

Nanotechnology: Coming soon to a product you will use - cwan
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/08/17/nanotechnology_coming_soon_to_a_product_you_use/

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kragen
This is pure hype, abusing the term "nanotechnology" to mean something like
"any technology depending on nanometer-scale features". I recently made a list
of such technologies:

Obsidian knives (Aztec empire): sharpness comes from ≈3nm edge thickness.

Soap bubbles (Roman empire): low average density is due to surface film of
50–1000nm thickness, as evidenced by iridescence.

Iron (Iron Age): stable in air because it forms a magnetite film about 5nm
thick, or thicker if heated.

Jell-O (commercialized around WWII, but of course present in roasting pans for
many centuries): its consistency is a result of a liquid-filled foam with pore
sizes in the single-nanometer to hundreds-of-nanometer range.

Montmorillonite clay (discovered 1847): its effectiveness in expanding when it
absorbs water is a result of plate-size crystal particles that may be hundreds
of nanometers wide, but are only a nanometer or so thick. Currently used in my
cat litter box, as a reinforcer in many plastics, for sealing landfills
against leakage, and for splitting rocks, among other things.

Homogenized milk (1900): the milkfat doesn't separate because it's in
particles that are small enough for Brownian motion to keep them from floating
to the top, which means 200–2000 nanometers. Milk also naturally contains
casein micelles of 10–300nm in size, but that's not "technology".

Gold leaf (ancient Egypt?): 30–100 nm in thickness.

Pottery (prehistoric): made of clay, which is often defined as dirt with
particle size of under 2000 nm. (Some people use a stricter definition that
additionally requires certain minerals.) Larger particle sizes don't form
plastic colloids when mixed with water. As mentioned above under
"montmorillonite", some clays have much smaller particle sizes.

Asbestos crystals will fracture into fibers down to the nanometer range; this
is the problem with them.

(Talcum powder is much larger: 10 000 nm or so.)

(And of course there's all the stuff we make with X-ray lithography, and
there's data on hard disks, but they don't support my point that the kind of
"nanotechnology" being touted here is nothing fundamentally new.)

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biohacker42
What's coming soon is plain old surface chemistry.

Nanotech, as in Lego like assembly is sadly not coming to you soon.

