Thursday, July 27, 2006

Hardly nano: This is a really big number!

The brave new world can translate into big bucks apparently.

In a windowless lab tucked inside International Business Machines Corp.'s Almaden Research Center south of San Jose, California, a scanning tunneling microscope stretches almost to the ceiling, dwarfing Andreas Heinrich.

Amid the snaking wires and the cut AriZona iced tea can that insulates a protruding pipe, Heinrich is viewing a particle thousands of times tinier than the width of a human hair.

"This is about looking at the properties of a single atom,'' says Heinrich, wearing a T-shirt, jeans and slip-on shoes. "We're starting with the smallest components and building upward.''

Heinrich is experimenting with ways to create semiconductors and data storage devices. Venture capitalists, lured by potential breakthroughs in electronics, medicine and textiles, are heading to the labs in search of inventions based on nanotechnology, the study and manipulation of particles smaller than 100 nanometers. A single nanometer is equal to one-billionth of a meter.

After decades of hype and false starts, the National Science Foundation forecasts that $1 trillion worth of nanotechnology- enabled products will be on the market by
2015. This year, corporations and governments will spend more than $11 billion on nanotechnology research, according to Cientifica, a London-based consulting firm.

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