Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
billionth of a meter, or three to five atoms in width. It would take approximately 40,000 nan-
ometers lined up in a row to equal the width of a human hair. The basic idea of nanotechnology,
used in the narrow sense of the world, is to employ individual atoms and molecules to construct
functional structures
[1]
.
In 1959, Nobel award winner Richard Feynman first proposed the seminal idea of nanotechnol-
ogy by suggesting the development of molecular machines. In his historic lecture in 1959, he
concluded saying, “this is a development which I think cannot be avoided”
[2]
. Ever since, the
scientific community has investigated the role that nanotechnology can play in every aspect of
science. The intrigue of nanotechnology comes from the ability to control material properties by
assembling such materials at the nanoscale. The tunable material properties that nanotechnology
can provide were stated in Norio Taniguchi's paper in 1974 where the term “nanotechnology” was
first used in a scientific publication
[3]
. The reason for the omnipresence of the word “nano” as
one of the most attractive prefixes in the contemporary materials science is simpler than it
seems
[4]
. Namely, the progress of humanity is underlaid by a continual increase in sensitivity of
human interactions with their physical surrounding. As the human societies evolved, the critical
length of cutting-edge functional devices has shifted from millimeter to micrometer to nanometer
scale. With the scientific ability to control physical processes at nanometer scale, we have entered
the era of research and application of nanoscale phenomena. Finally, as material properties often
significantly alter following the micro-to-nano shift in the scale at which critical boundaries are
found, a new field was born to explain these rather strange phenomena, named nanoscience; the
application of its discoveries is known as nanotechnology
[5]
.
Nanotechnologies are on the verge of initiating extraordinary advances in biological and biomedi-
cal sciences. These would be associated with both providing the tools for improved understanding of
fundamental building blocks of materials and tissues at the nanoscale and designing technologies for
probing, analyzing, and reconstructing them. It is not surprising that the development of novel tech-
nologies provides the foundations for creation and application of newer and more advanced ones.
Expansion of novel technologies, particularly those involved in enriching methods of research, have
already changed the way we view and define the standards of high-quality dental materials, tools,
and practices. As we see, nanotechnology has favored our understanding of dental materials at the
nanoscale and enabled the design of materials with ultrafine architecture
[6]
.
Nanoengineering is one field of nanotechnology. Nanoengineering concerns itself with manipu-
lating processes that occur on the scale of 1
100 nm. Nanoengineering is an interdisciplinary science
that builds biochemical structures smaller than bacterium, which function like microscopic factories.
This is possible by utilizing basic biochemical processes at the atomic or molecular level. In simple
terms, molecules interact through natural processes, and nanoengineering takes advantage of those
processes by direct manipulation. Current developments are limited to the creation of nanoscale
objects for use as materials in different technologies. Material engineered using nanotechnology is
often more precise and durable because of certain properties of matter at extremely small scales
[4]
.
2.2
Nanoscale materials
The nanomaterial field takes a science-based approach to study materials with morphological fea-
tures on the nanoscale, and especially those that have special properties stemming from their
