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Nano@NIST: Maximizing the Benefits and Minimizing the Risks of Nanotechnology

A vast assortment of job-creating, economy-building innovations are emerging from laboratories across the globe thanks to progress in understanding and controlling matter at ever finer scales—all the way down to assemblies of a few atoms. Research and services at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) aim to ensure that this nascent nanotechnology revolution will blossom in the United States. NIST focuses on building the supporting technical capabilities that U.S. industry needs to master the exceptionally small and build a competitive advantage in the growing international markets for nanotech products.

The Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNST) and nine other major laboratories at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are developing measurements, standards, and data crucial to industry’s development of products for a nanotechnology market that could top $2.5 trillion within the next decade—or about 15 percent of global manufacturing output. Already, worldwide sales of nano-enabled products—from computers, car parts, and cosmetics to cancer drugs, wound dressings, and dental adhesives—approach $90 billion. But the best is yet to come. NIST is helping to clear technical obstacles, including uncertainties about potential environmental, health, and safety risks, with the aim of opening the way for an ever more diverse range of prospective payoffs. More than 150 nanotechnology-related research projects are under way in the NIST laboratories. Here are a few examples of where NIST’s nanotechnology research is leading:

  • New measurement tools for ensuring the quality of nanoscale particles, nanotubes, and other nanomaterials that will be the building blocks of new technologies across a multitude of markets—from consumer products to construction and from healthcare to homeland security.

  • Powerful new imaging and diagnostic tools that exploit the unusual properties of quantum dots and magnetic nanoparticles to “see” and “analyze” cancer and other diseases at the level of individual cells, enabling earlier detection and less invasive treatment with greater specificity.

  • Affordable flexible arrays of transistors made from “self-assembling” organic materials that can be manufactured into large plastic displays pliant enough to be folded and stowed inside your cell phone.

  • Nanowires only a few atoms across, graphene films, and other nanostructured materials that have amazing properties, like the ability to carry electrons at incredible speeds, and that will be the basis for future generations of computers, sensors, batteries, lasers, and more.

  • Data storage devices that employ precisely controlled arrays of magnetic nanoparticles to achieve capacities that will dwarf those of today’s most advanced hard disk drives.

  • Improved formulations of cement—perhaps the world’s most widely used manufactured material—that perform better and last longer, thanks to a better understanding and control of their nanostructure. Improvements include reduced emission of greenhouse gases during production of this workhorse construction material, which currently accounts for 5 to 10 percent of global releases of carbon dioxide.

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Date created: June 12, 2008
Updated: August 8, 2008
Contact: inquiries@nist.gov

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