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[[Patent Pending a video podcast series from GE]]
[I'm a PhD chemist at GE Global Research. ]
[Nanotechnology lets us do stuff we thought impossible,]
[and that's a chance of a lifetime if you're a scientist or a chemist--]
[to be able to do something that's truly revolutionary and truly new.]
[There's nothing incremental about nanotechnology.]
[Again, I haven't had this much fun in my entire career. ]
[Now, nanotechnology, the first thing everybody asks me is what is it.]
[It's pretty hard to explain, but in simple terms]
[nanotechnology, to me, is about doing the impossible.]
[of material science so that we can do things and make products]
[for GE that we would never have been able to make before. ]
[I'd like to start here with a few examples,]
[and show you exactly why we're so excited about nanotechnology. ]
[Now nature does nanotechnology better then we ever will. ]
[We've got a lot to learn from nature. ]
[This seashell is basically calcium carbonate]
[To you, it's the same material in your coffee cup and your china plate]
[Everybody knows ceramics, which are what these materials are ]
[called as a class of materials, are very, very brittle. ]
[This chalk I can break very easily in my hands.]
[The coffee cup, if I was to drop it,]
[That's what the issue is with using ceramics]
[more broadly because they're excellent high-temperature,]
[They're materials we'd like to use more often. ]
[We'd like to use them in our aircraft engines because of their]
[lightweight and high-temperature capability. ]
[But we can't. They're just too brittle. ]
[Except for nature's ceramic materials. ]
[Nature's seashells can be designed such that they]
[have 3000 times better damage tolerance]
[than our man made ceramics, like chalks and coffee cups. ]
[I'm going to show you quickly--this seashell]
[has been designed by nature to withstand impact. ]
[I can drop it on the floor, unlike the coffee cup, and it won't break. ]
[Now why is that, you might ask?]
[Well, nature has designed the structure.]
[You can take a very high-power microscope and look at the inside ]
[of that shell, and this is what you see--]
[this elaborate, gorgeous structure,]
[where you can see that it's very, very, very difficult for a crack to ]
[move through that material and cause it to fail. ]
[It will form millions of little cracks, but not one crack.]
[seashell does not fracture. ]
[We're trying to learn from it and design and make ceramics]
[that are as nanoengineered as nature's seashell.]
[We've got that nice structure that you saw before,]
[but we're just learning about how to make it right now. ]
[This is a particle about the size of a pea.]
[We're going to have to learn how to scale it up. ]
[Here's another area in nanotechnology.]
[Again, unpredictable science, surprises. ]
[Here I have a solution on the bottom of this little]
[petri dish of very, very tiny ]
[nano-sized particles of a magnet. ]
[And I want you to guess what they'll do]
[when I bring them near to this magnet. ]
[I'm going to put a magnet in this test tube, and then I'm going to bring the]
[solution of little, tiny, nano-sized magnets closer to it. ]
[Watch what happens. Look at that. ]
[Would you have predicted that?]
[little, tiny nanomagnets didn't come out]
[They brought the water with them.]
[It doesn't act like a solid, and it doesn't act like a liquid. ]
[This is not a behavior normal to liquids, is it?]
[But a solution of magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles]
[So, again, nanotechnology can really, truly]
[do things that we never thought possible before. ]
[Last little stop here on our tour today. ]
[I'd like to introduce you to Brian Bales.]
[He's also a chemist, and he's actually making some of those]
[magnetic nanoparticles in solution, here. ]
[So what's going in this flask is we're taking these ferrofluid solutions ]
[and we're changing what's on the surface of these]
[nanomagnets so that they stay stable]
[in water solutions so that we can use them]
[in conjunction with the MRI, or]
[magnetic resonance imaging machines for contrast. ]
[We need to do this so we can keep the particles from sticking together]
[and to keep them monodispersed and]
[to stay soluble in solutions so they can take advantage]
[of some of these amazing properties of the nanoscale regime. ]
[So, that sort of ends our tour today, but I hope you've had a chance]
[to see some of the excitement we have here on nanotechnology ]
