Advanced Materials, Micromachines, and Nanotechnology

Preview:

Advanced Materials technology is vital to industrial competitiveness and innovation across all sectors including healthcare and the environment. 

Building a standards and measurement infrastructure for the use of new structural materials, such as composites and light alloys. Adoption of new materials - or their use in new applications - depends on an ability to understand, characterise and measure these materials throughout their working life. 

Human beings created the stone, bronze and iron ages. Many believe we are now in the materials age, and it is not hard to understand why. Unless you wear unbleached and naturally-dyed pure cotton, live in a cave with wooden furniture put together with wooden pegs and use clay cooking pots, advanced materials impact your life. 

Micro machines are tiny man-made machines so small that the moving parts are all molecules or very tiny molecular structures. We have been developing this technology and creating increasingly complex micro machines for decades.

This is particularly significant when one realizes that all living cells are based on the same molecular technology in that all of their moving and functioning parts are molecules or very tiny molecular structures like cilia. Both technologies are based entirely on organization and structure of molecules with the chemical function of molecules being the engines driving the motions and functions. These tiny engines derive their energy from other molecules and the cell's or machine's molecules reactions to those other molecules.

The biggest difference being that we have not as yet created a micro machine as complex and structured as the simplest living cell, that our micro machines have not been able to obtain their energy from their environment, and our micro machines can't reproduce, yet. But this research will definitely get us there.

Nanotechnology, shortened to "nanotech", is the study of the controlling of matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally nanotechnology deals with structures of the size 100 nanometers or smaller in at least one dimension, and involves developing materials or devices within that size. "Nanotechnology" has become something of a buzzword and is applied to many products and technologies that are often largely unrelated to molecular nanotechnology. While these broader usages encompass many valuable evolutionary improvements of existing technology, molecular nanotechnology will open up qualitatively new and exponentially expanding opportunities on a historically unprecedented scale. 

Narrative/ Things I learned

The reporter sited best examples of these topics for easy understanding. From the examples, it is clearly highlighted the differences of these three materials.

As what I learned, Advanced Materials are those simple materials or raw materials in producing to a new useful materials such as alloys, polymers etc. Some of our product nowadays are still made up of these materials like plastic cups. Micro machines and Nano technology is the latest development of technology. These are small materials having its great use like micro SD  cards for gathering memory of a specific digital phones and cameras. These materials had been part of human lives.

Sources:

http://www.science.org.au/nova/093/093key.htm

http://www.hauns.com/~DCQu4E5g/nano.html