Nanotechnology is an umbrella term that covers many areas of research dealing with objects that are measured in nanometers. A nanometer (nm) is a billionth of a meter, or a millionth of a millimeter.

Atoms are the building blocks for all matter in our universe. You and everything around you are made of atoms. Nature has perfected the science of manufacturing matter molecularly. Consumer goods that we buy are made by pushing piles of atoms together in a bulky, imprecise manner. Imagine if we could manipulate each individual atom of an object. That's the basic idea of nanotechnology, and many scientists believe that we are only a few decades away from achieving it.

Nanotechnology is a hybrid science combining engineering and chemistry. Atoms and molecules stick together because they have complementary shapes that lock together, or charges that attract. Just like with magnets, a positively charged atom will stick to a negatively charged atom. As millions of these atoms are pieced together by nanomachines, a specific product will begin to take shape. The goal of nanotechnology is to manipulate atoms individually and place them in a pattern to produce a desired structure. There are three steps to achieving nanotechnology-produced goods:

1) Scientists must be able to manipulate individual atoms. This means that they will have to develop a technique to grab single atoms and move them to desired positions.

2) The next step will be to develop nanoscopic machines, called assemblers, that can be programmed to manipulate atoms and molecules at will. It would take thousands of years for a single assembler to produce any kind of material one atom at a time. Trillions of assemblers will be needed to develop products in a viable time frame.

3) In order to create enough assemblers to build consumer goods, some nanomachines, called replicators, will be programmed to build more assemblers.

Trillions of assemblers and replicators will fill an area smaller than a cubic millimeter, and will still be too small for us to see with the naked eye. Assemblers and replicators will work together like hands to automatically construct products, and will eventually replace all traditional labor methods. This will vastly decrease manufacturing costs, thereby making consumer goods plentiful, cheaper and stronger.

Nanotechnology is likely to change the way almost everything, including medicine, computers and cars, are designed and constructed. Nanotechnology is anywhere from five to 15 years in the future, and we won't see dramatic changes in our world right away. But let's take a look at the potential effects of nanotechnology:

The promises of nanotechnology sound great, don't they? Maybe even unbelievable? But researchers say that we will achieve these capabilities within the next century. And if nanotechnology is, in fact, realized, it might be the human race's greatest scientific achievement yet, completely changing every aspect of the way we live.

What will we use nanotechnology for?

* Improved transportation – stronger lighter materials will make ground, air, and space travel more economical. We will be able to make shatterproof diamond fibers in any shape we want.

* Atom computers, computers that use atoms instead of semiconductor transistor on a chip for memory. These computers will be able to store vast amounts of data in a miniscule space. The smaller space will also allow for faster retrieval.

* Military applications – even bullets could contain a computer this small, they could analyze their surroundings and communicate with tracking systems. Weapons could be built better, faster, cheaper and stronger.

* Solar energy – nanotechnology will cut the cost of solar power, by making solar cells more cheaply.

* Medical uses – development of a medical technology that would allow healing at the molecular and cellular level, the root cause of disease and ill health. Also could build customized medicines from the atomic level up.

Nanotechnology may be the next step in more efficient computing, when it becomes more difficult and expensive to make transistors smaller. Nanotech might be an answer. A couple of developments point to how:

--- carbon nanotubes, first developed in Japan by electronics giant NEC in 1991. They are molecules of carbon, each 1.4 nanometers wide, with unusual properties. Shaped like hollow tubes, they conduct electricity and can modulate signals like a transistor. Almost unbreakable, they are bendable and stick to surfaces like cooked spaghetti.

--- use nanotubes to make the first carbon chips, perhaps the successor to silicon chips

--- possibility that nanotech can build a computer that doesn't need wires. IBM's found a way to use individual atoms to build a quantum corral that traps electrons on a copper surface. What they then discovered, to their astonishment, was that if the trapped electrons are disturbed on one side of the corral, an exact duplicate of that interruption is reproduced on the other side. The information doesn't travel across on an electrical impulse, like it does on a wire. The electrons just resonate and produce the duplicate on the other side, traveling more like waves. It could have huge implications for computer chips. Currently, wires on a chip can't cross. They have to be laid over one another in layers, adding to a chip's size and slowing it down. With quantum corrals, waves can propagate through one another, so lots of signals could criss-cross on the same layer. Chips could be smaller and faster.

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