When nanotechnology was first described, it was considered to be an over-hyped term straight out of a science fiction novel. But over the years, as technology advanced, microscopic machines and even factories became a reality and soon nanotechnology investing was the in thing for corporate ventures.

However, in the last few years, individual investors have realized that there is very little money to be made in nanotechnology investing. Even the existing firms have not performed according to expectations and newer IPO’s haven’t really flooded the market either.

The advances made by nanotechnology has been limited to improving the quality and lifetime of existing materials like batteries, cells etc. There have been very few breakthrough products in nanotechnology.

Whether to invest or not

Here is the big question. Do you invest in nanotechnology or not?

There are many start up ventures out there that seem to be promising enough but most of these will take years to get established.

Hence from an investor’s point of view, it is extremely important that you gauge the landscape.

You need to be well aware of the time frame and the constraints in the filed.

If you are expecting to invest in some of the nanotechnology products that seem sci fi, then keep in mind that most of these products are almost 100 years away.

Unless you have an extremely broad time frame for investing, there are better options at hand

For the corporate investor

On the other hand, nanotechnology investing might just prove to be the right thing for corporate investors.

However, keep yourself updated about the recent advances made in the filed like the classification of nanotechnology into active, passive and hybrid groups. This will help investors get a better grip on the time frame required for commercialization of the technology.
For more info visit : Nanotechnology Investing

Nanotechnology is a simple short term solution for implementing alternative, renewable energy systems. It is a cost effective way to implement solar and wind power systems, which generally depend on the weather for energy output. By using chemical techniques inexpensive solutions of nanoparticles can be prepared and applied to materials for use in ultra capacitors. These units will be cost effective and will conduct electricity at a higher rate than is currently possible.

Nanotechnology can be used in battery technology. Nanocomposite materials greatly increase the surface area at which chemical reactions occur in batteries. It enables increases in the battery’s output while reducing it’s size. In the long term nanotechnology could enable power to be harnessed from renewable sources and stored until we use the power at a later time. This is a technology whose time has come as we don’t have a system in place that effectively stores power in this fashion. However there are researchers who are working in this direction and new discoveries are coming almost daily.

It is almost the way every major innovation in our country has occurred. When the internal combustion engine was developed, there were several inventors working toward the same end without any of them having any knowledge of what the other was doing! The same could be said of the steam engine. Credit for a great deal of this information comes from material written by David Walker and Dr. Mark Daugherty of IPC Corporation. This technology is another advent in getting to a place where we free ourselves from costly fossil fuels and embrace renewable energy.
I am an engineer, artist, single father and a gourmet cook, I have extensive life experience covering a wide variety of topics. I have traveled extensively in the U.S. and I know many areas well. I am a teacher at times, as well as a mentor. I have written extensively about many subjects and decided I would like to try and bring about change in certain areas such as, alternative energy, single parenting and other topics that are concerns for the residents of this planet. I am well versed in the marketing of products and ideas. I want to help make the world a better place than it was when I arrived here.

There is little debate that we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, but the costs of renewable energy platforms such as solar make it difficult. Nanotechnology definitely offers the answer.

Solar power is considered one of the better renewable energy platforms. Enough sunlight hits our planet each day to meet our world wide energy needs for an entire year. On top of this, solar energy is a free power source, since nobody can corner the market on the sun. Solar power is also good for the environment since it produces none of the emissions that are of such concern today, specifically carbon dioxide greenhouse gases.

If solar is so great, why don’t we see more practical applications? The problem lies in the applications. Specifically, we have no way to harness the power. Commercial solar cells are very inefficient. Current models on the market only convert about 8 to 13 percent of the sunlight hitting them. This inefficiency makes the cost of producing energy via solar platforms too costly. So, what can we do?

Nanotechnology is a new scientific field with many applications. Although the media has hyped the technology as the answer to a wide variety of miracle cures, most scientists and companies are looking to more practical applications. One such application is improving the efficiency in solar cells.

Nanotechnology has already shown huge breakthroughs in the solar field. In certain studies, the use of nano applications has improved the conversion rate of solar cells to an incredible 65 percent, a slight increase over the current 8 to 13 percent rate. Although none of the applications are currently refined enough to be turned into commercial products, they are getting close. Let’s take a look at a one of the approaches.

Quantum dots have the potential to change the world. They are a form of solar cell that is completely beyond anything you might imagine. Traditional solar cells produce electricity in a unique way. When the sunlight hits material in the cell, the material kicks of an electron and the charge is the electricity. Quantum dots work the same way, but they produce three electrons for every photon of sunlight that hits the dots. The dots also catch more spectrums of the sunlight waves, thus increasing conversion efficiency to as high as 65 percent, a stunning figure.

The really interesting thing about quantum dots is they do not require big, bulk solar panels to work. Researchers are combing the dots with liquid polymers. In practical terms, this means they can be sprayed onto any surface. This literally means that anything painted can act as a solar cell. Think about that. In the near future, you will be able to go solar by just repainting your house. Hybrid cars will be revolutionized, so will your mobile phone. On a cold day, you can put on a coat and gloves that are heated by the solar cells imbedded in their surfaces. The scope of this breakthrough is as breathless as it is unlimited.

Let’s face it. We need to make changes to the way we produce energy. It appears as though nanotechnology may convert solar power from an iffy solution to a definite one.
Rick Chapo is with SolarCompanies.com - a directory of solar energy companies.

Michael K. Tucker’s first novel, Peaceful Endings: The NOPOSAM Project hits us exactly where it hurts! He explores our own lives and presents us with a powerful “what-if” novel that will leave you, if not frightened, then a much-more cautious person! For readers, he presents an exciting suspenseful medical thriller that will keep you on edge from the first page `til the last!

Though the prologue lets us know that the government is going to be involved, I was nevertheless caught when the story begins in the life of Doug Talbot, a news videographer at WJAM TV-16 and Dr. Marilynn Harwell from Coventry General Hospital who accidentally sit together to eat lunch due to the lack of seating. Later they are identified as terrorists; simply because of that chance lunch–of course, Talbot’s random filming of a covert conversation may have identified him as a problem as well!

Unfortunately, Doug Talbot again met Marilynn Harwell when he carried his young, very sick daughter into Coventry General for emergency treatment. She was just one of hundreds who had become ill and/or already died. The strange thing was that the involved individuals had been fine until a small accident had occurred–for instance, a hairbrush falling on a girl’s toe had led to her death!

As Dr. Harwell faced the emergency situation, she sought help from the medical examiner who was being inundated by the many bodies of individuals who had been found already dead. But he had not yet been able to determine if there was any consistent reason for the deaths.

Until Dr. Harwell had him check at a specific place on their bodies…

There were a number of individuals who knew what had really happened. But when General Thomas Uxbridge, head of the SIA, was called on to advise the president, he told him that terrorists had freed a B-Thrax virus into the United States. Talbot and Harwell appeared to be the leaders!

The amazing and frightening thing was that the evidence developed by Uxbridge against the two was so convincing that nobody even questioned him!

Talbot and Harwell really had no choice. They were forced to verify that Dr. Harwell’s discovery was correct and to trace how and what could be done to stop the ongoing deaths. But when the medical examiner, while on the phone with Dr. Harwell, was killed, they knew they were running for their lives!

If you don’t know what nanotechnology is–you might want to check it out! It’s being used today in many scientific fields. Michael Tucker has taken us to the dark side of this technology–shown us what is possible when evil men gain control over something that is created to help mankind. In doing so, he has created an exciting, suspense-packed medical thriller!

Read Peaceful Endings–if you dare…

Peaceful Endings: The NOPOSAM Project
By Michael K. Tucker
Outskirts Press, Inc.
ISBN: 9781432727390
333 Pages
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History of nanotechnology

In 1965, Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel Corporation, made the astounding prediction that the number of transistors that could be fit in a given area would double every 18 months for the next ten years. This it did and the phenomenon became known as Moore’s Law. This trend has continued far past the predicted 10 years until this day, going from just over 2000 transistors in the original 4004 processors of 1971 to over 700,000,000 transistors in the Core 2. There has, of course, been a corresponding decrease in the size of individual electronic elements, going from millimeters in the 60’s to hundreds of nanometers in modern circuitry.

At the same time, the chemistry, biochemistry and molecular genetics communities have been moving in the other direction. Over much the same period, it has become possible to direct the synthesis, either in the test tube or in modified living organisms,

Finally, the last quarter of a century has seen tremendous advances in our ability to control and manipulate light. We can generate light pulses as short as a few femtoseconds (1 fs = 10?15 s). Light too has a size and this size is also on the hundred nanometer scale.

Thus now, at the beginning of a new century, three powerful technologies have met on a common scale — the nanoscale — with the promise of revolutionizing both the worlds of electronics and of biology. This new field, which we refer to as biomolecular nanotechnology, holds many possibilities from fundamental research in molecular biology and biophysics to applications in biosensing, biocontrol, bioinformatics, genomics, medicine, computing, information storage and energy conversion.

Historical background

Humans have unwittingly employed nanotechnology for thousands of years, for example in making steel, paintings and in vulcanizing rubber.[1] Each of these processes rely on the properties of stochastically-formed atomic ensembles mere nanometers in size, and are distinguished from chemistry in that they don’t rely on the properties of individual molecules. But the development of the body of concepts now subsumed under the term nanotechnology has been slower.

The first mention of some of the distinguishing concepts in nanotechnology (but predating use of that name) was in 1867 by James Clerk Maxwell when he proposed as a thought experiment a tiny entity known as Maxwell’s Demon able to handle individual molecules.

The first observations and size measurements of nano-particles was made during first decade of 20th century. They are mostly associated with Richard Adolf Zsigmondy who made detail study of gold sols and other nanomaterials with sizes down to 10 nm and less. He published a book in 1914. [2]. He used ultramicroscope that employes dark field method for seeing particles with sizes much less than light wavelength. Zsigmondy was also the first who used nanometer explicitly for characterizing particle size. He determined it as 1/1,000,000 of millimeter. He developed a first system classification based on particle size in nanometer range.

There have been many significant developments during 20th century in characterizing nanomaterials and related phenomena, belonging to the field of interface and colloid science. In the 1920s, Irving Langmuir and Katharine B. Blodgett introduced the concept of a monolayer, a layer of material one molecule thick. Langmuir won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work. In early 1950s, Derjaguin and Abrikosova conducted the first measurement of surface forces [3].

There have been many studies of periodic colloidal structures and principles of molecular self-assembly that are overviewed in the paper [4]. There are many other discoveries that serve as scientific basis for the modern nanotechnology can be found in the “Fundamentals of Interface and Colloid Science by H.Lyklema [5].

Conceptual origins

The topic of nanotechnology was again touched upon by “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech on December 29, 1959. Feynman described a process by which the ability to manipulate individual atoms and molecules might be developed, using one set of precise tools to build and operate another proportionally smaller set, so on down to the needed scale. In the course of this, he noted, scaling issues would arise from the changing magnitude of various physical phenomena: gravity would become less important, surface tension and Van der Waals attraction would become more important, etc. This basic idea appears feasible, and exponential assembly enhances it with parallelism to produce a useful quantity of end products. At the meeting, Feynman announced two challenges, and he offered a prize of $1000 for the first individuals to solve each one. The first challenge involved the construction of a nanomotor, which, to Feynman’s surprise, was achieved by November of 1960 by William McLellan. The second challenge involved the possibility of scaling down letters small enough so as to be able to fit the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin; this prize was claimed in 1985 by Tom Newman.[6]

In 1965 Gordon Moore observed that silicon transistors were undergoing a continual process of scaling downward, an observation which was later codified as Moore’s law. Since his observation transistor minimum feature sizes have decreased from 10 micrometers to the 45-65 nm range in 2007; one minimum feature is thus roughly 180 silicon atoms long.

The term “nanotechnology” was first defined by Norio Taniguchi of the Tokyo Science University in a 1974 paper [7] as follows: “‘Nano-technology’ mainly consists of the processing of, separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or one molecule.” Since that time the definition of nanotechnology has generally been extended to include features as large as 100 nm. Additionally, the idea that nanotechnology embraces structures exhibiting quantum mechanical aspects, such as quantum dots, has further evolved its definition.

Also in 1974 the process of atomic layer deposition, for depositing uniform thin films one atomic layer at a time, was developed and patented by Dr. Tuomo Suntola and co-workers in Finland.

In the 1980s the idea of nanotechnology as deterministic, rather than stochastic, handling of individual atoms and molecules was conceptually explored in depth by Dr. K. Eric Drexler, who promoted the technological significance of nano-scale phenomena and devices through speeches and the books Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology and Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, (ISBN 0-471-57518-6). Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology is often called “Molecular Nanotechnology” (MNT) or “molecular manufacturing,” and Drexler at one point proposed the term “zettatech” which never became popular.

In 2004 Richard Jones wrote a book called Soft Machines (nanotechnology and life), is a book about nanotechnology for the general reader, published by Oxford University. In this book he describes radical nanotechnology as a deterministic/mechanistic idea of nano engineered machines that does not take into account the nanoscale challenges such as wetness, stickness, brownian motion, high viscosity (Drexler view). He also explains what is soft nanotechnology or more appropriatelly biomimetic nanotechnology which is the way forward, if not the best , to design functional nanodevices that can cope with all the problems at nanoscale. One can think of soft nanotechnology as the development of nanomachines that uses the lessons learned from biology on how things work, chemistry to precisely engineer such devices and stochastic physics to model the system and its natural processes in detail.

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology, which is sometimes shortened to “Nanotech”, refers to a field whose theme is the control of matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally nanotechnology deals with structures of the size 100 nanometers or smaller, and involves developing materials or devices within that size.

Nanotechnology is extremely diverse, ranging from novel extensions of conventional device physics, to completely new approaches based upon molecular self-assembly, to developing new materials with dimensions on the nanoscale, even to speculation on whether we can directly control matter on the atomic scale.

There has been much debate on the future of implications of nanotechnology. Nanotechnology has the potential to create many new materials and devices with wide-ranging applications, such as in medicine, electronics, and energy production. On the other hand, nanotechnology raises many of the same issues as with any introduction of new technology, including concerns about the toxicity and environmental impact of nanomaterials [1], and their potential effects on global economics, as well as speculation about various doomsday scenarios. These concerns have led to a debate among advocacy groups and governments on whether special regulation of nanotechnology is warranted.

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