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Imagine if you climbed out of the bath one day and discovered you’d shrunk in the wash by about 1500 million times! If you wandered through to the living room, instead of seeing chairs, tables, and your family, you would be surrounded by atoms, molecules, and cells.

Imagine that you started sticking those atoms together in interesting new ways, like tiny lego bricks. You could build all kinds of amazing new materials: everything from brand new medicines to tiny robots. Inventing new things on this incredibly small scale is called nanotechnology and it’s one of the most exciting and new areas of science today!

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We still don’t know much about how the world works on really small scales.  ‘Nano’ means ‘extremely small’ so nanoscience and nanotechnology deal with the very smallest things in the world – things that can only be measured using nanometres (one nanometre is one billionth of a metre, or 0.000000001 metres!)

It’s hard to imagine just how small these things are.  I work with things that are thousands of times smaller than a human hair  – things like cells, molecules, and even single atoms.

What is so interesting about the nanoworld is that things behave very differently there to how we expect.  If you dive into a swimming pool, your speed and your weight keeps you moving through the water for several metres.  But if you were nano-sized, the water would be like treacle and would soon bring you to a gloopy halt!

Nanotechnology has the potential to touch almost every aspect of our lives: it can be used to make very sensitive sensors to detect disease; it could revolutionise medicine, allowing us to treat diseased cells individually; … and it could even be used to build a bridge into space!

So I am a nanoscientist – and my work involves learning more about this truly amazing nanoworld.

Here is a really cool movie that takes you on a journey inside our bodies to explore the nanoworld inside us.  Enjoy! 🙂 (Don’t forget to turn up the sound!)

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What does the nanoworld look like?

Things look different in the nanoworld!   I love using powerful microscopes to zoom in really really close to see nature in amazing detail!

These amazing pictures show us what a fruit fly looks like, if only we could get so close…. As we look from left to right, the pictures get more and more zoomed in and we get closer and closer to the fruit fly’s eyes.

Who would have guessed a fly’s eyes would look like that?!

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Touching and MOVING

Nano-objects are far too small to see or touch – they are billions of times smaller than our fingers so they are tricky to pick up!  We get round this by using light to pick nano stuff up and move it around to study.  Just like a tractor beam from a sci-fi film, we can move things without touching them at all!

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MAKING NANO-OBJECTS

We can also make nano-objects.  Here at Osaka University, we make objects so small that the detail would be impossible to make even by the world’s most skilled craftsman using the most delicate tools. But light can be concentrated down to a very small area and used to make tiny objects with very fine detail.

The bull was made first.  It is so small that if you lined up a herd of one hundred bulls, nose to tail, they would fit across a single full stop!! It’s in the 2004 Guinness Book of World Records as it is the smallest sculpture ever made.

Now we have perfected the technique, we want to use it to make “nanobots” – nano-sized robots which could travel inside the body through the blood vessels and cure disease!

The best thing about my job is that no two days are the same!

I spend a lot of time doing experiments to learn more about how the nanoworld behaves.  When I have an interesting result, I write a report about my experiment for other scientists to read.  I also spend some time helping students with their research.

Sometimes I travel to conferences (often in exciting far away places) where I tell other scientists about my research and hear about all the exciting things other scientists are working on, too.