Tiny Tech

Episode 010

I don't know about you, but I get crabby if my shoes are too small for my feet.Well, electrons don't get crabby, but they do change properties if they are confined in small spaces.The small spaces that scientists are using to...

Episode 009 The topic is green nanomaterials. Like other nanomaterials, they're made from nano-sized components, but they are especially friendly to the environment.

Episode 008

A key ingredient in many products, from pencil leads to tennis racquets, is the chemical substance graphite. Graphite is a form of carbon in which the atoms bond to one another in sheets that are one atom thick.

Episode 007

Feeling sick? Although many illnesses are caused by microorganisms, other diseases such as cystic fibrosis and hemophilia are genetic disorders, caused by abnormalities in the DNA of our own chromosomes.

Episode 006

In 1965, the chemist Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a computer chip would double every two years, due to improvements in technology to make the individual circuit components smaller and smaller.

Episode 005

What would happen if you were to take a gold coin and cut it into two pieces, and then into four, and kept going until you had very tiny pieces consisting of perhaps a thousand gold atoms each?

Episode 004

In the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, Hollywood star Raquel Welch was part of a surgical team that was placed aboard a submarine, miniaturized to microscopic size, and injected into the bloodstream of a man.

Episode 003

Transistors are everywhere: in computers, in cell phones, and even in those gimmicky greeting cards that play tunes when they're opened.

Episode 002

We live in a world of change, and the technology that surrounds us is changing especially fast. One important contributor is something called nanotechnology.

Episode 001

Let's talk small, really small. The field of nanotechnology is making big advances toward achieving precise control of matter on the nanometer scale. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or about the size of four adjacent atoms.