Imagine walking to school with a computer in your pocket that’s smaller than a marble, and notebooks filled with smart paper that you can download text onto and change whenever you like. All the while, tiny machines are swimming painlessly through your bloodstream, checking your general health and treating your body for disease.

Sound like a fantasy? All of these things could soon be possible thanks to the tiny world of nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology is all about making machines from individual molecules so small that they are measured in nanometres. One nanometre is one billionth of a metre, or about 1/80,000th the diameter of a human hair!

Shrinking technology

We are learning how to make things smaller and smaller. Think of a chip of silicon. By etching detail into it, a microchip is created! As the techniques of etching (or lithography) improve, the devices we make get smaller.

There are many possibilities in the world of nanotechnology. MEMs, or microelectromechanical systems, are tiny devices etched from silicon that have moving mechanical parts and electronic parts. An acceleration sensor in a MEM triggers the airbags in cars.

A team in California has built a prototype of an extremely small and very sensitive nano-ear. One day, these will be injected into the bloodstream of patients to detect malfunctioning cells by the noises the cells make. They could even be sent to other planets to listen out for tiny oceanic creatures.