Ancient Nanotech
Ambience bells, Notre Dame Cathedral
The bells of Notre Dame cathedral. Can you guess the connection between this this centuries old place of worship and the cutting edge world of nanotechnology? I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Vance: Nano particles have been in the environment for a long long time.
Nina Vance is the associate director of the Virginia Tech Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology. Now in nanotechnology, we’re talking about particles that are on the scale of about a billionth of a meter.
Vance: Some researchers say nanotechnology is only about particles that are engineered that we produce. But others, say, “no no” nano particles have been in the environment forever because there are some minerals that only exist in the same size scale as the nano particles that we produce.
If you go to Paris and you enter the Notre Dame cathedral and you look at those beautiful stained glass windows- some of those stained glass windows have tiny metals inside the glass. And the tiny metals are nano particles except that nobody knew at the time that they were nano particles.
They probably used gold salts in a chemical process to make the nano particles. Which is actually the same process we use today.
One of the most amazing things about nano particles is their optical properties. If you take gold particles and you make them very, very small and they get down to a nano scale, they interact with light differently. So if you put these gold particles into a liquid and they’re just floating in the liquid, or if they’re dispersed inside a glass window, they’re going to interact with light in such a way that the glass looks red.
If the gold nano particles are smaller they might be a lighter shade of red; if they’re bigger they might be a darker shade of red – sort of like wine color.
We’ll hear more on nanotechnology in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.