—by Marilyn Davis, ed.

Scientists creating new materials with newsworthy properties hope to get big results by focusing small. The buzzword these days—nanotechnology—concerns materials designed and constructed at an almost unimaginably small scale.

"Nanos means 'dwarf' in Greek," explains Punit Kohli, an assistant professor of chemistry. "A nanomaterial has at least one dimension that measures between 1 and 100 nanometers."

How small is that? Ten atoms lined up side by side measure about 1 nanometer. A red blood cell, which can be seen only under a microscope, is thousands of nanometers in diameter.

A grain of pollen invisible to the naked eye is thousands of times bigger than the typical nanoparticle. And a veritable metropolis of nanoparticles could dance on the head of a pin, which is about 1 million nanometers in diameter.

Materials at the nano scale are hot right now—and promise to be for the long term—because their properties are so cool. A nanomaterial can behave very differently—electrically, magnetically, chemically, optically—from the same material in bulk, at the everyday sizes engineers are used to working with. And those properties can be "tuned" by making minute variations in the size of the nanomaterial. For example, a particle 2 nanometers in size might behave differently from a particle of the same substance that's 20 nanometers in size.

This variability gives engineers tremendous opportunities to tailor and miniaturize materials and to create new types of materials and devices. It also gives them tremendous challenges in making nanomaterials uniform, reliable, and appropriate for a particular application.

Industry has already started to employ nanomaterials in products, and their possible uses include computing, electronics, medicine, and fuel storage, to name just a few. It should be noted that in many cases the issue of safety needs to be explored and resolved, and the federal government is funding work in this area.

Meanwhile, basic research in nanomaterials has seen explosive growth over the past few years. Ideas are sprouting like mushrooms after a rain. Although not all of these ideas will pan out in the end, every attempt tells scientists something more about working on the nanoscale.