Nanotechnology
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50 free Nanotechnology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Nanotechnology is the craft of building with matter at the scale of atoms and molecules, where familiar materials start to behave in unfamiliar ways. Metals change color, weak substances turn strong, and surfaces clean themselves. It is a young field with a surprisingly long backstory, from ancient glassmakers who used it without knowing to physicists who learned to push single atoms around. This quiz covers what a first course would: how small the nanoscale really is, the units used to measure it, the talks, books and instruments that launched the field, and the wonder materials that came out of it. It also asks about nature's own nanostructures, uses in medicine, electronics and everyday products, safety worries, and the nanobots of films, novels and games. It is written for students revising for a nanotechnology quiz, teachers who want ready questions with answers, and anyone curious about the science of the very small. The opening questions can be reasoned out by most people; later ones reward real study. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01If a marble were scaled up to stand for one nanometer, a meter would be about as big as what?
The Earth
The Earth is to a marble roughly what a meter is to a nanometer, and even the smallest bacteria are about 200 nanometers long.
Q 02Which part of the human body grows at a rate of roughly one nanometer every second?
Fingernails
Fingernails grow about one nanometer per second, a length that just three gold atoms lined up would span.
Q 03Which lizard scales glass on toe hairs whose nanoscale tips cling by van der Waals forces?
Gecko
Gecko toes carry millions of hairs called setae, and each one branches into about 1,000 flat tips only around 200 nanometers wide.
Q 04Self-cleaning paints copy the water-shedding nanoscale texture on the leaves of which flower?
Lotus
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.
Q 05Zinc oxide nanoparticles let which everyday product rub in clear instead of leaving a white film?
Sunscreen
Sunscreen with nanoscale zinc oxide still soaks up the sun's burning rays but lets visible light pass, so the chalky look disappears.
Q 06In Avengers: Infinity War, which hero's Mark 50 suit forms from nanobots flowing over his body?
Iron Man
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.
Q 07A hollow cage molecule of 60 carbon atoms honors which architect of geodesic domes?
Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller died in 1983, shortly before chemists identified the molecule whose shape echoes his domes.
Q 08Which one-atom-thick form of carbon did Manchester physicists isolate in 2004 using sticky tape?
Graphene
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.
Q 09Shaping DNA strands into nanoscale smiley faces is a technique named after which Japanese art?
Origami
Origami lent its name to the method Paul Rothemund developed at Caltech, which made the cover of the journal Nature in March 2006.
Q 10Which physicist's 1959 talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom imagined moving single atoms?
Richard Feynman
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.
Q 11A nanometer, roughly half the width of a DNA double helix, is what fraction of a meter?
One billionth
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.
Q 12The prefix nano, as in nanotechnology and nanosecond, comes from a Greek word with what meaning?
Dwarf
Dwarf is the meaning of the Greek word nanos, which also passed into Latin as nanus before science borrowed it for the metric prefix.
Q 13Which of these is nanoscale, far too small to be seen with an ordinary light microscope?
A flu virus
A flu virus is only about 80 to 120 nanometers across, and its envelope bristles with roughly 500 spikes.
Q 21The buckyball's cage of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons matches the classic ball used in which sport?
Soccer
Soccer balls of the classic design share the molecule's truncated icosahedron shape, with a carbon atom sitting at each of its 60 corners.
Q 22At which Houston campus did Kroto, Curl and Smalley discover the buckyball in 1985?
Rice University
Rice University's team vaporized graphite with a laser, and the find earned Kroto, Curl and Smalley the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Q 23Which carbon nanostructures, among the strongest materials known, did Sumio Iijima report in 1991?
Nanotubes
Nanotubes are sheets of carbon atoms rolled into hollow cylinders, and Iijima's paper set off a flurry of research into uses for them.
Q 14Which unit of length, named after a Swedish physicist, equals one tenth of a nanometer?
Angstrom
Angstrom honors Anders Jonas Ångström, a founder of spectroscopy who paid special attention to the spectrum of sunlight.
Q 15Which Tokyo scientist coined the term nano-technology in 1974 for precise semiconductor processes?
Norio Taniguchi
Norio Taniguchi's term went largely unnoticed, and the word only caught on when an American engineer popularized it independently in the 1980s.
Q 16Which American engineer popularized nanotechnology with his 1986 book Engines of Creation?
Eric Drexler
Eric Drexler imagined universal assemblers, tiny machines able to build objects atom by atom, in a book with a foreword by Marvin Minsky.
Q 17Which nickname describes the doomsday scenario of self-copying nanobots devouring all living matter?
Gray goo
Gray goo filled the headlines after the future King Charles III asked the Royal Society to investigate the risks of nanotechnology.
Q 18Which 1981 invention by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer let scientists see individual atoms?
Scanning tunneling microscope
The scanning tunneling microscope feels a surface with a needle-sharp conducting tip, and it won its inventors the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Q 19In 1989 physicist Don Eigler spelled out his employer's logo using 35 atoms of which noble gas?
Xenon
Xenon atoms were nudged one by one across a chilled nickel crystal, the first time anyone had arranged individual atoms on a surface.
Q 20Which company made A Boy and His Atom, a 2013 stop-motion film animated by moving single molecules?
IBM
IBM researchers shifted carbon monoxide molecules to draw each of the 242 frames, earning a Guinness record for the smallest stop-motion film.
Q 24Which animal did future Nobel laureate Andre Geim levitate with magnets to win an Ig Nobel Prize?
A frog
A frog floated in midair on its own faint intrinsic magnetism, and Geim later became the first person to win both prizes.
Q 25Which nanocrystals, used in QLED television screens, earned the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?
Quantum dots
Quantum dots first reached living rooms in 2013, when Sony released the earliest flat-panel televisions to use them.
Q 26Which property of a semiconductor nanocrystal decides whether it glows blue, green or red?
Its size
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.
Q 27Which Victorian scientist made ruby-red colloidal gold at the Royal Institution in 1857?
Michael Faraday
Michael Faraday realized the color came from how tiny the gold particles were, and the samples he made are still optically active.
Q 28Which Roman goblet in the British Museum turns from green to red when lit from behind?
The Lycurgus Cup
The Lycurgus Cup owes its color change to metal nanoparticles only about 70 nanometers across, scattered through the fourth-century glass.
Q 29Nanoparticles of which metal are added to wound dressings and bandages because they kill bacteria?
Silver
Silver nitrate was an older treatment for skin ulcers, and nanoparticles of the metal can even boost antibiotics such as penicillin.
Q 30Self-cleaning windows are coated with a nanometers-thin film of which sunlight-activated compound?
Titanium dioxide
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.