Nanotechnology and its uses in Everyday Life

What if instead of making everything bigger to accommodate the growing population and growing industries, we could make technology smaller. Smaller than your fingertip, about 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The basis of that technology, the objects which would be used to make these new technologies are called nanoparticles.
So what are nanoparticles, how are they different from conventional building materials, and how can they be applied to the real world?

What is a nanoparticle?

Nanoparticles are particles that are between the size of 1 and 100 nanometers, and they are measured to be 1 billionth of a meter. To put that to scale, imagine a soccer ball, then imagine the earth. The ratio of a soccer ball to earth is about the ratio of a nanoparticle cube to that soccer ball. That’s how small it is!

However, because of their size, nanoparticles are not even visible by the microscopes we use in conventional high school or college classrooms. Instead, scientists have to use special microscopes called scanning tunneling microscopes, or atomic force microscopes.
In addition to the particular technology that is used when studying and observing nanoparticles, their size allows for interesting properties solely exclusive to nanoparticles to arise. These include changes in a substance’s color, conductivity, and temperature. However, what does that mean? Let’s take gold, for example. At the level humans can see, gold is a yellowish color (gold if you will), but once it’s broken down into nanoparticles gold takes on a reddish or sometimes purple color. In addition to the change in color, because there is more surface area to volume ratio the reactivity of gold goes up (this is because most chemical reactions happen on the surface level, so the more surface area a substance has, the more reactive it becomes).
This means that nanoparticles could and do have immense potential in the world of engineering and technology in various fields if scientists can grasp the knowledge of how to manipulate them fully.

Although scientists are already studying and working with nanoparticles, they are still a little ways away from fully controlling these particles. There are four stages of nanoparticle usage, and we have only just begun moving towards the second stage. These stages, also known as generations, were explained by Mike Roco, and are used to organize the future of nanotechnology and layout a neat way to categorize different types of this tech. The final generation being the one where scientists can use and manipulate the particles freely; in other words, become experts on the manipulation of nanoparticles and the construction of nanomaterials and structures.

Nanoparticles usage in real life: What they could do for the world of medicine, food, and environmental health

So what do nanoparticles, and nanotechnologies have to do with life for the masses? In other words, why should we care?

Nanotechnology could be implemented in our daily lives in just a few decades. There are extraordinary uses for nanostructures in medical, food, and environmental industries.

Medicine:
In the medical industry, nanostructures could be used as a more efficient drug delivery service. Which means that these nanostructures could potentially deliver treatment to specific parts of the body without the unneeded and unwanted side effects, as well as monitor levels of homeostasis in the body.
This technology could be especially useful in cancer treatment. Right now, modern chemotherapy causes death to not only the cancerous cells in a patient’s body but the healthy cells as well. With improved drug delivery and the use of nanoparticles that are smaller than a human cell, we could potentially use the structures to target and kill only the cancerous cells using sensors that detect particular molecules only found on cancerous cells.

Food:
In the food industry nanostructures could be used to test and monitor the freshness and overall state of food in packages. This would mean that sensors made of nanoparticles, could be implanted into the food we eat to track whether or not there are pathogens in the food when the food spoils, and even the temperature of the package the food came in. Meaning that we could have less foodborne illnesses in our near future.

Environmental:
The nanostructures in the environmental field could be classified in many different specialties. However, they all have to do with the quality of the earth and how we interact with it. We could potentially have nanostructures in our water, in the clothes we wear, and in solar panels that may power our homes in the years to come.
Structures in water would monitor how clean the water we drink is, help filter out pathogens, and clean up oil spills. The nanostructures in our clothes could turn colors when the air around us is contaminated, or unsafe to breathe, and the structures on solar panels could potentially improve efficiency in these panels themselves.

Our use with nanotechnology is limited to the human’s own imagination.

However, should we really be using nanoparticles in our bodies, food, and water? There might be extreme drawbacks in the world of nanotech, but do they outweigh the good that these structures could conceivably provide us?
There needs to be a further study in nanomaterials for us to say how nanotech will affect us truly. There could be large drawbacks in the way nanotech interacts with our biological systems, for example. There is evidence that these very nanotechnologies created to help keep us healthy could cause damage to our DNA. What about a build-up of nanoparticles in our bodies if we eat food that is laced with these tiny robots. In addition to the possible side effects of nanotech in our bodies, there are bound to be side effects to the environment as well.
For right now scientists must measure and keep track of the impact nanostructures have on the environment and our bodies before they can be properly implemented in our everyday lives at a large scale.