• Question: What is nanoscience

    Asked by 448nand34 to Micki, Aisling, Claire, Leona, Anil on 7 Nov 2015. This question was also asked by 793nand22, 458nand22, 628nand22, JohnK, 584nand36, Conor Milne.
    • Photo: Micki Mitchell

      Micki Mitchell answered on 7 Nov 2015:

      Nano means “dwarf” in Greek, so it’s the science of very small things. (no dwarves are harmed in the making of nanosciences ;))

    • Photo: Claire O'Connell

      Claire O'Connell answered on 8 Nov 2015:

      Nanoscience is looking at really really small things that are around 1 millionth of a millimeter in size.
      Because you can’t see something that small with your eye you might think there is nothing going on at that level but really there is so much!
      Nanoscience spans a lot of different fields of science and technology like making parts for your computer, testing athletes for drugs and even making clothes that don’t need to be ironed.

    • Photo: Aisling Kerr

      Aisling Kerr answered on 8 Nov 2015:

      Nanoscience deals with things on a very tiny scale – things are one billionth of a metre in size. This can be a very hard concept to grasp at first as it is difficult to imagine something that small, for example a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometres thick! So think about this: if you look at your fingernails, the amount your nail grows in one second is a nanometre! But why we care about nanoscience is very interesting as well. At this level, a materials properties can change dramatically compared to larger scales of it. So a big chunk of gold can have different properties to 1 nm of gold. We call this the quantum effects rule and it is why nanoscience is so fascinating to study!

    • Photo: Leona Mc Girr

      Leona Mc Girr answered on 9 Nov 2015:

      Nanoscience is the study of structures and materials on the scale of nanometers. “Nano” refers to the metric prefix 10-9. It means one billionth of something. So its the study of really really small things!

Comments