The nanometer is a unit of measure - just like inches, feet, and miles. A nanometer is a one-billionth of a meter, and used to measure things that are very, very small. Shaquille O’Neal, a very tall basketball player, is 2,160,000,000 nanometers tall! A nanometer is ... Read More...
So your nose is a super sniffing machine able to tell the different between 4000 to 10,000 different odors. Your nose has about one-hundred million tiny special things called receptors that can bind a particular odor molecule and when it does bind, it sends a ... Read More...
Can nanotechnology be used to help combat cancer? Sure, in a lot of different ways. Cancer is a very complicated disease. It is not one thing and therefore it is hard to figure out and then to treat. Cancer is a disease where your own ... Read More...
It is too small to see but not too small to smell. Sometimes we can’t eve see where the smell is coming from. An average person can smell maybe around 10,000 different odors. How do we do it? There are tiny sensors called “receptors” found ... Read More...
You don’t feel well and so you go to the doctor. To diagnose what is wrong with you, a doctor can do tests from the outside by looking in your ears and down your throat. But sometimes that’s not enough because there’s a limit to ... Read More...
Your body is a complex thing made up of about 50 trillion cells. Fifty trillion is a huge number -- about 10,000 times the number of people on the planet! Most cells in your body are about 5,000 nanometers across or less, which is about ... Read More...
You move the mouse on your computer, click on a link and here is something to read about muscles. But how did your finger move the mouse in the first place. Well that is easy, you have muscles that are wired into your brain and ... Read More...
You’ve probably heard of nanobots, but did you know that nature has some nanobots of its own? Ever wonder how tiny organisms like bacteria move around? It’s hard to move at the nanoscale but bacteria like E. coli can do it by using a tail-like ... Read More...
Chemists swear by it, but for the rest of us the periodic table is like a bunch of stuff organized more like your closet at home, with things stuffed into places just because they fit. In fact, there is a method: the rows (across) are called ... Read More...
My feet don’t but I bet yours do. Stink. After a day outside, hot sweaty and wearing those sneakers. Take a whiff. Stink! First what makes your feet stink? Microbes? Yes, microbes, bugs, bacteria, fungi. All of these creatures growing happily on your feet especially ... Read More...
The periodic table is a list of all of the atoms that we know of. But are those all the atoms on Earth or in the universe? Back in 1982, meitnerium was not on the periodic table. So who discovered it and how? New elements are ... Read More...
The four important things to know about nanotechnology So nanotechnology is new and cool and there are zillions of things to read about it. But what is really important to know before trying to figure out what all this nanotechnology stuff is about? Well first... Nanotechnology is ... Read More...
Do molecules have a real shape or are they just some kind of random blob like a piece of jello? Well, molecules do have shape (even the molecules that make up jello have shape) and their shape is important. Some molecules, like enzymes (which are ... Read More...
The light from the thing that we want to see is magnified with lenses in a microscope and we see a virtual image of that tiny thing. The smallest thing that we can see with a ‘light’ microscope is about 500 nanometers. A nanometer is ... Read More...
How can we see a world that is too small to see? With our eyes, we can see the world around us because of the light that reflects off the object we are viewing. If we turn off the lights, everything becomes harder to see. ... Read More...
Do you smell something? Odor molecules are really small, at most a few nanometers in size. They have to be small to be smelled. Something has an odor because some of the molecules (remember that all things are made of atoms) found in something ... Read More...
Another reader wanted to know about how nanotechnology would impact cancer. What is important about treating cancer? Finding where the cancer is in the body and then sending powerful medicines only to where the cancer is located. The first challenge is finding the cancer. You want ... Read More...
So just how big is a molecule? Molecules are made up of atoms and all things are made of atoms. Not quite everything; light isn’t, and sound isn’t either. But the things that we see when light hits them are made of atoms, and we hear ... Read More...
It is stronger than steel and taller than the Empire State Building (well relatively speaking). It was discovered in a pile of black crud, not exactly by accident but pretty close. What are these things? Carbon nanotubes and they were discovered in 1991 by scientists ... Read More...
Ever wonder how a computer works? If you were to take apart your computer and look inside there would be a lot of electronic parts including something called a microprocessor or as it’s commonly called, a chip. Inside of that chip are lots and lots of ... Read More...
