50 Fun Facts About Nanotechnology

If a marble were scaled up to stand for one nanometer, a meter would be about as big as what?

The Earth is to a marble roughly what a meter is to a nanometer, and even the smallest bacteria are about 200 nanometers long.

Which part of the human body grows at a rate of roughly one nanometer every second?

Fingernails grow about one nanometer per second, a length that just three gold atoms lined up would span.

Which lizard scales glass on toe hairs whose nanoscale tips cling by van der Waals forces?

Gecko toes carry millions of hairs called setae, and each one branches into about 1,000 flat tips only around 200 nanometers wide.

Self-cleaning paints copy the water-shedding nanoscale texture on the leaves of which flower?

Lotus leaves make water bead up and roll away with the dirt, a self-cleaning trick botanist Wilhelm Barthlott worked out with an electron microscope in the 1970s.

Zinc oxide nanoparticles let which everyday product rub in clear instead of leaving a white film?

Sunscreen with nanoscale zinc oxide still soaks up the sun's burning rays but lets visible light pass, so the chalky look disappears.

In Avengers: Infinity War, which hero's Mark 50 suit forms from nanobots flowing over his body?

Iron Man's nanobot suit was based on the Bleeding Edge armor from the comics, and effects studio Framestore spent about two years developing it.

A hollow cage molecule of 60 carbon atoms honors which architect of geodesic domes?

Buckminster Fuller died in 1983, shortly before chemists identified the molecule whose shape echoes his domes.

Which one-atom-thick form of carbon did Manchester physicists isolate in 2004 using sticky tape?

Graphene was peeled from a lump of graphite by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, who shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for the work.

Shaping DNA strands into nanoscale smiley faces is a technique named after which Japanese art?

Origami lent its name to the method Paul Rothemund developed at Caltech, which made the cover of the journal Nature in March 2006.

Which physicist's 1959 talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom imagined moving single atoms?

Richard Feynman gave the talk at Caltech and set two challenges, one of them a working motor that fit inside a cube 1/64 of an inch across.

A nanometer, roughly half the width of a DNA double helix, is what fraction of a meter?

One billionth of a meter is the nanometer, yet the bonds between carbon atoms are shorter still, at roughly 0.12 to 0.15 nanometers.

The prefix nano, as in nanotechnology and nanosecond, comes from a Greek word with what meaning?

Dwarf is the meaning of the Greek word nanos, which also passed into Latin as nanus before science borrowed it for the metric prefix.

Which of these is nanoscale, far too small to be seen with an ordinary light microscope?

A flu virus is only about 80 to 120 nanometers across, and its envelope bristles with roughly 500 spikes.

Which unit of length, named after a Swedish physicist, equals one tenth of a nanometer?

Angstrom honors Anders Jonas Ångström, a founder of spectroscopy who paid special attention to the spectrum of sunlight.

Which Tokyo scientist coined the term nano-technology in 1974 for precise semiconductor processes?

Norio Taniguchi's term went largely unnoticed, and the word only caught on when an American engineer popularized it independently in the 1980s.

Which American engineer popularized nanotechnology with his 1986 book Engines of Creation?

Eric Drexler imagined universal assemblers, tiny machines able to build objects atom by atom, in a book with a foreword by Marvin Minsky.

Which nickname describes the doomsday scenario of self-copying nanobots devouring all living matter?

Gray goo filled the headlines after the future King Charles III asked the Royal Society to investigate the risks of nanotechnology.

Which 1981 invention by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer let scientists see individual atoms?

The scanning tunneling microscope feels a surface with a needle-sharp conducting tip, and it won its inventors the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1989 physicist Don Eigler spelled out his employer's logo using 35 atoms of which noble gas?

Xenon atoms were nudged one by one across a chilled nickel crystal, the first time anyone had arranged individual atoms on a surface.

Which company made A Boy and His Atom, a 2013 stop-motion film animated by moving single molecules?

IBM researchers shifted carbon monoxide molecules to draw each of the 242 frames, earning a Guinness record for the smallest stop-motion film.

The buckyball's cage of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons matches the classic ball used in which sport?

Soccer balls of the classic design share the molecule's truncated icosahedron shape, with a carbon atom sitting at each of its 60 corners.

At which Houston campus did Kroto, Curl and Smalley discover the buckyball in 1985?

Rice University's team vaporized graphite with a laser, and the find earned Kroto, Curl and Smalley the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Which carbon nanostructures, among the strongest materials known, did Sumio Iijima report in 1991?

Nanotubes are sheets of carbon atoms rolled into hollow cylinders, and Iijima's paper set off a flurry of research into uses for them.

Which animal did future Nobel laureate Andre Geim levitate with magnets to win an Ig Nobel Prize?

A frog floated in midair on its own faint intrinsic magnetism, and Geim later became the first person to win both prizes.

Which nanocrystals, used in QLED television screens, earned the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?

Quantum dots first reached living rooms in 2013, when Sony released the earliest flat-panel televisions to use them.

Which property of a semiconductor nanocrystal decides whether it glows blue, green or red?

Its size sets the color, since crystals about 2 to 3 nanometers wide glow blue or green while those of 5 to 6 nanometers glow orange or red.

Which Victorian scientist made ruby-red colloidal gold at the Royal Institution in 1857?

Michael Faraday realized the color came from how tiny the gold particles were, and the samples he made are still optically active.

Which Roman goblet in the British Museum turns from green to red when lit from behind?

The Lycurgus Cup owes its color change to metal nanoparticles only about 70 nanometers across, scattered through the fourth-century glass.

Nanoparticles of which metal are added to wound dressings and bandages because they kill bacteria?

Silver nitrate was an older treatment for skin ulcers, and nanoparticles of the metal can even boost antibiotics such as penicillin.

Self-cleaning windows are coated with a nanometers-thin film of which sunlight-activated compound?

Titanium dioxide breaks down dirt in sunlight and makes rain spread into a sheet that rinses it away, and Pilkington announced the first such windows in 2001.

Which tropical butterfly's blue wings get their color from nanoscale structures instead of pigment?

Morpho wing scales reflect light at successive layers so the waves interfere, and some species are reportedly visible from a kilometer away.

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Sauvage, Stoddart and Feringa for designing what?

Molecular machines also exist in nature, where biological versions handle vital jobs in living cells such as copying DNA.

Which famous observation says the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years?

Moore's law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who first forecast a doubling every year in 1965 and slowed it to every two years in 1975.

Giant magnetoresistance, a nanoscale effect behind a 2007 Nobel Prize, reads data in which device?

Hard disk drive read heads rely on the effect, which Albert Fert in France and Peter Grünberg in Germany discovered independently in 1988.

COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna wrap which fragile molecule in fatty nanoparticles?

Messenger RNA is easily degraded in the body, so a lipid shell protects the strands and helps cells absorb them.

Which thriller novelist wrote Prey, a 2002 story of nanobot swarms loose in the Nevada desert?

Michael Crichton's swarms are clouds of solar-powered nanobots that reproduce and evolve at speed, and the company that made them turns out to have released them on purpose.

Which Star Trek villains assimilate other species by injecting them with nanoprobes?

The Borg first met the Enterprise crew in the Next Generation episode Q Who, arriving in a vast cube-shaped ship.

Which 2007 first-person shooter from Crytek gives the player a Nanosuit with switchable power modes?

Crysis based its Nanosuit on Future Force Warrior, a real-life military concept, and casts the player as a Delta Force soldier called Nomad.

Which US president announced the National Nanotechnology Initiative in a speech at Caltech?

Bill Clinton told the audience that some research goals might take twenty years or more, which he said was exactly why federal backing mattered.

Which Dickens novel's opening did a Stanford student shrink 25,000-fold to win a 1985 prize?

A Tale of Two Cities was shrunk by Tom Newman to a scale that would fit a whole encyclopedia on the head of a pin, meeting a challenge set back in 1959.

A 2008 mouse study warned that needle-like carbon nanomaterials may harm tissue like which mineral?

Asbestos-like effects were suggested by the study, but because the fibers were injected rather than inhaled, researchers called the comparison premature.

Which nanoparticle-filled liquid did NASA invent in 1963 so magnets could pull rocket fuel in space?

Ferrofluid particles are each coated to stop them clumping, and a strong magnet makes the dark liquid rise into a regular pattern of spikes.

A 2006 study reported nanowires in a blade of the legendary sword steel that shares its name with which city?

Damascus steel blades were forged from wootz ingots imported from southern India, and one metallurgist argues the supposed nanostructures were simply rods of cementite.

Which ultra-dark coating from Surrey NanoSystems absorbs up to 99.965% of visible light?

Vantablack caused an art-world row when its makers gave sculptor Anish Kapoor exclusive rights to use it in art.

Which structure in Clarke's novel The Fountains of Paradise might need a carbon nanomaterial cable?

Space elevator engineer Bradley Edwards proposed a paper-thin ribbon, a design that depends on pairing high tensile strength with low weight.

Grinding a material into nanoparticles boosts which ratio, making the particles far more reactive?

Surface to volume ratio soars as particles shrink, leaving far more of their atoms on the outside where they can act as catalysts.

Which instrument did Cornell researchers carve from silicon in 1997, as small as a red blood cell?

A guitar ten micrometers long was the result, and each of its six strings is only 50 nanometers wide.

Chip-printing machines made by ASML use 13.5-nanometer light from which part of the spectrum?

Extreme ultraviolet light of that wavelength was chosen to match the peak reflectivity of the machines' molybdenum-and-silicon mirrors.

Which nanotechnology approach shapes tiny structures out of larger pieces, as microchip makers do?

Top-down methods contrast with the rival approach, in which molecular components assemble themselves chemically into materials and devices.

Which ultralight solid, nicknamed frozen smoke, did NASA use to trap dust aboard the Stardust probe?

Aerogel gets its smoky blue tint from light scattering off its nano-sized internal structure, and it can catch speeding dust that would vaporize against a solid.