The Big Deal About Little Generators

it's it's one billion. Yeah, if you talk about nanometer, it's a one billionth of a meter yep. So we're talking about the nano scale. You're you're saying that stuff that exists gently speaking, in between one and a thousand nanometers somewhere in there, and usually it's between one and five d nanometers. That tends to be the area we

talked about. Now, the nanoscale is is one order larger than the atomic scale, right, So even at the nanoscale, atoms are still tiny, but the nano scale is much smaller than what we are accustomed to, and we need very special equipment to work with stuff and even see stuff that's on the nano scale. Right, Yeah, Just to

give you an idea. Human hair is usually between about six micrometers wide, which means that you would have to divide a hair at least sixty thousand times lengthwise in half in order to make it one one nanometer right exactly. Yeah nanometer. Yeah, it takes. It takes very small. It takes one tho nanometers to make one micrometer. That will become important later on in our conversation. So, yeah, super small.

Think of the smallest thing. You know, it's smaller than that, way small, unless you're thinking of like an atom, in which case you went too far, turn around, go back,

come back. But yeah, So so we're talking the nano scale, very tiny stuff, and there's a lot of interest in nanotechnology, this idea of being able to create things that work on this nanoscale for all sorts of applications, everything from actual mechanical applications, biological applications uh and uh, and even stuff like you can find nanoparticles and stuff like like sunblock, you know, has nanoparticles of zinc in it to help

block ultra violet radiation. Well, when you talk about building things on that nanoscale and you're talking about actual stuff that's doing work, it has to get power from somewhere. So where do you get power from? If you are this tiny? You can't go to a nano gas station and fill up with nano fuel as far as I know, not that we're personally aware of. Now, So the nanogenerator is this this idea of a device that uses stuff on the nanoscale in order to generate small amounts of

electricity by converting energy from one format into electricity. Now, remember we cannot create or destroy energy. We can merely convert it from one form into another. And in this case when nanogenerators, there are a couple of different kinds of energy that we can look at to convert into electrical energy. The main one is mechanical energy, so through

piezo electric piezo electric materials. Yeah, so if you've ever heard this term, piezo electric or as I sometimes say, piezo electric because I'm pretentious, or piezoelectric because pie is delicious.

Pie has been so long, guys, I'm sorry, Hi, alright, So anyway, Yeah, so piezo electric materials, this is this is a kind of material that when you apply a mechanical stress to it, it essentially emits electricity and the reverse is also true if you were to apply an electric charge to a piezo electric material, it would then move in some way, vibrate in some way. Right, All of your quartz watches, for example, contain piezo electric crys crystals. Yeah, yeah, exactly,

you get this little uh. You apply a very specific amount of electricity to this quartz watch, and it vibrates in a very specific way. It's it's predictable and it will do that every single time. And that's you know why they are great for keeping time. So as long as you've worked out all the math, it should it should keep time very very well, of course, you know, until something goes wrong with one of the other mechanisms in it. Yeah, and then then it's time to buy

a new watch. That's how that's what time it is. You you still know what time it is, just it's anyway. So piece of electric materials very useful when it comes

to nanogenerators. What you have to do is create something that can take a mechanical stress pinching, bending in some way, and create a convert that mechanical energy into electrical energy, and then you can apply that electrical energy to what we call a load in electrical terms electronics, you know, you have an electronic load that essentially means it's going through some sort of circuit in order to do work

of some kind. That might be lighting up an LED, or it might be helping recharge a battery, or it could be powering medical device. But we'll get into the applications later on. So that's the main one. And in fact, if you go to how stuff works dot com, first of all, you're awesome because it's a great website and we've got some amazing articles on there. One of those amazing articles is how nanogenerators work, and the focus on

that is the piece of electric nanogenerator. But we'll talk about a couple of other types as well in this podcast. And Uh, so you've got that, You've got that nano size, you know, it's tiny, tiny, tiny, You've got the generator part, which is the electricity. Where did this idea come from? Well, right down the road, as it turns out, from us. Yeah, a lot of the research has been done by doctor

Zo Lingen of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Yeah, Georgia Tech that is the rival school to the college I went to. Uh, they are their mascot is the Yellow Jackets and we hate them. I go Bulldogs. I went to the University of Florida. Oh I hate you too. That's tough really imagine there was a there was a fullback that I just thought looked exactly like you who

played for Florida anyway. Yeah, so, Dr John ling Wong of Georgia Tech has done a lot of work, a lot of amazing research in nano generators, piece of electric and other kinds as well. And uh, in fact, it, like I said, it's just down the road. So I really hope that at some point I will be able to visit the Georgia Tech campus and actually maybe speak with him, because yeah, the guy has done some phenomenal work. There are a lot of papers that are available for

free online that you can read. Georgia Tech hosts many of them, and you can actually read the scientific papers. I will go ahead and give you guys a warning. They are not meant for They're extremely scientific. Yeah, if you're not terribly familiar with with with electrical engineering or physics, uh, they can they can get very dense, very quickly, but they are uh, you know, the this is the leading research in this field. So it's very interesting stuff. We'll

toss up some lengths on social Yeah, definitely. So let's talk specifically about the piezoelectric nanogenerator and what's going on there. So they're using they've used lots of different materials to try and do this because, uh, there are several different kinds of materials that exhibit piezo electric qualities, mostly crystals and ceramics of various kinds. Yeah, so you know that you've got you've got some choices there to start with.

How do you narrow that down? Well, one of the things that Wonga and his team were looking at were stuff that that would not be too brittle, because if you're applying a lot of mechanical stress to it and you want to have this have a practical application, something that's flexible that has some give and doesn't break easily would be very useful, Yeah, because otherwise otherwise you really get it once and then after that it's like, now

that was a great generator for one second. Yeah, Yeah, And that might be important for some applications, but not so much for anything. Uh. And they also wanted to find considering that some of the the applications, potential applications could be medical and might even require a device to be implanted in a person. They wanted to find something that would be biocompatible, basically non toxic. You know, the goal was sort of less toxic than the stuff that

goes into the batteries that are already in medical implantable devices. Exactly. Yes, yea, So it's that was definitely a goal. And so when they were looking into different materials, the one that seemed to be the most promising and the one that they've done much of their work on is zinc oxide. So they ended up creating a nano generator using zinc oxide as the basis for it. Now, nano generator has a couple of different parts. Uh, nano wires are really important parts.

Nano wires are these incredibly they're exactly what you would think. They're wires that are on the nanoscale. These are measuring from about a hundred to three hundred nanometers in diameter. Yeah, so if you're if you were to look at a cross section of these, first of all, you'd have to have like a scanning microscope electron scanning microscope to be able to see it. But between a hundred and three

d nimeters in diameter. If you were to do that cross section their length, they are actually much much, much much longer longer than they are wide, about a hundred microns in length. Yeah. Now remember a micron is one thousand nanometers, so you're talking about a hundred thousand nanometers in length and a hundred nanometers in diameter. So the ratio there is pretty incredible. Yeah. Yeah, but but but it's still it's still I mean, the length is still

only about the same width as two human hairs put together. Yeah, if you put two human hair side by side, that's how long these wires are. So we're still talking super tiny. Yeah. I can't even imagine trying to do research with something that's small. Yes, you have to have some very specific equipment or incredibly steady hands. I'm amazed. I think it's gonna be the equipment thing. Probably, Yeah, I can't imagine someone actually, uh sorry I slipped with the Tweezers. We

lost all our research. So yeah, they took these zinc ox side nano wires and they put it on to a an etched flexible surface that is called a substrate, which, if you are familiar with things like semiconductors, this is going to start sounding familiar. Um. And uh. They then had some other components that are made from from silicone to help with this, uh, to create on an electrode,

because obviously you need something that's going to collect. Yeah, that's gonna act as like a harness to attact like the conduit for that electric So you need to have something that the electricity can flow through. Otherwise all you're doing is generating electric charge that doesn't really go anywhere. It will just redistribute to wherever the the electrons can go, right yeah, yeah, So you've got kind of a sandwich

going here. Yeah, and so you've got this zigzag electrode pattern. Uh. And when you start to apply pressure to that nanogenerator, those nano wires all start to flex. And because of that piezo electric nature of zinc oxide, which also acts as a conductor, that's another reason why they chose that material. When it when they flex, they start to generate that electrical charge that that nature of the mechanical energy and

the electrical energy starts to come into effect. Now the electrode, that silicon electrode ends up capturing that charge and it carries it through the load the circuit that nanogenerator is attached to, and uh, and there might be several electrodes, lots and lots and lots of nano wires in a

millions millions of nana wires. So you're you're talking because I mean clearly, if you just had one nano wire and one electrode, the amount of electricity you would draw off of that would be so tiny as to be difficult to put into words. So by collecting all of these and putting it all together into a larger form factor,

you're going to generate more electricity. Uh. The I remember reading at least in the early stages, they their efficiency of converting mechanical energy into electrical energy was between seventeen and thirty percent. So that's a small amount that you're thinking. You know, the whole purpose of this is to create something that's incredibly sensitive, because you've got on such a small scale that even the smallest movement is going to

create electrics. Something something like a like a heartbeat, or the touch of a finger, or even a even a not even stiff breeze, a gentle breeze could be activating this. The constriction of a blood vessel or even the flow of blood through a vessel could be enough to generate a significant for this size amount of electricity, and depending upon what you you need that electricity for, it may be enough to meet all of your needs, or at

least enough of your needs. So that the battery, because I think we're never going to get fully away from batteries, but the battery would be more of a backup than something to to kind of add in in between or

in case something doesn't sure. Yeah, the peak that they've recorded, according to UM a paper that they published in two thousand and twelve was that from a from a one centimeter square circuit of this stuff, they recorded a high level of thirty seven volt output um, which you know, for for comparison to double a battery is what like

like one point five and a car battery is twelve. So, I mean, yeah, it's pretty impressive when you're thinking about this tiny scale in lab standards that that's you know, a separate thing from real life experience. It's not a field tests, right, but it's pretty impressive. Yeah. And here here's something directly from one of Wong's papers. He says, the coupling of piezo electric and semiconducting properties, and zinc oxide creates a strain field and charge separation across the

nano wire as a result of its bending. The mechanism of the power generator relies on the coupling of piece of electric and semi conducting properties of zinc oxide, as well as the formation of a shot key barrier between the metal and zinc oxide contacts. So shot key barriers. This is one of those things that I'm not going to get into a lot of detail because frankly, it goes well beyond my own understanding of electrical engineering and physics.

But it's essentially a potential barrier, potential being electric electrical potential, not not that potentially this could be a barrier to us, not like that. Uh. And it's formed at the junction of a metal and a semiconductor. So when you get to those junctions, that's where you have the shot key barrier. And it can act like a diode, which means, if you're familiar with electric electronics, a diode h allows current to pass through in one direction but prevents it from

passing through the other way. So that's generally speaking, while shot key barriers, it gets way more technical than that, and I know that all the people out there who are schooled in electronics and and in this kind of stuff are probably screaming at me for oversimplifying it to that extent. But frankly, uh, I read about it for about an hour and watched a full presentation from a university in India about it, and that's what I came

away with. So, because this is not my area of expertise, but it is really fascinating And and just to be clear, while a lot of our research does follow the work that Wong and his team have done, there are other teams out there that have also explored the piece of electric nanogenerator model, and and some of them are doing a slightly different research. There's one team, um, a combination of Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, McAlpine and

Pira Hit. Yes. Um, they've been dealing with M. Dirk Nate tighten ate. Is that lead? Lead? I have no idea what it is. You know what that is? Well, you know, it's stuff. It's stuff. It's a it's a it's a piece of electric stuff. Yeah. They also are creating a nano ribbons. All right, Well, it's this this PCT is extremely brittle, and they figured out a way that when it's a specifically shaped it can stretch up

to ten percent without breaking and uh and therefore be useful. Right, And and these nano ribbons are that shape that they have come up with. That, Yeah, because usually this is that they're using a material that that traditionally you would not think would be very useful because it's very brittle, But because they have shaped it in this way, it could actually work in this piece of electric nanogenerator format

because it doesn't break immediately upon use. All Right, They fix these nano ribbons to UM to stretched silicone rubber surfaces UM, and when those surfaces are relaxed, it creates a buckle in the nano ribbons, a bend in the nano ribbons without actually breaking them. And uh then then in their bent state, any movement within them generates electricity. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. I mean, these are really creative ways

of designing these sort of tiny, tiny generators. Now, those are the that's the main kind of nanogenerator we talk about in the article on how stuff works. But like I said earlier, there are a couple of other methods and we're going to talk about those in just a minute, but before we do, let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsors. All right, and we're back. So we've got the piece of electric stuff down. We're experts, we know all about it. Yeah, yeah we can. You can

ask us anything and we will him and haw. But but we'll pretend like we know we will. We will look it up on the internet. Real good. It's super fascinating stuff. And I am familiar with piece of electricity or I shouldn't say piece electricity, but piece of electric materials. But this was this was at a level of detail that would beyond anything I had read before. But like we said, that's not the only only way. There's also

a kind of nanogenerator. And again Wong has done a lot of research in all of these called triboelectric generators. And uh, this is this is basically static electricity. Yeah, that's that's it's friction based, right exactly. So there's still a mechanical element to it, but it's not the mechanical stress that is converted into electricity. It's rather that the act of friction ends up generating this electric charge that

is then harnessed to go into a circuit. Right. It's that it's the fact that some materials can can gain or lose or tend to gain or lose electrons upon contact with other materials. Yeah, so you have to use two different kinds of generally speaking plastic materials and rub those against each other. Uh. They found that if you use two of the same type, you would not get the kind of right. And and you know, and you can.

I'm sure that everyone here has tested this, uh, you know in an annoying or hazardous way in terms of you know, they're delivering a small shock to a sibling by rubbing your feet on the carpet and going over and poking them, or the rubbing of the balloon against the hair, right, right, Yeah, or or even something something more unfortunate and dangerous like uh, if you're if you're dealing with computers with with computer enters, right, and you

haven't grounded your having grounded yourself, and you know it's my Faraday cages are really really cool. It's it's also why if you ever decided to build your own computer and you're doing it from scratch and you're getting ready to put that microprocessor into the motherboard, ground yourself first, please, because otherwise that that lovely stuff that's saying in front of you maybe rendered useless with one unfortunate zap. Important

safety tip, thanks Sagon. Yeah, you're welcome. Tell him about the twinkie. So the tribal electric generators, they they harness this stack electricity essentially, but they to to maximize it.

Wong and his team discovered something interesting. They found that if you took the these two different kinds of essentially plastic materials polymers, these polymers, and if you were to put on the sides that are rubbing against each other, if you were to put little tiny pyramids, that would actually maximize the electric field that you would generate, and so it would become more efficient. Otherwise, if it was smooth, it would still work, it just wouldn't generate as much.

But yeah, having the greater surface area. Yeah, so they were actually using uh, all right, let's see if I can do this, because I I even wrote out how I was supposed to say this very long word, so this could be disaster, folks, strap yourselves in. But they used a sheet of polyester. So that's not the long one. That's the easy one. So they went back into the seventies. Very concerned, I went back into the seventies, took some poor guy's suit and just ripped it off of them

and brought it back up here. And then they also used a sheet of polydimethyl salo sane p d MS. Sounds great to me. Yeah. So they use these two to rub against each other, and the polyester tends to donate electrons and the PDMS tends to accept electrons. And so while you're rubbing the surfaces together, they then you then the next step is to mechanically separate them, right, because because one one surface during this rubbing process become has gained a positive net charge and the other has

gained a positive negative. Yes, yes, but it was a lot of it, so and we don't want to be too negative on the show. But yeah, yeah, exactly, you rub them together and then you mechanically separate them very quickly. And uh while the that that's what generates the electric charges. You can then the current flows through the gap in

between them when once they have been separated. Yeah, yeah, so you do that, You've got the the electricity moving through the load the same way the piezo electric one would. I mean, from this point forward, it's exactly the same as piezo electric because you're you're just harnessing electricity, but the generation is different. It's not that mechanical stress. It's

the friction, which is a subtle but important difference. And uh so, yeah, Wong pointed out said the smooth surfaces rubbing together generated a charge, but using those micro pattern surfaces it increased the efficiency quite a bit um and said that they were generating as much as eighteen vaults at about point one three microamps per square centimeter, which is very promising. So another potential use of nanomaterials to

generate electricity. The peak that they found that that I was reading in that in that one paper that I mentioned earlier, was that up to a vaults. Yeah, so for for for a two square centimeter, right, yeah, so they what they've done is they have dramatically increased the efficiency since they first started looking into this. That's the other interesting thing I find about the research these guys are doing is that they're not just sitting on their

laurels after they discover this and go with that. They're exactly evolving that elect that that technique. Uh and it's it's really exciting stuff now there's another way of generating electricity on the nano scale with a nanogenerator, and there's probably more as well, but these are the that we've read about anyway, and the third is pyroelectric. Right, So you have to get a member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants who is on the nano scale and then

he just rides a bicycle really fast. That's that's pyro right. Okay, this is one of those moments where Lawrence looking at me and our listeners have pointed these out, like, okay, no, pyroelectric is obviously it deals with heat, and it deals with changing temperatures. Although the material itself does not have to have uh heat differentials across it, but it does have to have some changes in temperature from one to

another for this to work. Um. And it was a team of scientists who had developed a portable nanogener rader that's capable of partially charging a lithium ion battery using ambient energy as a power source. That ambient energy being temperature. He keep or we should say temperature, but because he's talking about the flow of temperature. But we apologized all about heat and temperature in a previous episode. Go and

listen to refrigerators. I believe in refrigerators. Yeah. And so the team of scientists included uh see Hong Wong, yeah, Yong Yan Chong and John ln Wong. Uh. And they called the device PEG pe n G. So if Chris were here, he would demand to say it's the device they called PEG as opposed to the device that goes ping um. And it stands for pe m G stands for pyro electric nanogenerator. So there's a there's an exciting fact.

But so what they're doing is they're they're harnessing this pyro electric effect, which, if you're being really lead general, it means it's small changes in temperature have an electrical potential, and the nanogenerator harvests the unused potential energy from its surroundings and then puts it to work just like the other two. You know, once you've harvested the electrons, then it follows the same pathway as piece of electric and the tribo electric. Right right, We we honestly understand uh,

comparatively less about this method. Yeah, it takes a little bit more technically complicated. This this one gets, this one gets so complex as to be very intimidating. But I can tell you there are two different pyroelectric effects. There's one that we call the primary effect and one we call the secondary effect. The primary effect is essentially that the change in temperature results in the electric dipole uh wobbling around, moving around at a greater oscillation magnitude around

equilibrium axis. And you know that sounds really confusing, but to go into too much detail would make it even more confusing because I can't it illustrated in any way in an audio podcast. But essentially it ends up creating a flow of electrons due to decreased induced charges and electrodes. Now, the secondary effect is way easier for me to understand

because it's really just going back to piezo electric. The secondary pyro electric effect is all about thermal deformation, which is the idea that materials expanding contract depending upon the presence or absence of h or the flow of heat. Right, So if I you know, it's just the same thing that you see on a hot summer day when the

power lines are sagging. You know, everything's expanding in the heat, and on a cold day those same power lines can be very taught U same sort of thing, Um, that deformation on the nanoscale is enough to change the nano wires so that you get that piece of electric effect. So it's still kind of piezo electric, but it's all based on a temperature changes, not the movement. So yeah, so again you're it's getting back to that mechanical stress.

But the mechanical stress is caused by temperature changes as opposed to pressure or whatever. So once I got to that point, like, I like the secondary effect pyroelectric effect way better because I can get it, I grasp it. Uh. And so now now let's talk about some of the applications for this stuff. So we're talking about these tiny, tiny, tiny electricity generators. What would that be good for We

kind of touched on a couple already. Yeah, we we already mentioned medical devices in uh in anything that you need to implant that needs to run on a battery, for example, uh, you know, a heart monitor or write, anything that would require maybe like an insulin. Yeah, so essentially what you're you know, anything that you could think of that would be an implant that would normally require

electricity from a battery. Just imagine that you have as part of the surgical process that implants this this uh, this device into you. You have this nano generator film that's also part of it, and that film is just all it's doing is taking energy that's being given off by your heartbeat and that and converting the into electricity

that powers the implant. Or it's the power of your breathing or the blood flowing through your veins, or the constriction of blood vessels, or any of the million tiny movements that your body is continually doing anyway. Yeah, and it's usually anything that's involuntary because you're gonna be doing that no matter why. Because we had to tap your finger against your thumb head a million times a day, that would get a little bit tiresome, Right, what are

you doing staying alive? Yeah, It's just like if you had to concentrate to make your heartbeat, or had to concentrate to breathe, that would not that would not that would that would defeat the purpose of the exercise. I'd be leading an even less productive life because I could be concentrated too much. But that's that's one potential use

of this. And again because of the zinc oxide, that's something that could actually happen as the material does not react to the body in a negative way unless you have, you know, some sort of allergy to the material itself, which is still possible. Um. Also, I mean we we could get little little films of this stuff and use it to, for example, help power our cell phones and other mobile devices. Yeah, just imagine this stuff incorporated in

your clothing. So let's say that, you know, because you know, I put a put a shirt on, and the shirt actually has within, you know, sewn into the fabric, one of these nanogenerators, and every time I'm moving around, I'm actually generating electricity, and maybe that's attached to a little battery pack, and then I can recharge my cell phone a little a little output plug in your hoodie that

just goes straight to your cell phone. And we could eventually have fully incorporated electronics that are getting powered this way, whether they are part of our clothing or something else

like I could. I could easily imagine that. I mean, if you've ever seen anything like fabric displays or where double computers, this is the kind of stuff that would allow us to power those devices without having to carry a big, old heavy battery, which is one of the There there are several barriers to the wearable computer model right now. That's a big one is that no one wants to have to carry it, you know, four pound battery because I mean, electronics are such that your laptop

can be extremely lightweight, but the battery is always the killer. Yeah, and it in your laptop requires quite a bit of power, whereas some of these other devices, uh, you know, everyone wants the super sleek, sexy phone, right. That means you have to have a very small battery in there. You have to make the device itself as efficient as possible, so that it's very very careful about consuming power. Because our battery technology has only extended so far, and and

we have not seen huge leaps in battery capacity. You know that it has improved over time, but not at the same rate as are improving in microprocessors for example, right right, And it's and it's wonderful that they're rechargeable,

that we have such terrific rechargeable batteries these days. However, if we could get something that is continually getting power from just moving around, yeah, and again, it could be again, it could be harnessing the power of your breathing if it's on your shirt, you know, so there you are breathing, and the nanogenerators are so small that those even if even if you think you're barely moving, it's enough to generate electricity. It's just pretty awesome. Yeah, yeah, you could.

I could also see these being used in uh, in other ways as well, Like can you imagine something that is kind of like nano sized wind turbines, not so much that they're actually turning, but you put them out in places connected to stuff where if it's a windy area, then every single time of breeze blows by your generating electricity. Right. If you could coat the side of a house and this stuff, then it could hypothetically power the house. Yeah,

or at least offset the needs that you have already. Right, Right, if you put this in a roadway or on a sidewalk and collected the motion of cars and steps going by, yep, yep, yeah, every time, every time anyone would walk on it, put

pressure on it, that would actually help generate electricity. These are ways where if we are able to to make it efficient enough and robust enough, because obviously, when you're talking about something like sidewalks or roads, it will have to withstand a lot of punishment and most most of these, most of these devices probably couldn't do that yet. They they're more like, oh, you can use it about a hundred thousand times and to be fine. Well, clearly, if it's on a road and that road gets a lot

of traffic, hundred thousand goes by pretty quickly, right yeah. Yeah. As of I mean, these these things are in testing. As of early two thousand eight, the East Japan Railway Company installed pies electric pads in piece Electric sorry and uh in one of the ticket gates and station in Tokyo and um uh, you know, trying to figure out ways to make trains more energy efficient and and had

reasonable success. This is really cool stuff because again, if it can offset our need for fossil fuels, then that is a big benefit environmentally speaking, assuming of course, that the production of the nanogenerators is an environmentally friendly production process, you know, which actually I have read zero research about. That is absolutely a thing to watch out for, especially since they're talking about it in the testing phase. They're not there's no production, so it's really hard to say.

But I mean, obviously if the production of the electricity would be very clean, but the production of the actual devices that generate the electricity could be very dangerous. We I honestly don't know one way or the other, but that's something you always have to take into consideration. That's why I'm always careful when I talk about clean energy. You have to look at the big, big, big picture. You can't just look at how the electricity was generated.

You have to go beyond that. For example, in photovoltaics, when some of the materials used to make those solar power cells are very toxic, or the involved very expensive, very earth minerals, things like that. Yeah, Yeah, it's one of those things that you have to take into consideration. You have to look at the big picture, because if you don't, then you're going to have other problems come

up down the line. So I always recommend everybody when you when you look into these things, do try and go beyond just the story and see what's what's just outside on the perimeter, because sometimes that will give you enough information to say, well, this is really cool technology, and I think we should pursue it because who knows

what we could learn. But ultimately I don't see it being practical because of x Y and z uh and x Y and z might just be because look at politics just in general, that is that is always an issue as well. I say this as I watch the United States totally cut the space program to shreds. But hey, you know, I'm not going to talk about that because it makes me cry. Anyway, that's probably a whole another episode of a whole another episode. We just did episodes

about space travel anyway. So and we've done some pretty awesome stuff, and I'm sure we will do awesome stuff again. It's just this will be a little lull, that's all, all right, eyes Well, anyway, enough of that commentary. Yeah, and that super positive note. Uh And like I said, you know that these are super cool discoveries that these

guys are making. And uh, and I'm really looking forward to learning more about it and seeing how it it plays out, especially when we start getting into even greater detail about how nanotechnology can change our lives. We've just scratched the surface. I have a feeling that twenty years from now, we'll all be laughing at how limited our scope was when we were thinking about nanotechnology, right right. Uh. Dr Long is talking about in the next five years

these being commercial products. That's phenomenal. I mean five years. That's no time at all, you know, it's it's definitely not the standard scientific response of twenty to thirty years, right, yeah, exactly. So guys, uh, this was a great topic. I really had a lot of fun with it. So if you have any episode ideas, you you know, think this would be a fantastic thing for them to talk about, let us know. Get in touch with us. We have an email address that you can write to. That email address

is tech stuff at Discovery dot com. Or get in touch with us through the miracle of social media. We're on Facebook, we're on Twitter. At both of those locations. You can find us with the handle tech stuff hs W and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com