NANOTECHNOLOGY

Nanotechnology is molecular manufacturing or, more simply building things one atom or molecule at a time with programmed nanoscopic robot arms. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter (3 to 4 atoms wide). Utilizing the well-understood chemical properties of atoms and molecules (how they stick together) a nanotechnology proposes the construction of novel molecular devices possessing extraordinary properties. The trick is to manipulate atoms individually and place them exactly where needed to produce the desired structure.

Nanotechnology broadly refers to the manipulation of matter on the atomic and molecular scales i.e. where the objects of interest are 0.1-100 nanometer n size. Atomic diameters represent the lower end of this range at tenths of nanometers. Transistors used in the present generation of microprocessors, with dimensions of the order of 100 nanometers are at the upper end of the nanotechnology range. As atoms come together to form molecules and molecules come together to form clusters or crystals, the inherent macro-scale properties are determined. By controlling molecular structure in material synthesis, mankind has gained unprecedented control over the basic material properties such as conductivity, strength, capacity, ductility and reactivity, yielding innovative applications ranging from batteries to automotive materials. This is a passive nano technique that primarily focuses on tuning the properties of resulting bulk materials. The active nano technique facilitates creation of functional electronic and ultimately mechanical devices at the nano scale.

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NANOTECHNOLOGY, A BREAK THROUGH IN ALL FIELDS

Nanotechnology has been successful in almost all the fields irrespective of its kind and with the help of this technology it is possible to perform any type of operations starting from manipulating the molecules for separating impurities to the stage where it is the easy method for the production of power.In molecular manufacturing systems, using nanotechnology it is possible transform raw materials, in molecular form, into finished products. Impurities could be separated from feedstock molecules using a sorting rotor .
The purified molecules can be transported away from the sorter system using the molecular equivalent of a conveyor belt. Once a conveyor belt, the molecules can be transported to other belts, changing speed or frequency if necessary. The estimated belt speed is 0.5cm/s and the transition time form belt to belt is less than 0.2µs. a system for transforming a stream of small feedstock molecules into a stream of reagent moieties would be between one million and three million atoms in size. It could deliver the equivalent of its own mass is about 3 sec. The error is rated to be less than 1in 1015 operations at 106 operations per second. This gives a mean time to failure of about 3000 years. Other possible scheme has reagent moieties transported up through the centre of a hollow manipulator arm to a working tip for positional synthesis.

Nano technology is also playing an important role for electronic displays so as replace existing CRO and CRT’s and it is even competing with LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) which is the advanced trend in electronic displays.
The process involved for electronic display using nanotubes is as follows:
• Firstly, Mixture of C60 and nickel is ‘steered’ to specific surface sites by evaporating through a mask. The mask has an array of holes of 300 nm and can be moved with a precision of 1 nm.
• The C60/nickel mixture is evaporated sequentially in ultra high vacuum so as to form alternating layers of C60 and nickel with no impurities
• Then heat it up in the presence of a magnetic field. In this step, the C60 molecules are transformed into bundles of perfectly aligned nanotubes.

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Micro Electro Mechanical Systems

Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) is the integration of mechanical elements, sensors, actuators, and electronics on a common silicon substrate through micro fabrication technology. While the electronics are fabricated using integrated circuit (IC) process sequences (e.g., CMOS, Bipolar, or BICMOS processes), the micro mechanical components are fabricated using compatible “micro machining” processes that selectively etch away parts of the silicon wafer or add new structural layers to form the mechanical and electromechanical devices.
MEMS promises to revolutionize nearly every product category by bringing together silicon-based microelectronics with micro machining technology, making possible the realization of complete systems-on-a-chip. MEMS is an enabling technology allowing the development of smart products, augmenting the computational ability of microelectronics with the perception and control capabilities of micro sensors and micro actuators and expanding the space of possible designs and applications.

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Advantages of Nanotechnology

• This is having major advantage of to making the things very smaller. Nanotechnology is making small size of memory product with high storage capacity.
• Chip is having high-speed access of stored data.
• It is mainly used for making large data base storage devices like terabytes storage devices.

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Disadvantages of Nanotechnology

• The manufacturing cost is very high because the product is fully made of molecules.
• The initial investment is very high. If a failure of product means there is lot of loss. So it takes full of risk.
• The damage of the Nanotechnology product may cause not recover the original product. There is a maintenance cost is high.

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Nanotechnology Medicine ( Nanomedicine)

Nanotechnology will make us healthy and wealthy though not necessarily wise. In a few decades, this emerging manufacturing technology will let us inexpensively arrange atoms and molecules in most of the ways permitted by physical law. It will let us make supercomputers that fit on the head of a pin and fleets of medical nano robots smaller than a human cell able to eliminate cancer, infections, clogged arteries, and even old age. People will look back on this era with the same feelings we have toward medieval times--when technology was primitive and almost everyone lived in poverty and died young. Besides computers billions of times more powerful than today's, and new medical capabilities that will heal and cure in cases that are now viewed as utterly hopeless, this new and very precise way of fabricating products will also eliminate the pollution from current manufacturing methods. Molecular manufacturing will make exactly what it is supposed to make, no more and no less, and therefore won't make pollutants.

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Advances in medical nanotechnology

Advances in medical nanotechnology depend on our understanding of living systems. With nano-devices, we would be able to explore and analyze living systems in greater detail than ever before. Autonomous molecular machines, operating in the human body, could monitor levels of different compounds and store that information in internal memory. They could determine both their time and location. Thus, information could be gathered about changing conditions inside the body, and that information could be tied to both the location and the time of collection.
These molecular machines could then be filtered out of the blood supply and the stored information could be analyzed. This would provide a picture of activities within healthy or injured tissue. This new information would, in turn, provide us with deeper insights and new approaches to curing the sick and healing the injured. Nano-robots could help us to change our physical appearance. They could be programmed to perform cosmetic surgery, rearranging our atoms to change our ear/nose shape, eye colors or any other physical feature we wish. These are all the possibilities with nanotechnology.
Super medicine:-
If we combine microscopic motors, gears, levers, bearing, plates, sensors, power and communication cables, etc with powerful microscopic computers, we will have a new class of materials. Programmable and microscopic, these smart materials could be used in medicine.
For example, medical nanite could patrol the body, armed with the complete knowledge of a person’s DNA, and dispatch any foreign invader; such cell sentinels would form immunity to not only the common cold but also AIDS and any future viral or bacterial mutation. These nanites would do what the plastic surgeon does, but in a better way. No pain, no bruising and results over night. People would be able to sculpt their own bodies. These who feel they were born the wrong sex could take on the full reproductive attributes of an opposite sex. So men could bear children.
How about painless childbirth? With mature nanotechnology capable of cellular manipulation, there is no reason a women should experience torturous hours of labour for that miraculous moment of birth. Trauma is not a great way for the newborn to enter the world either. Birth will not be traumatic with nanotechnology. Dilation can be controlled by the mother without pain.
Life extension:-
A finch lives two years, a parrot ninety, a gecko one year and a Galapagos Island turtle two hundred. The difference is the genetic programming. The geneticists are quickly unraveling human genetic code. Life is molecular machinery, with atoms arranged in dynamic complex relationships, controlled by DNA. If we have tools small enough to work on a machine and understand its controlling software, machines and their behavior can be modified. Even without nanotechnology, genetic therapies for stopping aging and even reversal will be developed soon.
Cryonics-raising the dead:-
When a patient’s heart stops beating, but before the structure of his brain starts to degenerate, the patient is attached to heart-lung machine and progressively infused with ‘anti-freeze’ and other cellular stabilizers and then his body temperature is lowered until the patient is at liquid nitrogen temperatures. At this point, all molecular stops indefinitely and the patient is put in storage. Later, when nanotechnology cell repair devices become available, the fatal disease that caused ‘death’ is reversed, the anti-freeze toxicity is removed; the patient is warmed back up alive and well.

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IMPACT OF NANOTECHNOLOGY ON MEDICINE

Nanotechnology may have its biggest impact on the medical industry. For instance, consider patients drinking medical fluids containing nano-robots programming to attack and reconstruct the molecular structure of cancer cells and viruses to make them harmless.
Diseases are caused largely by damage at the molecular and cellular level. Today’s surgical tools are, at this scale, large and crude. Modern surgery works only because cells have a remarkable ability to regroup, bury their dead and heal over the injury. Nano-robots could also be programmed to perform delicate surgeries. Nano-surgeons could work at a level a thousand times more precise than the sharpest scalpel available today. By working on such a small scale, a nano-robot could operate seamlessly without leaving the scars that conventional surgery does.


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