Nanotechnology: Your visa to a better future

At Velbionantech, a little-known Bangalore-based company, researchers are working on path breaking projects that - if successful - might dramatically reduce the need for heart surgery or for kidney stone operations.

It is working on designing nano-chips, which will deliver a drug exactly to the affected area in the body.

So, one project aims to develop a chip which when injected into the body will head towards the kidney and remove stones.
Another - even more ambitious project - aims to develop a nano-chip that will move into the heart and reduce the fatty tissues that cause arteriosclerosis.

Though this dream is still a long way from reality, nanotechnology is creating waves in different sectors. It is being used in many consumer products.
For example, today's clothes are offering intelligent services like Grasim’s and Van Heusen’s "Icetouch" that keeps the body five degrees cooler; Van Heusen also has "Oxyrich" shirts that release “power-packed oxygen ions" and Arrow shirts are promoted as "unstainable" clothes.

For that matter, even LG and Samsung are selling nanotech-based refrigerators and air-conditioners. There are even more exotic products being lined up.

Nanotechnology is the new cutting edge tool that is helping scientists work at the molecular level. Nano-materials are a thousand times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. The building blocks of all products are atoms. If we rearrange the atoms then we get different products.

Say for example rearranging the atoms of coal will give us diamonds. Nanotechnology will help scientists work on atoms at a finer level, helping us get more advanced products.

This technology has the potential to change the world around us in unimaginable ways. Soon, it will impact every aspect of our lives from medicine to computers to the energy we require to the cars we drive and so on.