ISSN 2229-5518
Nanotechnology- Impacting in Life science and Technology
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Dr.A Mohamed Sikkander
Department of Chemistry, Velammal Engineering College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India Email:ams240868@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
One of the most pressing issues facing nanoscientists and technologists today is that of communicating with the non-scientific community. As a result of decades of speculation, a number of myths have grown up around the field, making it difficult for the general public, or indeed the business and financial communities, to understand what is a fundamental shift in the way we look at our interactions with the natural world. This article attempts to address some of these misconceptions, and explain why scientists, businesses and governments are spending large amounts of time and money on nanoscale research and development.
Take a random selection of scientists, engineers, investors and the general public and ask them what nanotechnology is and you will receive a range of replies as broad as nanotechnology itself. For many scientists, it is nothing startlingly new; after all we have been working at the nanoscale for decades, through electron microscopy, scanning probe microscopies or simply growing and analysing thin films. For most other groups, however, nanotechnology means something far more ambitious, miniature submarines in the bloodstream, little cogs and gears made out of atoms, space elevators made of nanotubes, and the colonization of space. It is no wonder people often muddle up nanotechnology with science fiction.
Introduction
Nanoscale
Although a metre is defined by the International Standards Organization as `the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second' and a nanometre is by definition 10- 9 of a metre, this does not help scientists to communicate the nanoscale to