General facts about nanotechnology

Nanotechnology includes all processes that tend to manipulate with a matter on an atomic and molecular scale and involves developing materials or devices that possess at least one dimension within 1 to 100 nanometre in size.

Nanotechnology holds a great future promise as it can not only improve vast area of current applications but can also create brand new materials and devices.

Billions of dollars are poured into nanotechnology each year for different researches such as the delivery of drugs into the body, increasing the efficiency of different renewable energy technologies to reduce friction in automobile engines and machines, and improving methods of food packaging.

Nanotechnology as a science has throughout the years developed to several different scientific branches such as nanoelectronics, nanomechanics, nanophotonics and nanoionics.

At the end of 2010 there were more than 1300 manufacturer-identified nanotech products publicly available plenty of which are used for health and fitness. The scientists have estimated that the number of nanotech products could reach 3,500 different products by 2020.

Nanotechnology has stirred many lively debates because some people believe that new developments in nanotechnology could even result in untraceable weapons of mass destruction because nanomaterials have almost unlimited potential.

The environmental effect of nanotechnology is still unknown. Some fear that nanomaterials could cause big damage to our environment because several nanomaterials have showed big levels of toxicity.

Many scientists believe that nanotechnology needs to be very strictly regulated in order to minimize the possible negative impact on human health and environment.

Read more...

Synthetic brain with the help of nanotechnology

There are many ongoing researchers all over the world with the purpose of creating a synthetic (artificial) brain, and one of the most promising scientific researches comes from the University of Southern California where scientists managed to create a carbon nanotube synapse circuit whose behavior in tests was able to reproduce the function of a neuron, the building block of the brain that transmits information via synapses.

Carbon nanotubes, the extremely small molecular structures of carbon have so far showed big potential in several different scientific fields, and now the scientists have showed that they can be also used to create a synapse, which is an important step towards the creation of synthetic brain.

Of course we are talking here about the very early stage of development, and science will certainly need lot more researches before being able to successfully create synthetic brain simply because our brain has more than 100 billion neurons.

Professor Alice Parker said that "the actual development of a synthetic brain, even a functional brain area is decades away, and she believes that the first hurdle that science needs to overcome is to create solution for reproducing the brain plasticity in the circuits.

The scientific challenge in creating the synthetic brain almost looks impossible from the current point of view because the human brain continually produces new neurons, makes new connections and adapts throughout life. In other words, complexity at its very best.

Nanotechnology might be an answer to this complexity but such major discovery is at least couple of decades away. The creation of synthetic brain could have an extremely large span of usefulness from healing the traumatic brain injuries to developing intelligent cars that would maximally protect drivers.

Read more...