Green Nanotechnology

One of the frontier areas of contemporary technology is the emerging ability to manage and control matter at a molecular level, popularly known as nanotechnology. Widely seen as one of the most exciting technologies of the 21st century, nanotechnology has been hailed as the next industrial revolution and the basis of an industry worth billions of dollars by the year 2020. Nanotechnology refers to the use of materials at an atomic or molecular level—nano literally means “extremely small” in Greek. Nanotechnology is the ability to measure, see, manipulate, and manufacture things, usually between 1 and 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter; a human hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers wide. At the nano level, material takes on very different properties. Thus, for ...