Nanotechnology: Shaping The World Atom By Atom

f you were to deconstruct a human body into its most basic ingredients,you’d get a little tank each of oxygen,
hydrogen, and nitrogen. There would be piddling piles of carbon, calcium, and salt.You’d squint at pinches of sulfur, phosphorus, iron, and magnesium, and tiny dots of 20 or so other chemical elements. Total street value: not much. With its own version of what scientists call nanoengineering, nature transforms these inexpensive, bundant, and inanimate ingredients into self-generating, self-perpetuating, self-repairing, self-aware creatures
that walk, wiggle, swim, sniff, see, think, and even dream. Total value: immeasurable. Now, a human brand of nanoengineer

The field’s driving question is this: What could we humans do if we could assemble the basic ingredients of the
material world with even a glint of nature’s virtuosity? What if we could build things the way nature does—atom by atom and molecule  by molecule? Scientists already are finding answers to these questions. The more they learn, the more they suspect nanoscience and nanoengineering will become as socially transforming as the development of running water, electricity, antibiotics, and microelectronics. The field is roughly where the basic science and technology behind transistors was in the late 1940s and 1950s. In April 1998, Neal Lane, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and former Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), stated at a Congressional hearing, “If I were asked for an area of science and engineering that will most likely produce the breakthroughs of tomorrow, I would point to nanoscale science and engineering.” Lane is not alone in this view. Many scientists, including physicist and Nobel laureate Horst  tormer of Lucent Technologies and Columbia University, are themselves amazed that the emerging  notechnology may provide humanity with unprecedented control over the material world. Says Stormer: “Nanotechnology has given us the tools...to play with the ultimate toy box of nature—atoms and molecules. Everything is made from it...The possibilities to create new things appear limitless.” So what do scientists like Lane and Stormer mean by nanotechnology? In the language of science, the prefix nano means one-billionth of something like a second or a meter (see sidebar, p. 3). Nanoscience and nanotechnology generally
refer to the world as it works on the nanometer scale, say, from one nanometer to several hundred anometers. That’s the natural spatial context for molecules and their interactions, just as a 100 yard gridiron is the relevant
spatial context for football games. Naturally- occurring molecular players on the nanoscale field range from tiny three-atom water molecules to much larger protein molecules like oxygen- carrying hemoglobin with  housands of atoms to gigantic DNA molecules with millions of atoms. Whenever scientists and engineers push
their understanding and control over matter to finer scales, as they now are doing on the nanoscale, they invariably discover qualitatively new phenomena and invent qualitatively new technologies. “Nanotechnology is the builder's final frontier,” remarks Nobel laureate Richard Smalley, Rice University. For years now,  cientists have been developing synthetic nanostructures that .

Quantum Corral. Using a tool known as a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the wave nature of electrons becomes visible to the naked eye.

Here, the electrons are confined by a ring of 48 iron atoms individually positioned with the same STM used to image them.