Nanotechnology; Tiny Science
Nanotechnology is measured in nanometers. The diameter of one strand of your hair is approximately 80,000 nanometers! You can’t even see it through a regular high school microscope, the only possible way to see a nanometer is through a special microscope; the electron microscope.
So what is Nanotechnology?
Nanotechnology is the manipulation of atoms on a nano scale. As described above, the nano scale is pretty small and can range between 1 and 100 nanometers. Scientists that work with Nanotechnology work to manipulate and interact with atoms for health benifits such as medicine. For example, nanotechnology has been used to help treat cancer, aiming to kill cancer cells, but not proven to work 100% of the time.
Lets get to the specifics; Nanosensors
When we think of nano sensors, we can think about other types of sensors that we use in everyday life such as the sensors that the doors of a grocery store use to detect that you’re planning to walk through the doors. These sensors detect movement and send signals to the mechanisms to open the doors for you.
In this case, nanosensors would detect chemical or mechanical properties within nanoparticles. Due to their small size, nanosensors have a greater surface area, allowing nanosensors to quickly and easily pick up new information and adapt. Going back to the cancer example, researchers have used nanotechnology and nanosensors to deliver medicine throughout the body to elliminate cancer cells. With their small size and greater surface area, nano sensors can pick up and detect cells all around them rather than having doctors inject random drugs into a person’s arm, hoping that it would reach and destroy vital, cancerous cells, instead of normal cells.
So, how are Nanosensors built exactly?
Just like every other technology that you use such as your laptop and your phone, there is a process for creating technology, all by scratch. For nanosensors, the process of creating them is called nanofabrication. This process can be done in two ways, top-down or bottom-up.
The first way of building nanotechnology is top-down nanofabrication. Through this process, as described in the image above, we would start with the large material over a substrate and cover parts of the material with protective film so that we could break the material down to a desired nano size to use for nanotechnology.
Bottom-up nanofabrication is the second way of building nanotechnology from scratch. Instead of using large materials as a building block to begin with, we would start but building up nanostructures using atoms. Using atoms, we can create clusters but we would also have to be very careful that these clusters won’t become larger than what is desired as a nano size. We can do this by protecting the clusters with a protective layer to prevent it from connecting more, similarly to phospholipid bilayer in that the hydrophobic tails won’t ever touch one another.
Are there any issues with nanofabrication?
Nanofabrication is very time consuming, expensive, and ineffective. In order to create nanosensors, scientists must purchase large machines, which is very expensive. As well as this, these machines are time consuming and inefficient.
