Medicine can be pretty powerful, but sometimes it’s best if you can deliver it only to the places in your body that needs it. Learn about all the different ways that nanotechnology can help scientists develop smarter medicines that can make us healthier!
by Josephin Vincent, Millersville University If you were bitten by a snake, what would you do? Stay calm, yeah, that’s the first thing experts recommend. Next, it’s important to identify if the snake is venomous. If it is, you must quickly counteract the venom in your ... Read More...
Spinal injuries can be devastating with the loss of movement in arms and legs. The primary problem is damage to neurons, those cells that transmit signals to and from the brain. There have been many attempts to fix neurons. Scientists at MIT have developed a ... Read More...
Scientists at Vanderbilt University have discovered a new use for the machine that is used to make cotton candy. Cotton candy is basically sugar that is spun into thin fibers. The cotton candy machine was invented by William Morrison a dentist in collaboration with a ... Read More...
In the old days, surgery was a nasty business. To work inside your body, doctors needed to make a hole in you large enough for their hands or at least the tools that they needed to use to perform the surgery. So to workon your ... Read More...
Think about a rainbow. Is that a big streak of dyes that someone painted across the sky? No it is the diffraction of light into individual wavelengths that we see as the colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. The water droplets in the ... Read More...
When you get sick and need to take medicine, like an aspirin pill or cough syrup, the medicine spreads all over your body. A medicine’s job is to treat a specific problem but it doesn’t go directly to where the problem is in your body. ... Read More...
You might think from reading Nanooze that nanotechnology is something that was just invented. Not really. The idea of making things at the nanometer scale is not new, in fact people have been making nanoscale stuff for a long time. Even before they knew that ... Read More...
So your nose is a super sniffing machine able to tell the different between 4000 to 10,000 different odors. Your nose has about one-hundred million tiny special things called receptors that can bind a particular odor molecule and when it does bind, it sends a ... Read More...
Can nanotechnology be used to help combat cancer? Sure, in a lot of different ways. Cancer is a very complicated disease. It is not one thing and therefore it is hard to figure out and then to treat. Cancer is a disease where your own ... Read More...
It is too small to see but not too small to smell. Sometimes we can’t eve see where the smell is coming from. An average person can smell maybe around 10,000 different odors. How do we do it? There are tiny sensors called “receptors” found ... Read More...
You don’t feel well and so you go to the doctor. To diagnose what is wrong with you, a doctor can do tests from the outside by looking in your ears and down your throat. But sometimes that’s not enough because there’s a limit to ... Read More...
Your body is a complex thing made up of about 50 trillion cells. Fifty trillion is a huge number -- about 10,000 times the number of people on the planet! Most cells in your body are about 5,000 nanometers across or less, which is about ... Read More...
You move the mouse on your computer, click on a link and here is something to read about muscles. But how did your finger move the mouse in the first place. Well that is easy, you have muscles that are wired into your brain and ... Read More...
You’ve probably heard of nanobots, but did you know that nature has some nanobots of its own? Ever wonder how tiny organisms like bacteria move around? It’s hard to move at the nanoscale but bacteria like E. coli can do it by using a tail-like ... Read More...
My feet don’t but I bet yours do. Stink. After a day outside, hot sweaty and wearing those sneakers. Take a whiff. Stink! First what makes your feet stink? Microbes? Yes, microbes, bugs, bacteria, fungi. All of these creatures growing happily on your feet especially ... Read More...
Another reader wanted to know about how nanotechnology would impact cancer. What is important about treating cancer? Finding where the cancer is in the body and then sending powerful medicines only to where the cancer is located. The first challenge is finding the cancer. You want ... Read More...
Do you smell something? Odor molecules are really small, at most a few nanometers in size. They have to be small to be smelled. Something has an odor because some of the molecules (remember that all things are made of atoms) found in something ... Read More...
In the last 20 years, scientists and engineers have created machines to sequence DNA, which lets them read it much like you read a book, except it’s too hard to read your DNA from front to back in one long stretch. So the DNA is ... Read More...
DNA is really thin, about two nanometers across and cells can fold and pack DNA into a cell which is about ten micrometers across. DNA also doesn’t like to be stretched out and would rather fold up. We know something about DNA folding up, the ... Read More...
Seeing, it’s one of our five senses, and it is kind of important for getting around. Almost all animals have some kind of ability to see, with hawks and eagles having the best vision and rats having some of the worse. And then there ... Read More...
