Question: What sort of applications does nanotechnology actually have in everyday life? It seems as though the applications would be great for things like medicine and even computer networks and machine maintainence (obviously as the science progresses), but would people really be comfortable with the thought of these tiny robots being everywhere? Well, maybe I just watch too much sci-fi...

Andrew Maynard answered on 15 Jun 2010:

Hi blubber,

sadly, nanotechnology is a little more boring than tiny robots running round doing stuff.

Nanotech is really simply just engineering stuff at a really small scale, so that we can do interesting stuff with it. And it’s already everywhere – I bet the computer you are using to read this has got processor chips in it that use nanometer-scale circuits and components – that’s nanotechnology. And my guess is that the hard disk drive in the computer also uses nanotechnology – the heads in hard disk drives these days are all made up from extremely thin layers of materials so that they can read and write an incredible amount of data from and to the disks.

But you just wait – over the next ten years you will probably see many other uses for engineering at the nanoscale – including smart drugs that can seek out and destroy cancer cells, and cheap solar cells that will help turn sunlight into energy.

In the meantime, here’s a great movie about nanobots (the bottom one) – none of it’s true, but it made me laugh!

http://2020science.org/2009/04/25/nanotechnology-in-motion-the-good-the-bad-and-the-weird/