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Nano..Nano..

The hit hot topic people talked about is now Nano technology--blue ray, nano battery, nano powder, ect.

The word 'nano' is actually used for the prefix of 10E-9 or 'n'.

Oh, so how big that's gonna be then!

um..m..

For 1 centimeter, it's about the length of a fly. 

In 1 millimeter long, we can compare 1 mm to fly's eyes, which are composed of a bunch of tiny honeycomb resembling facets. 

And 100 micrometers, we will see the each facet of fly's eyes is made of smaller eyes, which is lens that have light sensitive cells underneath. 

If we look closer into 10 micrometers, we will see the areas between those facets and those are have bristles giving sensory input from the surface of the fly's eyes. 

For 1 micron, the root of those bristles will be seen.  And in level of the 100 nanometers, we will see the texture of bristles surface. 

Closer and closer into 10 nanometers, we see the helix-coiled molecules of DNA and for 1 nanometer, we see the compositions of 4 nucleic acids in long chains of DNA. 

And for 1 Angstrom the clouds of 6 negatively charged electrons orbiting around the positive nucleus of carbon atoms are seen.  So that some people said that we already knew Nano for a long period of times and even studied it for a while but we didn't notice that we did so.

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What're the applications of Nano-technology?

Oh, the Pentium computer chips are the most outstanding for the applications of nanotechnology.  And also there are some attempts trying to using the nano-concepts to explain the existing biology, chemistry, physics, and more.  How can it work?

Lately, SONY will develop the newest DVD high capacity.  This technology uses the nano technology and the blue light to read the storage data. 

The recent DVD technology will be obsolete because it use the red light to read the storage data and its technology cannot serve the new high capacity DVD with blue light reading. 

So within few months we might have to throw away the DVD/CD combo and buy the new one for higher storage capacity. 

Actually the SONY already launched and sold this high capacity DVD (blue light) but the price's now still so high.  So people wait for a little while.  We will get cheaper, better, faster, high capacity storage DVD.

Spider Man

There are the attempts to make the glove for being spider-man, walking (by hand) on the ceiling.  The gloves are made of a bunch of polyimide pillars to help the adhesive force during walking by hands but the only one problem is how can human use only one hand to release his/her hand from the adhesion to move to the next step. 

The gloves work but the adhesion force is so high and human doesn't have much power to remove the hand from the ceiling and the walk to the next another step further. 

Or in the other words once we attach to the ceiling we'll  always be there if there is no one around to help us remove our hands from the ceiling and walk to the next step.  :-))  That's about the most beautiful parts.

inspired by www.nature.com/natuematerials