Bringing about the nanotech miracle
Insufficient human resources is another vexing problem. NNDL president Simon Sze points out that last year more than 3000 high-tech positions in Taiwan went unfilled due to a shortage of qualified personnel. Industry wants the government to allow qualified personnel from the mainland to work in Taiwan and to increase international cooperation in order to increase the speed at which personnel are trained. For instance, the NNDL is cooperating with the Canadian National Research Council. Both institutions are sending personnel back and forth to gain knowledge. Their respective staffs have equal access to each other's equipment and are jointly writing papers and filing patents, with the hope that this can overcome the problem of insufficient resources.
NTU professor Lee Chih-kung, who has been advising the government on how to cultivate nanotech personnel, has come up with a "K-12" to prepare students for careers in nanotech. He has selected various flagship schools, including the Chienchung and Taipei First Girls senior high schools, as well as Tunhua Junior High School and the Tunhua and Tungmen elementary schools. They are starting by cultivating future teachers and writing educational plans. They hope to introduce children to the marvels of the nanometric world at as early in their school careers as possible.
"Nanotech will be a key to success in the coming era," says Lee. Today's kindergarten children will be in graduate school in 20 years and eventually become Taiwan's main research force. By starting with instruction at an early age, you get the most bang for your buck. "The 'winning strategy' for the country's future is right here!"
The global battles of nanotech development seem to have started a little ahead of schedule here in Taiwan, where the IT industry seems weary and stagnated and particularly in need of nanotech to bolster its confidence and point to a new direction for industrial development.
ITRI executive vice president Yang Jih-chang says that when he was trying to promote nanotech a year ago, industry seemed to show little interest, which worried him. But recently there has been a steady stream of nanotech conferences and growing exchange between industry, government and universities. "The right atmosphere has formed!" Taiwan had abundant success with the "third wave" of information technology. As for whether Taiwan will reap the economic fruits of the fourth wave of nanotech, only time will tell.
What You Must Know About Nanotech
(Laura Li/tr. by Jonathan Barnard)
1Nature is the most amazing
nanotech engineer.
Everywhere in nature there are fantastic nanometric structures. It's just that people previously knew what they could do, but didn't know how they worked. But now that we can create nanotech, the mysteries are beginning to be exposed.
For instance, human teeth can survive for 1000 years without disintegrating because the surfaces of the teeth have nanometric crystalline structures. And apart from a layer of wax on its feet, the simply designed remigator (an insect) can walk on water thanks to a nanometric structure that helps it repel water so that it won't become waterlogged. The water lily's ability to grow out from mud without being sullied by it is also due to natural nanotech.
What's more, the belly of a bee has magnetic nanometric particles, which it uses like a compass to track its position in relation to flowers, its nest and other bees. Similarly, sea turtles also have similar kinds of particles, which enable them to navigate vast distances in the ocean without getting lost!
2The nanometric world isn't the
smallest
From the macroscopic world that is visible to the naked eye, the nanometric world is unimaginably small. But in the nanometric world, you can still fit from one to ten atoms-never mind subatomic particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons.
The first character in the Chinese compound for nanotech is (c)`. Its top part is composed of the Chinese character for big (§j). Some say that this represents the macroscopic world of traditional physics. Meanwhile, the bottom part of the character includes the character for small (§p), which is said to represent the microscopic world of quantum mechanics. The nanometric world is said to be the "mesoscopic" world between them.
3Develop the strong points of
nanotech
Nanotech is often praised as being a "green technology." Indeed, if you could use nanotech to create self-cleaning, antibacterial and de-odorizing materials, so that clothes, tableware, fan blades and cars would never need to be washed, and skyscrapers would gleam like new after a little rain, then you could greatly reduce the threat of water shortages.
What's more, nanometric titanium dioxide can effectively process organic wastewater and act as a photocatalyst to help decompose organic toxins and clean up oil spills on the surface of ocean.
As for super-lightweight, super-small, super-fast, super-high-capacity and super-electricity-saving nanoelectronics, a single MRAM unit will replace a whole row of current memory chips, a single disc will be able to store the books of an entire library, and a computer built with carbon nanotubes instead of silicon will operate 50 times faster and consume 50 times less electricity.
What about a mobile phone battery that would run for 100 days without recharging, a nanoengine that would run on a drop of fuel, or even quantum computers or photon ICs? Nanotech also provides hope of release from the oil dependency and oil shortages of the industrial era.
4 Does nanotech contain the poten
tial for disaster?
At the same time that the advantages of nanotech are being widely discussed, some environmentalists are also issuing solemn warnings. Because nanometric substances are by definition too small for the naked eye to see, some worry that it will be difficult to determine whether they are causing environmental problems.
Take one everyday product: the toner used in laser printers. The carbon powder in printer toner is at a nanometric scale and can easily enter cells if it gets into the human body. Might it lead to a health crisis on a similar scale to asbestos? This is an issue that people in various fields are examining closely.
Abroad, nanotech companies often require licenses as "highly polluting industries." In this respect, Taiwan is not as vigilant as it should be. In some plants that make nanometric powders under contract for larger companies, or in mixed processing plants, the air is full of dust from powders that contain ingredients such as metals that may accumulate in the body, yet workers walk about obliviously without special breathing masks or other protective equipment. How to reap the benefits of nanotech without suffering harm requires raising consciousness about environmental concerns and public health.
Nanotech Milestones
(Laura Li/tr. by Phil Newell)
1959
Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman delivers a speech in which he suggests a future form of science in which the entire Encyclopedia Britannica could fit into a space the size of a pinhead, and people could manipulate atoms and molecules. Such ideas, bizarre at the time, open new vistas on nanotechnology.
1962
The Japanese physicist Ryogo Kubo proposes the "Kubo Theory" (a.k.a. the quantum confinement theory). With this discovery, people begin to grasp that materials have different properties at nanoscale sizes than those they normally exhibit.
1974
The Japanese scholar Norio Taniguchi coins the term "nanotechnology" to describe precision machinery processing, but few people realize the potential importance of the field.
1970s
K.Eric Drexler of MIT begins to promote nanotechnology. In 1986 he will publish Engines of Creation, offering detailed descriptions of future molecular and atomic sized devices. The book will be largely rejected as nonsense by mainstream science.
1982
Two scientists at IBM's Zurich Research Center, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, create the first "scanning tunneling microscope," a device capable of observing how atoms are arrayed on the surface of metal materials, thus allowing people to enter the nano-world. In 1986 Binnig will invent the "atomic force microscope," to observe atoms on the surface of non-conducting materials.
1984
The German scientist Herbert Gleiter discovers that nano-scale titanium dioxide ceramics powder has extraordinary resilience, sparking research into all manner of nano-materials.
1985
The British chemist H.W. Kroto and the American chemists R.E. Smalley and R. Curl purify a soccer-ball-shaped nano-structure "C60" (a molecule of 60 carbon atoms)-known as "buckminsterfullerene"-from graphite. From this will be produced many important nano-materials, including carbon nanotubes, invented in 1991 at Japan's NEC corporation.
1990
D. Eigler, a researcher at IBM, uses a scanning
tunneling microscope to spell out the letters "IBM" using 35 xenon atoms. This is the first deliberate manipulation of individual atoms in history.
In July of the same year, the first international nano-technology conference is held in the US, formally establishing nanotechnology as an independent field of study. Large research teams, led by the US and Japan, take nanotechnology research to a new level.
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