not like a cutoff where you say, oh, no,
I'm sorry, that's not nano scale, it's microscale unless you're
talking about a thousand nanometers. In that point you're like no, literally, um,
(04:27):
but you know this is a size where things are
so small that light waves actually kind of hit on
either side, like the particles can fit in between, sort
of like how in science fiction you have those creatures
occasionally that are able to exist in between seconds, and
that's why we can't see them. But in this case,
it's stuff that's so small that light waves can't interact
with them. You don't see them using light. I think, uh,
(04:50):
correct me if I'm wrong, But I think one good
way of looking at it is it is it's sort
of at the molecular scale can be. It's uh, it's
larger than single app yes, right, a nanometer might be
about ten atoms together. Yeah, that's the atomic scale would
be the next smallest scale, and the nanoscale really is
the realm of the molecule. Okay. Yeah. So and also
(05:13):
while we're talking about this, while we talk about nanotechnology
and that sounds, you know very much humans have their
hand in it. We're the ones building this kind of stuff,
we should also stress that a lot of nanotechnology depends
very heavily on things that we already find in nature,
specifically stuff like viruses, which are on the nanoscale. These
viruses range in size, you know, that's not like it's
(05:33):
not one size fits all. But these are tiny, tiny,
tiny structures. Some would say organisms, some do not, because
virus is one of those tricky things. Is it, is
it life? Is it not life? Um, there's not full
agreement on the matter. But it is found in nature,
and in fact, nanotechnology has made great use of viruses,
(05:55):
both as a source of inspiration and actually as something
that we could use by scooping all all the virus
stuff out and replacing it with other stuff, keeping that
shell intact. Absolutely, DNA itself is on the nano scale.
A particle of d N DNA might be about two
nanometers across, which is the size of a carbon nanotube.
By the way, particles of smoke also on the nano scale.
(06:16):
So yeah, this is stuff that, uh is both in
nature and stuff that we will construct ourselves, we being
people way smarter than I am, not the three the
four people in this room. I will say I visited
a nano lab just last week in a high school
in Chicago. So high school had its own nano lab,
(06:36):
including scanning electron microscopes so that they could see the
stuff they were working on. I was blown away. In
my high school. In my high school, we had a
computer and it was an apple. Um, So anyway, the
interesting thing you asked me. Also, why is the nano
scale important? We've explained what it is, but why do
(06:57):
we care? Well, we care? Can you really do anything
useful down there that tiny, tiny range on? Well? Technically
right now, that's that's up for that's kind of up
for grabs. But you, Dennis Quaide and you're in this
this device that could be shrunk down to the nano scale. Uh,
and Martin short is nearby. Hey, first, let's say we
(07:19):
do have a lot to learn about the name, because
the nano scale is, as you might have understood if
you've ever studied, say, quantum physics, when you get down
to the very very small scale, things don't act like
you're used to exactly. On the nano scale, material that
you could be extremely familiar with will demonstrate properties that
(07:43):
are completely different from the ones you're accustomed to. Right.
For example, like color, okay, so so so gold we
call it gold. There's a color called gold because that
is the color that gold is. Yeah, exactly why we
call oranges oranges? Right, but so at at the at
the nano scale, gold has to be gold, right, No,
(08:03):
it does not have to be. Don't. You can't tell
gold how to be. You aren't the boss of gold.
Gold decides it wants to be purple. As it turns
out on the nano scale, particles of gold are actually red.
So it's still gold, you know, chemically, but it's it's
it's no longer the color gold. It is the color
(08:23):
red red or kind of purple. Yeah. And and this
happens to be a function of gold electrons being confined
at this scale, which means that the gold interacts with
light differently. And you can actually see this. If you
see gold nanoparticles that are suspended in solution, the solution
itself will appear to be read or slightly purplish and
not gold. So that's kind of interesting. Also, the melting
(08:45):
point of materials changes. A melting point that's where a
solid turns into a liquid, so gold using gold again
as an example. The melting point is typically on the
macro scale. So if you had a bar of gold
and you want to alt it down and be a
James Bond villain and melt somebody with it, then you
would need to heat that up to one thousand degrees
(09:08):
fahrenheit or one thousand sixty four degrees sels use, but
on the nanoscale it's actually lower. The melting point is
lower than that, and the actual melting point depends on
the size of the nanoparticle. So it's not just that
at a smaller size, these little particles will melt at
a lower temperature. It's all size dependent, and a lot
of that has to do with surface area, which will
(09:29):
get into a little bit later. Also, the hardness of
material can be different at the nanoscale than it is
on the macro scale. It's electrical conductivity. Some substances that
don't that aren't very good conductors on the macro scale
become excellent conductors of electricity on the nanoscale, and vice versa.
You'll find some things that end up acting more like
(09:50):
an insulator on the nanoscale than they do on the
macro scale. So knowing that, knowing that material has these
different properties at these different sizes, means that you can
take advantage of that and design electronics that leverage that.
Also the chemical reactivity. By the way, one thing that's
related to this that I didn't put on this list
is toxicity. So a material may or may not be
(10:15):
more or less toxic on the nanoscale than it is
on the macro scale. Similar Similarly, they will react differently
in chemical reactions on the nano scale than on the
macro scale. And again that has a lot to do
with surface area, which again I'll talk about in a minute.
Just calm down, I'm gonna get there. And then there's magnetoism. Magnetism,
(10:36):
It still has nothing to do with the x men.
I keep trying. I know it's a valiant effort, um.
But no nano particles of magnetic substances like like iron
oxide for example, can exert magnetic force on each other
when exposed to weak magnets just plain old handheld things, um.
Which means that that what we expect to happen is
(10:56):
that we'd need a huge electro magnet to to move
magnetic nano particles. Um. But but if you just introduce
them to a really weak magnetic field, they'll start moving themselves.
And we'll talk a little bit about that again in
a minute. Because there are certain forces that are really
important on the nano scale, and other forces that, while
they're important to us on the macro scale, don't mean
(11:18):
a thing once you get down to a couple of nanometers.
Just doesn't doesn't even you know, it's a negligible effect.
And uh, Anyway, another important part is that the motion
of energy at the nano scale, this is kind of
falling into what you were saying, Joe. It follows the
rules of quantum physics rather than classical physics. So now
we're starting to see some quantum effects come into play.
(11:40):
And this is where stuff really behaves in a weird way,
things that are not intuitive to us on the map.
Whether you're trying to use your intuitions or you're trying
to work it out with Newtonian equations, it's it's not
going to make sense at this scale. They're not going
to be able to predict movement by going going by
Newton's book. Now, there's a lot of uncertainty at the level,
which if you are able to take into account, means
(12:03):
that you can work your way around it. But if
you take some really interesting things exactly, but if you're
not able to take it into account, then you might
end up creating, say a microchip that is useless because
it cannot control the flow of electrons. And we'll get
into that as well. So now we've covered the different properties,
what about the things that are important or not important
(12:24):
at the scale that I you know, I just alluded
to it a minute ago. Well, service area, like I said,
way more important than it would be on the macro scale.
And specifically, the reason we say that is because the
surface area ends up the ratio of surface area to
volume is out of control. On the nano scale, you've
got way more surface area than you would have volume
because you're talking about teny T T teeny tiny nanoparticles
(12:47):
share a collection of nanoparticles as as you can imagine
very clearly. Probably it's it's like having a having a
whole bunch of blocks versus one large solid block of
the same volume. Yeah, and so this means that that
surface area that enormous relative to its volume. Surface area
means that more of that that substance can come into
contact with something else than it would on the macro scale. So, uh,
(13:10):
you know, relatively speaking, more of the actual substance would
be exposed to a solution. For example, if you were
to suspend nanoparticles into a solution, more of the service
of those particles would be exposed to that other substance,
whatever it might be. Then it would if it were
a you know, a bar of it on the macro scale.
(13:31):
That means that it can do stuff more efficiently than
many things on the macro scale, and that includes being
a catalyst. Now, a catalyst in chemistry, we're talking about
something that facilitates chemical reactions, not necessarily that it itself
reacts chemically with something else, but it might aid in
the reaction of another substance third party negotiator. Yeah, that's
(13:51):
a good way of putting it. So, for example, fuel cells,
we talked about those a lot. A catalyst and a
fuel cell is essentially what convinces you know, I say convinced.
There's not really any convincing, but go with you this
convincing a hydrogen atom to ditch it's its electrons, become
a hydrogen ion and pass through a membrane. Right, you
might want a little bit of what platinum in there? Yeah,
(14:12):
we're talking about platinum on the nanoscale, little nanoparticles of platinum.
And again, the reason why you want nanoparticles it exposes
more surface area of the platinum, so that way it's
a much more efficient catalyst. So it's also why a
lot of the earlier fuel cells were so expensive because
you had to have platinum to be able to create
this catalyst for the membrane for your basic hydrogen based
(14:35):
fuel cell. So this catalyst then convinces the hydrogen to ditch.
The electrons come on across a permeable membrane and join
some oxygen, and then the electrons go through a pathway,
a circuit that you have built so that they do
work what however you wanted them to work, like drive
a car, for example, and then they rejoin the fuel
cell on the other side, and that's where you get
the water, where the hydrogen, ions, the oxygen, and the
(14:57):
electrons all rejoin, and then all you have is water
and then the electricity and the heat. So that's just
one example of how the chemical reactions are are different
on the now scale and how it's really important. The
other thing I wanted to mention was that I had
talked about how some forces are really important others aren't.
Gravity on the nanoscale is practically meaningless. You it's these
(15:19):
particles are so small and these reactions happen so close
together that gravity really doesn't play a part. It's it's negligible.
You can pretty much ignore it. However, electro magnetic force
off the charts incredibly powerful. So, like you were saying, Lauren,
it doesn't take a very strong magnetic field for you
to have a strong effect because those forces are way
(15:41):
more important at this scale than something like gravity. Gravity
big important force when you're talking about cosmological scale, right,
and then electromagnetism doesn't really have that much of an
effect because it's it's not as strong over great distances,
but you know here it's the opposite way. So interesting
thing to think about. And also, electrons they get up
(16:02):
to Shenanigan's yeah, they can. They can tunnel through materials
that are that are one nanometer thick that they can
kind of teleport from one side of a barrier to another,
which is not teleportation is not actually something that that
is physically that's against the rules usually, so uh, to
get a little more specific with this, this is one
(16:24):
of the big problems with designing microprocessors using nano sized
pathways because if the chips in your computer do you're
you're thinking for you, right, because ultimately that's really about
controlling the flow of electrons through lots of teeny teeny
super teeny tiny circuitry. Right, So you have these electron
gates that either allow an electron through or prevent an
(16:45):
electron from moving through. And these gates are getting smaller
and smaller as we continue to miniaturize these these UH
elements so that we keep making more powerful microprocessors. Essentially
more powerful means you've crammed more elements onto that microprocessor
by making them smaller. So we've seen this ever since
the very the birth of the transistor. Now the problem
(17:07):
is when that gate gets so thin that the electron
can tunnel through. And by tunnel through, we don't mean
that it actually makes a hole and then passes through.
It's not damaging the gate. What's happening is there's a
field around where when we say an electron is located
a certain place, we don't really mean it's exactly right there. Yeah,
there's more like a field of probability of where an
(17:30):
electron can be found at any given time. So you
can think of it as sort of nebulous, almost like
a gas like thing. Alright, just just an area and
anywhere within that area the electron has the possibility of
being at any given time. Now, as that starts to
approach a gate, if the gate is thin enough, then
part of the area could overlap the gate and be
(17:54):
on the other side, with the other part of the
area being on on the first side of the gate,
And therefore, when we need to act the position of
the electron, there's a pretty good chance that it's going
to be across that gate. Yeah, there's at least a possibility.
And as long as there's a possibility, that means sometimes
it is on the other side of that gate. Right,
if it's possible for it to be there, sometimes it's
(18:14):
going to be there, and maybe that it's a fifteen
percent possibility and that of the time it's going to
be on the other side. But even that means sometimes
the electrons on the other side of the gate, which
means your gate is not keeping the electrons out, which means,
in the case of electronics, the thing is barked. Yeah,
it means that you get errors. You know, you're you
get a microprocessor that cannot process without without lots of
(18:38):
logic failures. So that's a real engineering problem, and there
have been lots of different engineers working on this and
they solve it in different ways. Usually they use different
exotic materials that are better at at blocking electrons than others.
But but ultimately it's this quantum effect that makes things
so tricky, and that's the world of the nano scale.
Like you know, again, in a classic world, if you
(19:01):
were to roll a ball towards a toward a brick wall,
you wouldn't expect it to suddenly appear on the other
side of the brick wall and continue rolling. That just
wouldn't happen. It would bounce off the brick wall. Or
if that red ball were filled with some sort of
incredibly dense material, perhaps it would make a hole in it,
But it wouldn't. It wouldn't just pass like onto the
other side without any other kind of interaction. It's extremely unlikely. Well,
(19:25):
another thing about that red ball, if you want to
play with the ball, you can predict pretty much what
it's going to do. It's initial starting conditions, Like I've
pushed it in this direction with this amount of force,
you can actually predict pretty well where it's gonna end up. Yeah,
as long as you know the other variables, like you
know how smooth the surfaces it's rolling on. But ultimately
(19:47):
you've got a good idea, you know, just even intuitively
on the on the nanoscale, that doesn't come into play.
There's also this idea of random molecular motion or brownie
in motion. I'm sure you've probably heard that term if
you've ever taking chemistry or physics, like the idea of uh,
you know, the brownie and motion also explains the movement
of things like smells. So if you are baking cookies
(20:09):
and you walk into a house and someone or someone
else has been baking cookies and you walk in and
you smell it, that's brownie emotion. That explains the motion
of the molecules that move through the atmosphere. I cannot
believe that you didn't just say brownies instead of cookies,
so that it could have been brownies motion. Well, I
mean it's that's a fair point. I didn't miss an opportunity.
But I also like cookies more than I like brownies.
(20:30):
So anyway, at the at the macro scale, random motions
not as big a deal. Okay, So think of this
like a stream that's moving just at a a steady rate,
but not crazy. Like it's not a rapid, but it's
a steady rate. Now on the macro scale, if you're
walking through that stream, you might feel a little bit
of a tug here and there, but it's not that
(20:50):
bad on the nano scale. This seemingly simple motion on
the macro scale becomes really chaotic, you know. It's it's
much more of a kind of a raging, rapid sort
of approach. And uh so it's sort of that idea
of as you get smaller, these these seemingly um tiny
effects have much larger consequences, as we all saw from
(21:14):
the documentary Honey I Shrunk the Kids exactly, or or
inner space as I was alluding to earlier. Yes, both
of those have proven beyond reasonable doubt that tiny things
can have big impact. Okay, so we've been hearing about
nanotechnology for years. Can it actually do anything for us?
I mean absolutely so those microprocessors I mentioned, you could
(21:37):
argue those have had a some somewhat of an impact
on our lives by boys, But you know, we're using
nanotechnology and all sorts of fields already, right, not just
high tech, but in ways that you might not anticipate.
For example, sunscreen, so zinc oxide. On the macro scale,
the macro particles, even if you're talking about just a
(21:58):
you know, a few um micro eaters in size, they're opaque.
So that's where you get that white zinc oxide, uh
some block. You know, if you ever saw the the
pictures of people in moving old style with with like
stripes of some block on it, like the nose is
totally white and everything else, you know, that's uh, that's
those are zinc oxide particles. But these days it can
(22:19):
be titanium oxide as well, But the concept is still
the same. It is physically blocking the sun's rays from
reaching your face. So on the nano scale, zinc oxide
is actually transparent, and you can still use nanoparticles of
zinc oxide within a sun block that um that still
have that ultra violet blocking. They still work even though
(22:39):
they appear transparent to our eyes. Yeah, so we are
able to make some block that doesn't make you look
extra pasty for people who have skin tones like some
of the people in this room, all of the people
in this room where where when sun hits us, we
look like we stepped out of a vampire movie and
(22:59):
we should be turning to dust almost immediately. So yeah,
it's important stuff. Yeah, I mean you can use it
to make things stronger, more durable, water repellent, stain resistant,
more absorbent, heat insulated, reflective, or anti reflective, scratch resistant,
airtight for certain gases, uh, moisture controlling, conductive, fluorescence. Yeah,
(23:20):
there's there's a huge list of things that can make
material behave in a way that otherwise it wouldn't. So
whether you're trying to make something hydrophobic or hydrophilic, uh,
you know, nanoparticles can go a long way to helping
you achieve that. And um, you know, there's there's importance
to this work. Like we said, with these, the fact
(23:41):
that the features the properties of materials changed dramatically at
the nano scale than they do at the macro scale,
it's important that we study those so that we understand
how to use them, like what what what are the
potential applications for that material, and also whether or not
it's even safe to use them, because, like I said,
the toxicity can change since they work differently at that scale. Yeah,
(24:02):
we need to figure out how else they work differently
other than looking transparent for example for example. Yeah, like
like silver, silver is something that we've used. It's people
have understood that silver is important with medicine for ages,
and it does have the unfortunate side effect of having
silver deposits build up in your various tissues, including your skin,
(24:24):
so that if you were to take it, you know,
over an extended period of time, you would start to
turn blue. There are pictures of people who have done this,
who have used the colloidal silver as a means of medicating.
It's not like I mean, I'm not certain that anyone's
ever done it on purpose for cosmetic purposes, but you
know the examples I've seen, it's all been a medicinal thing. Well,
(24:46):
silver actually does have antimicrobial properties. It can't kill off microbes,
and it's actually through silver ions. It's the way that
silver ions interact with oxygen and then break down these
microbes and kill them. So we have seen silver nanoparticles
used in uh in in wound dressings, in bandages so
(25:06):
that it will help doctors bind up a wound and
thus help prevent infection or at least decrease the chances
of infection, which are obviously really important. It can turn
it can turn a uh you know, a wound that
could be inconvenient or irritating or uh you know, it
could slow you down into an infection, could turn it deadly.
(25:30):
I mean even even a wound that you would think, oh,
well that you know, I'll be fine in a few weeks.
That if it's infected, that's serious. So uh, but you know,
that could be a totally different story. If silver nanoparticles
themselves had been toxic to humans, then obviously you wouldn't
want to be You wouldn't want to do that, just
like you don't really want to use colloidal silver as
(25:51):
a means of treating a medical issue, especially if you
don't want to turn blue. By the way, that is irreversible, Yeah,
you don't. It's not like it's a layer of skin
that eventually wears off. That is that's under your tissue
and that's how you will look for the rest of
your life. So just a word of warning. But we
(26:11):
can also start to understand whether or not future applications
of nanotechnology are particularly practical or viable. So you you
Joe mentioned at the top of the show about nano robots,
and that was I mean, that's a really it's still
a fairly popular subject among futurists. But it's also something
that a lot I won't say all, but a lot
(26:33):
of engineers and nanotechnology experts have said, is if that's
going to be something we see in the future, it's
going to be a ways off. You gotta walk before
you can run. Yeah, absolutely, and we we're not quite
walking yet. Um. In order to make complex interacting parts
at the nano scale, it seems much simpler to start
(26:54):
with basic sort of nano structures that you think can
can do interesting things for you, but they might not
have complex moving parts, right, all right, we really need
to figure out what's going on on the nano scale
before we can start to apply those those high level
kind of things, um. You know, for for for example,
a lot of the biological processes that this could be
(27:15):
very useful in in aiding or changing in our bodies,
we don't understand very well yet, DNA combination and photosynthesis
or stuff that we're really just beginning to to understand
on that scale, right. Yeah. We we know like the
general processes and we know what the outcomes are, but
that doesn't mean we understand the mechanisms behind it. And
in fact, we're going to have an upcoming episode about
(27:37):
antibiotics where we talk about even the mechanisms bacteria have
that end up causing us to actually feel ill and
become ill. We don't fully understand those yet. Yeah, And
that's boring old micro scale stuff. Yeah, so obviously very
important to understand. Okay, So I want to talk about
sort of the current state of nanotechnology by way of
(27:59):
just singling out what I think are some of the
coolest discoveries in recent years, definitely in uh in nanoscience
and nanoscale research. And one of the first things I
wanted to talk about was a few years ago, is
from two thousand and ten when IBM was able to
use a nano scale silicon chisel to carve this three
(28:20):
D relief map of the surface of the Earth onto
a polymer substrate. So it's it's using a nano scale
needle basically to carve a nano scale model. Okay, so
how how big was this canvas? So the map was
twenty two by eleven micrometers, which is so small that,
(28:41):
according to the IBM press release, a thousand of these
maps could fit on a single grain of table salt.
Though that's assuming your grain is zero point three millimeters,
and some grains, as we know, are bigger than others.
If you're using rock salt, that's a lot of maps
on your rock salt, right, uh So, but this one
of the cool things about this because it's not the
(29:02):
first time we've manipulated objects at at that scale. I mean,
we've been able to do this before. Yeah. But one
of the cool things about this was that it was
done in two minutes and twenty three seconds fast. Yeah, bam,
super fast. So they also carved a three D model
of the matter Horn, which is that big craggy mountain
(29:23):
in Europe. I'm sure you've seen Disneyland. Yeah, it looks
kind of like a like rhinocerous horn. The actual matter
Horn is more impressive than the Right of Disney They
were not carving the ride. The right of Disneyland is
way more fun though, okay maybe, I mean it depends
on how you feel about mountains. I suppose, right. So
they carved that out of molecular glass that was reduced
(29:45):
in scale to twenty five nanometers high. They also did
some nano scale two D carvings, such as the IBM logo,
and some always have to do right well many decades
ago they did they were able to arrange atoms into
the IBM. Yeah. They used an electron microscope to position
atoms precisely to spell out IBM scanning microscope scanning, tunneling microscope. Yes,
(30:11):
but those things are big and expensive, So what's the
point of all this beautiful art. Well, in order to
create like technologically useful nanoparticles and nanostructures, it would be
great to have really fast, precise, and relatively cheap ways
of sculpting and manipulating objects on the nanoscale. So this
(30:31):
is a sort of silicon nano milling tool like you'd
find on on a large scale and a factory to
sort of just carve out the parts you need. Though,
the silicon nano milling tool and it's programmed carving patterns
are a step in the right direction, uh, because they
say it's it's fast, it's cheap, and it's pretty sturdy.
(30:51):
Though it's also worth saying that carving at this scale
isn't necessarily like carving at the macro scale. Nanoscale fabrication
and manipulation might make use of totally different forces and
strategies than say a human sculptor who's wanting to work
in stone or wood or something like that, and the
ideal strategy probably depends on the nature of the substrate material.
(31:14):
So like in this example, the substrates they were working
with were sort of special materials that were designed for
this purpose. Yeah, this is this is fascinating stuff to me.
I mean, you know, and we're we haven't even finished
all the different potential uses, right Yeah. And in medicine
and health, nanoparticles and nanotubes are being researched for their
(31:35):
abilities to push and pull specific articles, uh, specifically in
liquids like water and blood. Um, Like, you could pull
salter arsenic from a water supply. Um. In the case
of arsenic, it so happens that iron oxide particles pick
the stuff up and then can be magnetized for easy removal.
Um Or circulating cancer cells or viruses can possibly be
(31:58):
picked up out of blood, which is amazing, you guys. Um. Unfortunately,
there's also evidence that carbon nanotubes can cause cancer to
develop because they're pointy like asbestos. Uh So, so that's
the thing that researchers are working on a way around.
But but overall, I mean, the possibilities of being able
to to remove stuff what we don't want from stuff
(32:21):
um or or possibly to use nanotubes to deliver drugs
very precisely to particular cells is a completely amazing vista
of health. On a similar note, there are doctors and
engineers looking at using viruses themselves as the delivery tool,
where you take the virus, you coat the virus with
proteins that will allow it to essentially doc with cancerous cells,
(32:45):
and then deliver a payload of essentially chemotherapy to the
cancer cells. And the goal here would be very precise
delivery of chemotherapy drugs, which we all know have some
pretty nasty side effects. Yeah, and most of those side
effects come from the fact that that you're exposing your
entire body to to the chemo. It's it's not it's
(33:05):
not it's not just poison to the cells, it's poison
to you. Right, So if you are able to limit
the exposure of cells to mainly the cancer cells, you
or side effects will be decreased significantly. Now, there's no
one is saying that they're going to get to a
point where the cancer, you know, the chemotherapy is not
going to have any side effects at all. Uh, we
(33:25):
haven't reached that level of certain decision. But the hope
is that this will dramatically cut down those those side effects,
and which you know that would be a great benefit
to people who have to undergo that kind of treatment.
I want to look also at what research at the
nanoscale can do to help improve computing. Sure, so right now,
(33:46):
what does a computer chip look like. It's silicon. Yeah,
it's that with some little metal metal bits etched into it,
sometimes so little that you can't even see the individual parts. Yeah,
it's a standard. A standard. Processors may to silicon, and
silicon is great, but it's not perfect in terms of
things like energy efficiency and heat dissipation. Plus, is you
(34:07):
keep cramming more and more processing power onto a chip
and reducing the scale, you encounter problems like what we
were talking about earlier, like the electron gating and stuff
like that. Well, what if you could make a computer
out of something else, something other than silicon, like carbon
of carbon based computer, organic computer? Well I'm not talking
(34:28):
about a brain here, I'm talking about it something made
out of carbon nanotubes. Yeah, if you can make it, right,
if you can make it out a carbon, you can
make it out of carbon nanotubes, which do have impressive
electrical properties. Right, So we've talked about carbon nanotubes on
this podcast before, but there's something that's really big in
research at the nano scale. And uh so different people
have been working on this idea. Can you make a
(34:49):
computer processor out of carbon nanotubes that will perform well
enough to perhaps replace silicon chips one day. I know
IBM has been working on it. They have like a
carbon nanotube transistor lab in Stanford. Researchers created the first
carbon nanotube computer. Now it is pretty basic. One source
(35:10):
I saw compared it to the power of Intel's first
computer chip ever in nine So it's not like a
like what you find in a MacBook pro. It is
not at that scale, but it works um. And this
is no easy task because carbon nanotubes can be really
hard to work with, so much so that some people
have dismissed the idea of carbon based computing. It's hard
(35:31):
to get all the nanotubes arranged in the way you
want them to just make them totally. And if if
you're trying to create a semiconductor, you mentioned how the
nanoscale arranging nanotubes in different positioning gives them different properties. Well,
so you can have a bunch of nanotubes lined up
to work as a semiconductor, but within them you might
(35:54):
have these nanotubes that are not arranged correctly. They're metallic
nanotubes and they're coming up the works, and so how
do you deal with those? Well, these researchers at Stanford
found some basic ways around these these starting problems, and
we're able to get something off the ground. Uh. And
so nanoscience research could help us build a more powerful
(36:14):
carbon nanotube computer chip that would be smaller and more
energy efficient than silicon, possibly faster too, since a major
impediment speed and silicon chips is the tendency to build
up heat, and of course carbon nanotubes could potentially allow
heat to dissipate faster than the silicon. Right, very important stuff.
And uh, I see here. Now this is kind of crazy.
(36:36):
I have not had a chance to actually read over
this research, so I'm curious to hear about it about
nanoscale information, nanotechnology, nano particles actually letting us giving giving
us insight on how life on Earth may have started. Yeah,
so this is one of the most interesting things to me.
And this was actually a story that just came out
the other day. I think it was yesterday, as the
(36:56):
recording of this podcast, which were recording on February, I
believe it's coming out. This was two days ago. Justtant
passed forward thinkers. Okay, well, so here's the deal. So
at the University of Michigan, some researchers were working with
simulations of nanoparticles how they behave when you apply energy
(37:18):
to them in certain ways. And so they were looking
at what happens when you take certain nanoparticles and put
them into a spin. And what they found is that
these nanoparticles naturally arranged themselves into what they called quote
living rotating crystals. And the researchers were investigating how basically
disordered groups of particles can be made to self as
(37:41):
symbol into various architectures under different physical circumstances. So you
apply energy in one way or another, and you see
what types of clumps these things form into. Right, you
can think of it the the example in the article
that I think that you linked to was was thinking
about them rotating like like pin wheels, and the pin
(38:01):
wheels that are rotating in the same direction will, well,
we'll catch each other at the edges and kind of
link up and form a giant group of of pin wheels.
They're they're almost like interlocking gears in a way, although
they behave in ways that are counterintuitive to the ways
we would think they would behave on the macro scale. Um.
But this is really important in nanoscience and nanoengineering because
(38:23):
if you want to build any kind of complex machinery
or architecture at that scale, it's really difficult to manipulate
the parts directly to do it by hand. Remember that's
what we were talking about with that first thing, like
carving them out. It's hard to take the tiny little
particles and put them where you want them. So instead,
one way to think about this kind of engineering would
be to say, well, what kind of structures naturally arise,
(38:46):
say when you just like when you shake the snow globe,
how do the particles stick together? And can we use
that in a way that will help us with engineering. Uh.
And so the researchers found that by applying energy causing
the particles to rotate like pin wheels, there was this
sort of natural tribal grouping where the particles organized themselves
into complex, larger structures. And so, on one hand, the
(39:09):
structures they discovered in their simulation might be useful for
engineering to create what they called like a nanopump, which
would sort of move particles around within a tiny machine.
But the researchers also pointed out that the experiments like
this and research like this could actually help us learn
about the chemical machines that make up living organisms and
(39:30):
how they were first assembled, presumably from the same type
of chaotic masses of particles stimulated in one way or
another by energy coming in from the outside. Yeah, that's
pretty cool. I mean, it's it's interesting when uh, I mean,
I love it whenever any sort of exploratory science starts
coming up with possible insight into areas that you weren't
(39:52):
even initially considering when you started out on whatever experiment
you were doing. And that's kind of what this sounds like. Yeah, well,
I do certainly want to make it clear that they
were humble. I mean that they weren't saying like, we've
discovered how life began on Earth, and they're just saying like,
this is the kind of research that could someday lead
us to answers to this question, which is really fast.
(40:13):
But this computer simulation was doing this thing, and when
they said living rotating crystals, they don't mean that the
thing suddenly came alive. They simply mean that they displayed
self self assembling behavior sort of the organizational properties that
we look at in in organic molecules we associate with life.
(40:34):
That's really interesting. I You know, of course, time will
will tell whether or not that particular line of inquiry
has any substance to it. As people do more and
more research based upon that kind of approach, whether it's
through simulation or further down the line where we're able
to do this on a practical level, it'll be really
interesting to see if that holds up, and maybe it won't.
(40:56):
But the cool thing, like we've always said in the show,
is that ultimately you learn through this this process. So
whether it's something works or not, you know, that's that's
important on an individual scale, but ultimately it's important on
just building up our knowledge. Oh yeah, sometimes something not
working is a lot more valuable than it working. Oh yeah.
If something works, then essentially what that means is that
(41:18):
you've confirmed a hypothesis, which is important play it certainly,
But if it doesn't work, that means there's something else
going on that you haven't taken into account, and that
can be really interesting. It's part of why if you
ever read anything from the scientists at the Large Hadron
Collider where they were talking about discovering the Higgs boson,
and a lot of people are saying, I kind of
(41:40):
hope it's not, because if it's not the Higgs boson,
that suggests that there's more that we need to learn.
But if it is the Higgs boson, it pretty much
confirms the hypothesis. And then we just got confirmation. Well,
there's still so much more we need to learn. But yeah,
it's it's kind of some of them felt aesthetically like, well,
once we got the Higgs boson, now it's it's too easy. Yeah, well,
(42:00):
or at least now now that's now this question rather
than answered. It's like an answer that someone proposed has
been more or less confirmed, and that uh, and that seems,
at least on the service level, to be a little
less interesting when your when your job is all about
answering questions. I'm just saying, don't walk away from this
discussion with the idea that all the questions about physics
(42:21):
have been settled. Well, certainly not. I can only blog
so quickly, Joe, I'll get I'll get around to it eventually,
all right. So yeah, that kind of wraps up our
discussion about why the nanoscale is so interesting and why
it's so important. And obviously we'll do more episodes specifically
about nanotechnology and its applications in the future, will look
(42:42):
at very specific cases and explain the development because this is,
you know, a huge industry about a very little thing.
Uh that we can if we could do, we could
have just a podcast, like just a series about nanotechnology
and not run out of things to say for a
long long time. So we will do more episodes in
the future, but for now we're wrapping this up. Remember
(43:04):
if you have any suggestions for topics that we should
tackle in the future about the future, let us know.
Send us an email our addresses f W Thinking at
discovery dot com, or get in touch with us online
through Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. Our handle it all
three of those FW Thinking, and don't forget to visit
f W thinking dot com. That's our home page where
(43:26):
we have all the podcast episodes, all the videos that
we've done, all the blog posts, and other information including
fun facts about your beloved hosts. So go check that
out and we will talk to you again really soon.
For more on this topic and the future of technology,
(43:47):
visit forward Thinking dot com. Brought to you buy Toyota
let's go places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast and makes the future, and says I turned
my back for two minutes and they've grown again. I'm
Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Pocalban, and I'm Joe McCormick. And uh,
(00:23):
you know, guys, I don't want to make a big
deal about this. I know it's a small thing, but
nano scale, am I right? Was wonderful? Man? That that
noise that Joe just made. If anyone's ever ever heard
me shaking my head, and that's exactly yeah. Okay, well
(00:44):
we're glad you put a voice to it. Sorry, anyway,
go ahead. I wanted to talk to thought today about honestly,
come on, I'm trying to get it out now. I
wanted to talk today about the nano scale and and
why things that the nano scale are so special and unusual,
particularly when we think about how we're familiar with material
(01:05):
on the macro scale that's that's in our world in
amounts that we're able to see and pick up and
and manipulate. Yeah, So, if you are interested in the
future or have been within the past decade and a
half or so, you've probably heard a whole lot about nanotechnology,
but you might not necessarily know any of the principles
behind nanotechnology except that it has something to do with
(01:28):
extremely tiny robots that will turn the world into Google, right,
or will make us be able to resist make us superhero.
It's one of the one of the two. Really, it's
either Google or Awesome. Well, it's one of those things
that has been through a lot of hype, and there
has been a lot of It's sort of one of
those magic technologies and people just invoke it like a
(01:51):
magic spell to say that it can do anything. Yeah,
and a lot of media reports kind of simplify it
to the point where, uh, you know, you don't really
understand what they're talking about because it's it's so general
and vague, because you get the feeling that they don't
really understand what they're talking about. They're going, like science, y'all,
and that's yeah, it's like using a placeholder, you know,
(02:12):
just throw nanotechnology in there and everything will be fine.
But it's it's uh, it is fascinating, it is and
it's a true industry. It's not like we're not trying
to downplay this, and so nanotechnology isn't a thing. It's
totally a thing. It's a true industry, and it's an
industry that's really trying to happen, especially if you've read
about any of the huge sort of patent rush that's
been going on over the previous years in nanotechnology. People
(02:36):
are taking out so many patents on ideas for nanotechnology,
you know, devices that they have no way of making
function right now, some of which they might have at
least a way of approaching it. But yeah, that well,
there's so many patents it's possible to see this as
an impediment to actual work getting done in the field.
I will say that, you know, everyone who's listening to
(02:58):
this is likely doing so on a device that is
incorporating nanotechnology because at this at this stage, microprocessors have
transistors and other elements that are on the nanoscale. So
these are things that have been made to such a
a precise degree that it's it's super super tiny, tinier
than we can see using a light microscope. Jonathan, Yeah,
(03:20):
super super tiny. Come on, let's use some real terms here.
Let's back up and say what the heck is the
nano scale, and why should we care about it? Right? So,
a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, so that
that's very difficult to have rightly. Put you this way,
all right, your typical sheet of paper, just a sheet
(03:41):
of paper, a single sheet of paper is about one
hundred thousand nanometers thick. So that edge of a sheet
of paper that can give you that nasty paper cut
that's actually enormous. On the nano scale, red blood cell
would be two thousand, five hundred nanometers across. So you know,
there's there's the micro scale, which is the scale large,
one scale larger than the nano scale, uh, which you
(04:04):
know at that level we can look at stuff using
light microscopes. But the nanoscale we're actually talking about things
typically we're we're talking about stuff that's around a hundred nanometers,
are smaller in size. I mean, you're kind of it's
it's not exact. There's not like a cutoff where you say, oh, no,
I'm sorry, that's not nano scale, it's microscale unless you're
talking about a thousand nanometers. In that point you're like no, literally, um,
(04:27):
but you know this is a size where things are
so small that light waves actually kind of hit on
either side, like the particles can fit in between, sort
of like how in science fiction you have those creatures
occasionally that are able to exist in between seconds, and
that's why we can't see them. But in this case,
it's stuff that's so small that light waves can't interact
with them. You don't see them using light. I think, uh,
(04:50):
correct me if I'm wrong, But I think one good
way of looking at it is it is it's sort
of at the molecular scale can be. It's uh, it's
larger than single app yes, right, a nanometer might be
about ten atoms together. Yeah, that's the atomic scale would
be the next smallest scale, and the nanoscale really is
the realm of the molecule. Okay. Yeah. So and also
(05:13):
while we're talking about this, while we talk about nanotechnology
and that sounds, you know very much humans have their
hand in it. We're the ones building this kind of stuff,
we should also stress that a lot of nanotechnology depends
very heavily on things that we already find in nature,
specifically stuff like viruses, which are on the nanoscale. These
viruses range in size, you know, that's not like it's
(05:33):
not one size fits all. But these are tiny, tiny,
tiny structures. Some would say organisms, some do not, because
virus is one of those tricky things. Is it, is
it life? Is it not life? Um, there's not full
agreement on the matter. But it is found in nature,
and in fact, nanotechnology has made great use of viruses,
(05:55):
both as a source of inspiration and actually as something
that we could use by scooping all all the virus
stuff out and replacing it with other stuff, keeping that
shell intact. Absolutely, DNA itself is on the nano scale.
A particle of d N DNA might be about two
nanometers across, which is the size of a carbon nanotube.
By the way, particles of smoke also on the nano scale.
(06:16):
So yeah, this is stuff that, uh is both in
nature and stuff that we will construct ourselves, we being
people way smarter than I am, not the three the
four people in this room. I will say I visited
a nano lab just last week in a high school
in Chicago. So high school had its own nano lab,
(06:36):
including scanning electron microscopes so that they could see the
stuff they were working on. I was blown away. In
my high school. In my high school, we had a
computer and it was an apple. Um, So anyway, the
interesting thing you asked me. Also, why is the nano
scale important? We've explained what it is, but why do
(06:57):
we care? Well, we care? Can you really do anything
useful down there that tiny, tiny range on? Well? Technically
right now, that's that's up for that's kind of up
for grabs. But you, Dennis Quaide and you're in this
this device that could be shrunk down to the nano scale. Uh,
and Martin short is nearby. Hey, first, let's say we
(07:19):
do have a lot to learn about the name, because
the nano scale is, as you might have understood if
you've ever studied, say, quantum physics, when you get down
to the very very small scale, things don't act like
you're used to exactly. On the nano scale, material that
you could be extremely familiar with will demonstrate properties that
(07:43):
are completely different from the ones you're accustomed to. Right.
For example, like color, okay, so so so gold we
call it gold. There's a color called gold because that
is the color that gold is. Yeah, exactly why we
call oranges oranges? Right, but so at at the at
the nano scale, gold has to be gold, right, No,
(08:03):
it does not have to be. Don't. You can't tell
gold how to be. You aren't the boss of gold.
Gold decides it wants to be purple. As it turns
out on the nano scale, particles of gold are actually red.
So it's still gold, you know, chemically, but it's it's
it's no longer the color gold. It is the color
(08:23):
red red or kind of purple. Yeah. And and this
happens to be a function of gold electrons being confined
at this scale, which means that the gold interacts with
light differently. And you can actually see this. If you
see gold nanoparticles that are suspended in solution, the solution
itself will appear to be read or slightly purplish and
not gold. So that's kind of interesting. Also, the melting
(08:45):
point of materials changes. A melting point that's where a
solid turns into a liquid, so gold using gold again
as an example. The melting point is typically on the
macro scale. So if you had a bar of gold
and you want to alt it down and be a
James Bond villain and melt somebody with it, then you
would need to heat that up to one thousand degrees
(09:08):
fahrenheit or one thousand sixty four degrees sels use, but
on the nanoscale it's actually lower. The melting point is
lower than that, and the actual melting point depends on
the size of the nanoparticle. So it's not just that
at a smaller size, these little particles will melt at
a lower temperature. It's all size dependent, and a lot
of that has to do with surface area, which will
(09:29):
get into a little bit later. Also, the hardness of
material can be different at the nanoscale than it is
on the macro scale. It's electrical conductivity. Some substances that
don't that aren't very good conductors on the macro scale
become excellent conductors of electricity on the nanoscale, and vice versa.
You'll find some things that end up acting more like
(09:50):
an insulator on the nanoscale than they do on the
macro scale. So knowing that, knowing that material has these
different properties at these different sizes, means that you can
take advantage of that and design electronics that leverage that.
Also the chemical reactivity. By the way, one thing that's
related to this that I didn't put on this list
is toxicity. So a material may or may not be
(10:15):
more or less toxic on the nanoscale than it is
on the macro scale. Similar Similarly, they will react differently
in chemical reactions on the nano scale than on the
macro scale. And again that has a lot to do
with surface area, which again I'll talk about in a minute.
Just calm down, I'm gonna get there. And then there's magnetoism. Magnetism,
(10:36):
It still has nothing to do with the x men.
I keep trying. I know it's a valiant effort, um.
But no nano particles of magnetic substances like like iron
oxide for example, can exert magnetic force on each other
when exposed to weak magnets just plain old handheld things, um.
Which means that that what we expect to happen is
(10:56):
that we'd need a huge electro magnet to to move
magnetic nano particles. Um. But but if you just introduce
them to a really weak magnetic field, they'll start moving themselves.
And we'll talk a little bit about that again in
a minute. Because there are certain forces that are really
important on the nano scale, and other forces that, while
they're important to us on the macro scale, don't mean
(11:18):
a thing once you get down to a couple of nanometers.
Just doesn't doesn't even you know, it's a negligible effect.
And uh, Anyway, another important part is that the motion
of energy at the nano scale, this is kind of
falling into what you were saying, Joe. It follows the
rules of quantum physics rather than classical physics. So now
we're starting to see some quantum effects come into play.
(11:40):
And this is where stuff really behaves in a weird way,
things that are not intuitive to us on the map.
Whether you're trying to use your intuitions or you're trying
to work it out with Newtonian equations, it's it's not
going to make sense at this scale. They're not going
to be able to predict movement by going going by
Newton's book. Now, there's a lot of uncertainty at the level,
which if you are able to take into account, means
(12:03):
that you can work your way around it. But if
you take some really interesting things exactly, but if you're
not able to take it into account, then you might
end up creating, say a microchip that is useless because
it cannot control the flow of electrons. And we'll get
into that as well. So now we've covered the different properties,
what about the things that are important or not important
(12:24):
at the scale that I you know, I just alluded
to it a minute ago. Well, service area, like I said,
way more important than it would be on the macro scale.
And specifically, the reason we say that is because the
surface area ends up the ratio of surface area to
volume is out of control. On the nano scale, you've
got way more surface area than you would have volume
because you're talking about teny T T teeny tiny nanoparticles
(12:47):
share a collection of nanoparticles as as you can imagine
very clearly. Probably it's it's like having a having a
whole bunch of blocks versus one large solid block of
the same volume. Yeah, and so this means that that
surface area that enormous relative to its volume. Surface area
means that more of that that substance can come into
contact with something else than it would on the macro scale. So, uh,
(13:10):
you know, relatively speaking, more of the actual substance would
be exposed to a solution. For example, if you were
to suspend nanoparticles into a solution, more of the service
of those particles would be exposed to that other substance,
whatever it might be. Then it would if it were
a you know, a bar of it on the macro scale.
(13:31):
That means that it can do stuff more efficiently than
many things on the macro scale, and that includes being
a catalyst. Now, a catalyst in chemistry, we're talking about
something that facilitates chemical reactions, not necessarily that it itself
reacts chemically with something else, but it might aid in
the reaction of another substance third party negotiator. Yeah, that's
(13:51):
a good way of putting it. So, for example, fuel cells,
we talked about those a lot. A catalyst and a
fuel cell is essentially what convinces you know, I say convinced.
There's not really any convincing, but go with you this
convincing a hydrogen atom to ditch it's its electrons, become
a hydrogen ion and pass through a membrane. Right, you
might want a little bit of what platinum in there? Yeah,
(14:12):
we're talking about platinum on the nanoscale, little nanoparticles of platinum.
And again, the reason why you want nanoparticles it exposes
more surface area of the platinum, so that way it's
a much more efficient catalyst. So it's also why a
lot of the earlier fuel cells were so expensive because
you had to have platinum to be able to create
this catalyst for the membrane for your basic hydrogen based
(14:35):
fuel cell. So this catalyst then convinces the hydrogen to ditch.
The electrons come on across a permeable membrane and join
some oxygen, and then the electrons go through a pathway,
a circuit that you have built so that they do
work what however you wanted them to work, like drive
a car, for example, and then they rejoin the fuel
cell on the other side, and that's where you get
the water, where the hydrogen, ions, the oxygen, and the
(14:57):
electrons all rejoin, and then all you have is water
and then the electricity and the heat. So that's just
one example of how the chemical reactions are are different
on the now scale and how it's really important. The
other thing I wanted to mention was that I had
talked about how some forces are really important others aren't.
Gravity on the nanoscale is practically meaningless. You it's these
(15:19):
particles are so small and these reactions happen so close
together that gravity really doesn't play a part. It's it's negligible.
You can pretty much ignore it. However, electro magnetic force
off the charts incredibly powerful. So, like you were saying, Lauren,
it doesn't take a very strong magnetic field for you
to have a strong effect because those forces are way
(15:41):
more important at this scale than something like gravity. Gravity
big important force when you're talking about cosmological scale, right,
and then electromagnetism doesn't really have that much of an
effect because it's it's not as strong over great distances,
but you know here it's the opposite way. So interesting
thing to think about. And also, electrons they get up
(16:02):
to Shenanigan's yeah, they can. They can tunnel through materials
that are that are one nanometer thick that they can
kind of teleport from one side of a barrier to another,
which is not teleportation is not actually something that that
is physically that's against the rules usually, so uh, to
get a little more specific with this, this is one
(16:24):
of the big problems with designing microprocessors using nano sized
pathways because if the chips in your computer do you're
you're thinking for you, right, because ultimately that's really about
controlling the flow of electrons through lots of teeny teeny
super teeny tiny circuitry. Right, So you have these electron
gates that either allow an electron through or prevent an
(16:45):
electron from moving through. And these gates are getting smaller
and smaller as we continue to miniaturize these these UH
elements so that we keep making more powerful microprocessors. Essentially
more powerful means you've crammed more elements onto that microprocessor
by making them smaller. So we've seen this ever since
the very the birth of the transistor. Now the problem
(17:07):
is when that gate gets so thin that the electron
can tunnel through. And by tunnel through, we don't mean
that it actually makes a hole and then passes through.
It's not damaging the gate. What's happening is there's a
field around where when we say an electron is located
a certain place, we don't really mean it's exactly right there. Yeah,
there's more like a field of probability of where an
(17:30):
electron can be found at any given time. So you
can think of it as sort of nebulous, almost like
a gas like thing. Alright, just just an area and
anywhere within that area the electron has the possibility of
being at any given time. Now, as that starts to
approach a gate, if the gate is thin enough, then
part of the area could overlap the gate and be
(17:54):
on the other side, with the other part of the
area being on on the first side of the gate,
And therefore, when we need to act the position of
the electron, there's a pretty good chance that it's going
to be across that gate. Yeah, there's at least a possibility.
And as long as there's a possibility, that means sometimes
it is on the other side of that gate. Right,
if it's possible for it to be there, sometimes it's
(18:14):
going to be there, and maybe that it's a fifteen
percent possibility and that of the time it's going to
be on the other side. But even that means sometimes
the electrons on the other side of the gate, which
means your gate is not keeping the electrons out, which means,
in the case of electronics, the thing is barked. Yeah,
it means that you get errors. You know, you're you
get a microprocessor that cannot process without without lots of
(18:38):
logic failures. So that's a real engineering problem, and there
have been lots of different engineers working on this and
they solve it in different ways. Usually they use different
exotic materials that are better at at blocking electrons than others.
But but ultimately it's this quantum effect that makes things
so tricky, and that's the world of the nano scale.
Like you know, again, in a classic world, if you
(19:01):
were to roll a ball towards a toward a brick wall,
you wouldn't expect it to suddenly appear on the other
side of the brick wall and continue rolling. That just
wouldn't happen. It would bounce off the brick wall. Or
if that red ball were filled with some sort of
incredibly dense material, perhaps it would make a hole in it,
But it wouldn't. It wouldn't just pass like onto the
other side without any other kind of interaction. It's extremely unlikely. Well,
(19:25):
another thing about that red ball, if you want to
play with the ball, you can predict pretty much what
it's going to do. It's initial starting conditions, Like I've
pushed it in this direction with this amount of force,
you can actually predict pretty well where it's gonna end up. Yeah,
as long as you know the other variables, like you
know how smooth the surfaces it's rolling on. But ultimately
(19:47):
you've got a good idea, you know, just even intuitively
on the on the nanoscale, that doesn't come into play.
There's also this idea of random molecular motion or brownie
in motion. I'm sure you've probably heard that term if
you've ever taking chemistry or physics, like the idea of uh,
you know, the brownie and motion also explains the movement
of things like smells. So if you are baking cookies
(20:09):
and you walk into a house and someone or someone
else has been baking cookies and you walk in and
you smell it, that's brownie emotion. That explains the motion
of the molecules that move through the atmosphere. I cannot
believe that you didn't just say brownies instead of cookies,
so that it could have been brownies motion. Well, I
mean it's that's a fair point. I didn't miss an opportunity.
But I also like cookies more than I like brownies.
(20:30):
So anyway, at the at the macro scale, random motions
not as big a deal. Okay, So think of this
like a stream that's moving just at a a steady rate,
but not crazy. Like it's not a rapid, but it's
a steady rate. Now on the macro scale, if you're
walking through that stream, you might feel a little bit
of a tug here and there, but it's not that
(20:50):
bad on the nano scale. This seemingly simple motion on
the macro scale becomes really chaotic, you know. It's it's
much more of a kind of a raging, rapid sort
of approach. And uh so it's sort of that idea
of as you get smaller, these these seemingly um tiny
effects have much larger consequences, as we all saw from
(21:14):
the documentary Honey I Shrunk the Kids exactly, or or
inner space as I was alluding to earlier. Yes, both
of those have proven beyond reasonable doubt that tiny things
can have big impact. Okay, so we've been hearing about
nanotechnology for years. Can it actually do anything for us?
I mean absolutely so those microprocessors I mentioned, you could
(21:37):
argue those have had a some somewhat of an impact
on our lives by boys, But you know, we're using
nanotechnology and all sorts of fields already, right, not just
high tech, but in ways that you might not anticipate.
For example, sunscreen, so zinc oxide. On the macro scale,
the macro particles, even if you're talking about just a
(21:58):
you know, a few um micro eaters in size, they're opaque.
So that's where you get that white zinc oxide, uh
some block. You know, if you ever saw the the
pictures of people in moving old style with with like
stripes of some block on it, like the nose is
totally white and everything else, you know, that's uh, that's
those are zinc oxide particles. But these days it can
(22:19):
be titanium oxide as well, But the concept is still
the same. It is physically blocking the sun's rays from
reaching your face. So on the nano scale, zinc oxide
is actually transparent, and you can still use nanoparticles of
zinc oxide within a sun block that um that still
have that ultra violet blocking. They still work even though
(22:39):
they appear transparent to our eyes. Yeah, so we are
able to make some block that doesn't make you look
extra pasty for people who have skin tones like some
of the people in this room, all of the people
in this room where where when sun hits us, we
look like we stepped out of a vampire movie and
(22:59):
we should be turning to dust almost immediately. So yeah,
it's important stuff. Yeah, I mean you can use it
to make things stronger, more durable, water repellent, stain resistant,
more absorbent, heat insulated, reflective, or anti reflective, scratch resistant,
airtight for certain gases, uh, moisture controlling, conductive, fluorescence. Yeah,
(23:20):
there's there's a huge list of things that can make
material behave in a way that otherwise it wouldn't. So
whether you're trying to make something hydrophobic or hydrophilic, uh,
you know, nanoparticles can go a long way to helping
you achieve that. And um, you know, there's there's importance
to this work. Like we said, with these, the fact
(23:41):
that the features the properties of materials changed dramatically at
the nano scale than they do at the macro scale,
it's important that we study those so that we understand
how to use them, like what what what are the
potential applications for that material, and also whether or not
it's even safe to use them, because, like I said,
the toxicity can change since they work differently at that scale. Yeah,
(24:02):
we need to figure out how else they work differently
other than looking transparent for example for example. Yeah, like
like silver, silver is something that we've used. It's people
have understood that silver is important with medicine for ages,
and it does have the unfortunate side effect of having
silver deposits build up in your various tissues, including your skin,
(24:24):
so that if you were to take it, you know,
over an extended period of time, you would start to
turn blue. There are pictures of people who have done this,
who have used the colloidal silver as a means of medicating.
It's not like I mean, I'm not certain that anyone's
ever done it on purpose for cosmetic purposes, but you
know the examples I've seen, it's all been a medicinal thing. Well,
(24:46):
silver actually does have antimicrobial properties. It can't kill off microbes,
and it's actually through silver ions. It's the way that
silver ions interact with oxygen and then break down these
microbes and kill them. So we have seen silver nanoparticles
used in uh in in wound dressings, in bandages so
(25:06):
that it will help doctors bind up a wound and
thus help prevent infection or at least decrease the chances
of infection, which are obviously really important. It can turn
it can turn a uh you know, a wound that
could be inconvenient or irritating or uh you know, it
could slow you down into an infection, could turn it deadly.
(25:30):
I mean even even a wound that you would think, oh,
well that you know, I'll be fine in a few weeks.
That if it's infected, that's serious. So uh, but you know,
that could be a totally different story. If silver nanoparticles
themselves had been toxic to humans, then obviously you wouldn't
want to be You wouldn't want to do that, just
like you don't really want to use colloidal silver as
(25:51):
a means of treating a medical issue, especially if you
don't want to turn blue. By the way, that is irreversible, Yeah,
you don't. It's not like it's a layer of skin
that eventually wears off. That is that's under your tissue
and that's how you will look for the rest of
your life. So just a word of warning. But we
(26:11):
can also start to understand whether or not future applications
of nanotechnology are particularly practical or viable. So you you
Joe mentioned at the top of the show about nano robots,
and that was I mean, that's a really it's still
a fairly popular subject among futurists. But it's also something
that a lot I won't say all, but a lot
(26:33):
of engineers and nanotechnology experts have said, is if that's
going to be something we see in the future, it's
going to be a ways off. You gotta walk before
you can run. Yeah, absolutely, and we we're not quite
walking yet. Um. In order to make complex interacting parts
at the nano scale, it seems much simpler to start
(26:54):
with basic sort of nano structures that you think can
can do interesting things for you, but they might not
have complex moving parts, right, all right, we really need
to figure out what's going on on the nano scale
before we can start to apply those those high level
kind of things, um. You know, for for for example,
a lot of the biological processes that this could be
(27:15):
very useful in in aiding or changing in our bodies,
we don't understand very well yet, DNA combination and photosynthesis
or stuff that we're really just beginning to to understand
on that scale, right. Yeah. We we know like the
general processes and we know what the outcomes are, but
that doesn't mean we understand the mechanisms behind it. And
in fact, we're going to have an upcoming episode about
(27:37):
antibiotics where we talk about even the mechanisms bacteria have
that end up causing us to actually feel ill and
become ill. We don't fully understand those yet. Yeah, And
that's boring old micro scale stuff. Yeah, so obviously very
important to understand. Okay, So I want to talk about
sort of the current state of nanotechnology by way of
(27:59):
just singling out what I think are some of the
coolest discoveries in recent years, definitely in uh in nanoscience
and nanoscale research. And one of the first things I
wanted to talk about was a few years ago, is
from two thousand and ten when IBM was able to
use a nano scale silicon chisel to carve this three
(28:20):
D relief map of the surface of the Earth onto
a polymer substrate. So it's it's using a nano scale
needle basically to carve a nano scale model. Okay, so
how how big was this canvas? So the map was
twenty two by eleven micrometers, which is so small that,
(28:41):
according to the IBM press release, a thousand of these
maps could fit on a single grain of table salt.
Though that's assuming your grain is zero point three millimeters,
and some grains, as we know, are bigger than others.
If you're using rock salt, that's a lot of maps
on your rock salt, right, uh So, but this one
of the cool things about this because it's not the
(29:02):
first time we've manipulated objects at at that scale. I mean,
we've been able to do this before. Yeah. But one
of the cool things about this was that it was
done in two minutes and twenty three seconds fast. Yeah, bam,
super fast. So they also carved a three D model
of the matter Horn, which is that big craggy mountain
(29:23):
in Europe. I'm sure you've seen Disneyland. Yeah, it looks
kind of like a like rhinocerous horn. The actual matter
Horn is more impressive than the Right of Disney They
were not carving the ride. The right of Disneyland is
way more fun though, okay maybe, I mean it depends
on how you feel about mountains. I suppose, right. So
they carved that out of molecular glass that was reduced
(29:45):
in scale to twenty five nanometers high. They also did
some nano scale two D carvings, such as the IBM logo,
and some always have to do right well many decades
ago they did they were able to arrange atoms into
the IBM. Yeah. They used an electron microscope to position
atoms precisely to spell out IBM scanning microscope scanning, tunneling microscope. Yes,
(30:11):
but those things are big and expensive, So what's the
point of all this beautiful art. Well, in order to
create like technologically useful nanoparticles and nanostructures, it would be
great to have really fast, precise, and relatively cheap ways
of sculpting and manipulating objects on the nanoscale. So this
(30:31):
is a sort of silicon nano milling tool like you'd
find on on a large scale and a factory to
sort of just carve out the parts you need. Though,
the silicon nano milling tool and it's programmed carving patterns
are a step in the right direction, uh, because they
say it's it's fast, it's cheap, and it's pretty sturdy.
(30:51):
Though it's also worth saying that carving at this scale
isn't necessarily like carving at the macro scale. Nanoscale fabrication
and manipulation might make use of totally different forces and
strategies than say a human sculptor who's wanting to work
in stone or wood or something like that, and the
ideal strategy probably depends on the nature of the substrate material.
(31:14):
So like in this example, the substrates they were working
with were sort of special materials that were designed for
this purpose. Yeah, this is this is fascinating stuff to me.
I mean, you know, and we're we haven't even finished
all the different potential uses, right Yeah. And in medicine
and health, nanoparticles and nanotubes are being researched for their
(31:35):
abilities to push and pull specific articles, uh, specifically in
liquids like water and blood. Um, Like, you could pull
salter arsenic from a water supply. Um. In the case
of arsenic, it so happens that iron oxide particles pick
the stuff up and then can be magnetized for easy removal.
Um Or circulating cancer cells or viruses can possibly be
(31:58):
picked up out of blood, which is amazing, you guys. Um. Unfortunately,
there's also evidence that carbon nanotubes can cause cancer to
develop because they're pointy like asbestos. Uh So, so that's
the thing that researchers are working on a way around.
But but overall, I mean, the possibilities of being able
to to remove stuff what we don't want from stuff
(32:21):
um or or possibly to use nanotubes to deliver drugs
very precisely to particular cells is a completely amazing vista
of health. On a similar note, there are doctors and
engineers looking at using viruses themselves as the delivery tool,
where you take the virus, you coat the virus with
proteins that will allow it to essentially doc with cancerous cells,
(32:45):
and then deliver a payload of essentially chemotherapy to the
cancer cells. And the goal here would be very precise
delivery of chemotherapy drugs, which we all know have some
pretty nasty side effects. Yeah, and most of those side
effects come from the fact that that you're exposing your
entire body to to the chemo. It's it's not it's
(33:05):
not it's not just poison to the cells, it's poison
to you. Right, So if you are able to limit
the exposure of cells to mainly the cancer cells, you
or side effects will be decreased significantly. Now, there's no
one is saying that they're going to get to a
point where the cancer, you know, the chemotherapy is not
going to have any side effects at all. Uh, we
(33:25):
haven't reached that level of certain decision. But the hope
is that this will dramatically cut down those those side effects,
and which you know that would be a great benefit
to people who have to undergo that kind of treatment.
I want to look also at what research at the
nanoscale can do to help improve computing. Sure, so right now,
(33:46):
what does a computer chip look like. It's silicon. Yeah,
it's that with some little metal metal bits etched into it,
sometimes so little that you can't even see the individual parts. Yeah,
it's a standard. A standard. Processors may to silicon, and
silicon is great, but it's not perfect in terms of
things like energy efficiency and heat dissipation. Plus, is you
(34:07):
keep cramming more and more processing power onto a chip
and reducing the scale, you encounter problems like what we
were talking about earlier, like the electron gating and stuff
like that. Well, what if you could make a computer
out of something else, something other than silicon, like carbon
of carbon based computer, organic computer? Well I'm not talking
(34:28):
about a brain here, I'm talking about it something made
out of carbon nanotubes. Yeah, if you can make it, right,
if you can make it out a carbon, you can
make it out of carbon nanotubes, which do have impressive
electrical properties. Right, So we've talked about carbon nanotubes on
this podcast before, but there's something that's really big in
research at the nano scale. And uh so different people
have been working on this idea. Can you make a
(34:49):
computer processor out of carbon nanotubes that will perform well
enough to perhaps replace silicon chips one day. I know
IBM has been working on it. They have like a
carbon nanotube transistor lab in Stanford. Researchers created the first
carbon nanotube computer. Now it is pretty basic. One source
(35:10):
I saw compared it to the power of Intel's first
computer chip ever in nine So it's not like a
like what you find in a MacBook pro. It is
not at that scale, but it works um. And this
is no easy task because carbon nanotubes can be really
hard to work with, so much so that some people
have dismissed the idea of carbon based computing. It's hard
(35:31):
to get all the nanotubes arranged in the way you
want them to just make them totally. And if if
you're trying to create a semiconductor, you mentioned how the
nanoscale arranging nanotubes in different positioning gives them different properties. Well,
so you can have a bunch of nanotubes lined up
to work as a semiconductor, but within them you might
(35:54):
have these nanotubes that are not arranged correctly. They're metallic
nanotubes and they're coming up the works, and so how
do you deal with those? Well, these researchers at Stanford
found some basic ways around these these starting problems, and
we're able to get something off the ground. Uh. And
so nanoscience research could help us build a more powerful
(36:14):
carbon nanotube computer chip that would be smaller and more
energy efficient than silicon, possibly faster too, since a major
impediment speed and silicon chips is the tendency to build
up heat, and of course carbon nanotubes could potentially allow
heat to dissipate faster than the silicon. Right, very important stuff.
And uh, I see here. Now this is kind of crazy.
(36:36):
I have not had a chance to actually read over
this research, so I'm curious to hear about it about
nanoscale information, nanotechnology, nano particles actually letting us giving giving
us insight on how life on Earth may have started. Yeah,
so this is one of the most interesting things to me.
And this was actually a story that just came out
the other day. I think it was yesterday, as the
(36:56):
recording of this podcast, which were recording on February, I
believe it's coming out. This was two days ago. Justtant
passed forward thinkers. Okay, well, so here's the deal. So
at the University of Michigan, some researchers were working with
simulations of nanoparticles how they behave when you apply energy
(37:18):
to them in certain ways. And so they were looking
at what happens when you take certain nanoparticles and put
them into a spin. And what they found is that
these nanoparticles naturally arranged themselves into what they called quote
living rotating crystals. And the researchers were investigating how basically
disordered groups of particles can be made to self as
(37:41):
symbol into various architectures under different physical circumstances. So you
apply energy in one way or another, and you see
what types of clumps these things form into. Right, you
can think of it the the example in the article
that I think that you linked to was was thinking
about them rotating like like pin wheels, and the pin
(38:01):
wheels that are rotating in the same direction will, well,
we'll catch each other at the edges and kind of
link up and form a giant group of of pin wheels.
They're they're almost like interlocking gears in a way, although
they behave in ways that are counterintuitive to the ways
we would think they would behave on the macro scale. Um.
But this is really important in nanoscience and nanoengineering because
(38:23):
if you want to build any kind of complex machinery
or architecture at that scale, it's really difficult to manipulate
the parts directly to do it by hand. Remember that's
what we were talking about with that first thing, like
carving them out. It's hard to take the tiny little
particles and put them where you want them. So instead,
one way to think about this kind of engineering would
be to say, well, what kind of structures naturally arise,
(38:46):
say when you just like when you shake the snow globe,
how do the particles stick together? And can we use
that in a way that will help us with engineering. Uh.
And so the researchers found that by applying energy causing
the particles to rotate like pin wheels, there was this
sort of natural tribal grouping where the particles organized themselves
into complex, larger structures. And so, on one hand, the
(39:09):
structures they discovered in their simulation might be useful for
engineering to create what they called like a nanopump, which
would sort of move particles around within a tiny machine.
But the researchers also pointed out that the experiments like
this and research like this could actually help us learn
about the chemical machines that make up living organisms and
(39:30):
how they were first assembled, presumably from the same type
of chaotic masses of particles stimulated in one way or
another by energy coming in from the outside. Yeah, that's
pretty cool. I mean, it's it's interesting when uh, I mean,
I love it whenever any sort of exploratory science starts
coming up with possible insight into areas that you weren't
(39:52):
even initially considering when you started out on whatever experiment
you were doing. And that's kind of what this sounds like. Yeah, well,
I do certainly want to make it clear that they
were humble. I mean that they weren't saying like, we've
discovered how life began on Earth, and they're just saying like,
this is the kind of research that could someday lead
us to answers to this question, which is really fast.
(40:13):
But this computer simulation was doing this thing, and when
they said living rotating crystals, they don't mean that the
thing suddenly came alive. They simply mean that they displayed
self self assembling behavior sort of the organizational properties that
we look at in in organic molecules we associate with life.
(40:34):
That's really interesting. I You know, of course, time will
will tell whether or not that particular line of inquiry
has any substance to it. As people do more and
more research based upon that kind of approach, whether it's
through simulation or further down the line where we're able
to do this on a practical level, it'll be really
interesting to see if that holds up, and maybe it won't.
(40:56):
But the cool thing, like we've always said in the show,
is that ultimately you learn through this this process. So
whether it's something works or not, you know, that's that's
important on an individual scale, but ultimately it's important on
just building up our knowledge. Oh yeah, sometimes something not
working is a lot more valuable than it working. Oh yeah.
If something works, then essentially what that means is that
(41:18):
you've confirmed a hypothesis, which is important play it certainly,
But if it doesn't work, that means there's something else
going on that you haven't taken into account, and that
can be really interesting. It's part of why if you
ever read anything from the scientists at the Large Hadron
Collider where they were talking about discovering the Higgs boson,
and a lot of people are saying, I kind of
(41:40):
hope it's not, because if it's not the Higgs boson,
that suggests that there's more that we need to learn.
But if it is the Higgs boson, it pretty much
confirms the hypothesis. And then we just got confirmation. Well,
there's still so much more we need to learn. But yeah,
it's it's kind of some of them felt aesthetically like, well,
once we got the Higgs boson, now it's it's too easy. Yeah, well,
(42:00):
or at least now now that's now this question rather
than answered. It's like an answer that someone proposed has
been more or less confirmed, and that uh, and that seems,
at least on the service level, to be a little
less interesting when your when your job is all about
answering questions. I'm just saying, don't walk away from this
discussion with the idea that all the questions about physics
(42:21):
have been settled. Well, certainly not. I can only blog
so quickly, Joe, I'll get I'll get around to it eventually,
all right. So yeah, that kind of wraps up our
discussion about why the nanoscale is so interesting and why
it's so important. And obviously we'll do more episodes specifically
about nanotechnology and its applications in the future, will look
(42:42):
at very specific cases and explain the development because this is,
you know, a huge industry about a very little thing.
Uh that we can if we could do, we could
have just a podcast, like just a series about nanotechnology
and not run out of things to say for a
long long time. So we will do more episodes in
the future, but for now we're wrapping this up. Remember
(43:04):
if you have any suggestions for topics that we should
tackle in the future about the future, let us know.
Send us an email our addresses f W Thinking at
discovery dot com, or get in touch with us online
through Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. Our handle it all
three of those FW Thinking, and don't forget to visit
f W thinking dot com. That's our home page where
(43:26):
we have all the podcast episodes, all the videos that
we've done, all the blog posts, and other information including
fun facts about your beloved hosts. So go check that
out and we will talk to you again really soon.
For more on this topic and the future of technology,
(43:47):
visit forward Thinking dot com. Brought to you buy Toyota
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Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.