For those who are unfamiliar with nanotechnology, stand by, it’s been changing our lives for a while now, and those changes are going occur more often in the future.

Nanotechnology involves working with particles that are a mere one billionth of a meter wide.

To emphasize how small this is, my wife the microbiologist knows about looking into microscopes — and a single germ that she can point out on a slide is 1,000 nanometers wide.

What I like about nano-tech is all the cool advances it’s allowing us to make in so many areas. For example, there’s a company called Industrial Nanotech, Inc. While looking for ways to minimize mistakes when installing an oil pipeline, they stumbled upon a method to reduce application time of a pipeline coating—through the use of nanotechnology. The time spent applying a particular coating per 50-foot length of pipe dropped from hours to minutes.

That’s what I call workplace excellence. 

ScienceDaily.com tells us that companies and research institutions are using nanotech to “create faster, better, cheaper and environmentally-friendly transistors, batteries, solar cells, diagnostic materials for detecting cancer, and semiconductors for use in modern electrical devices–everything from computers to cell phones.”

Can anyone tell me they wouldn’t like those things to be faster, better, and cheaper?

And while nano-tech holds tremendous promise, it’s not without its distracters. Since nano-tech is so, well, nano, its ripple-effects for future consequences cannot be seen.

A story in today’s San Francisco Chronicle points out that bacteria-proof knives and forks (already a reality courtesy of nano-technology) may end up creating even more virulent bacteria.

I’m all for being in the nano-goove. It’s a cutting edge place and we’re gaining a lot of cool stuff from it. I’ve been tuning into it for some time now, and  I’m excited about the products and processes emerging from it.

Let’s just hope that along the way we maintain a watchful eye on safeguards, and we don’t create some sort of nano-ripple-effect that builds into a tsunami.

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