The Big Deal About Small Stuff

noise that Joe just made. If anyone's ever ever heard me shaking my head, and that's exactly yeah. Okay, well 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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

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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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. 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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

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, 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, visit forward Thinking dot com. Brought to you buy Toyota let's go places,