nao technology
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Introduction
Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged.
If we rearrange the atoms in coal, we get diamonds.
If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a pinch of impurities) we get computer chips.
If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we get grass.
In special cases we can already arrange atoms and molecules exactly as we want.
Eventually, we should be able to arrange and rearrange atoms and molecules much as we might arrange LEGO blocks.
The idea behind nanotechnology is in reproducing what nature already does: produce things atom-by-atom, molecule-by-molecule.
History
To purists, nanotech means things with one dimension no bigger than 100 nanometers, or 100 billionths of a meter.
Buckyballs--those soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules discovered in 1985 by a team led by Rice University's Richard E...