If everything we own had improved over the last 25 years as much as electronics have, the average family car would travel four times faster than the space shuttle. Houses would cost two hundred bucks. Whats the secret behind electronics stunning advances . How many times have i reviewed these and wondered exactly whats inside there . Do you mind if i have a look . No, not at all, go ahead. Id like to have a look inside. Please do. Where i come from, you want to know how something works, you cut it open. Sony versus saw. Here we go. Think you guys are standing far enough back . cause i would not want anyone to get hurt. evil laughter what do you think well find . Elves . Butterflies . And now lets see what really is on the inside of a digital camera. Not much, really. And no moving parts at all. This digital camera. This is the brains. Pogue . Runs on a halfinchwide microchip. So it seems like if this is really the heart of the camera, a lot of it just exists so that i can handle it with my big human hands. Correct, cause thats not exactly the most comfortable form factor you want to be using right there. I know. Honey, smile. Cmon, let me see you smile. Cmon. Pogue this tiny wafer contains a highly sophisticated machine. Whats it made of . A computer chip is like a densely packed city a solid slab of silicon sprinkled with other elements like boron and arsenic, topped by layers of metals and ceramics. Theyre laid out like tiny, functional neighborhoods. Over here is memory. 50 years ago youd have needed a whole Building Full of vacuum tubes to store just a fraction of what fits in here. Over here is where data comes in and out of the chip. 50 years ago the fastest computer on earth could process maybe a few hundred punch cards a minute. Today, data goes in and out billions of times faster. And here is the processor. 50 years ago a computer could add a few thousand numbers in a second. In that same amount of time, this tiny chip can perform billions of calculations. Scientists have discovered that the secret to cheap Computing Power is size. When we find the right materials and make them small, they change the world. The race to miniaturize began 500 years ago with an invention that, in its day, was the first personal computer. Im talking about the watch. How did they go from big wallmounted grandfather clocks to something you could wear on your wrist . The miniaturization. More functions in a smaller space. Pogue pierre gygax is a watchmaker in switzerland. Some of his watches have more than 400 components. And how small are some of the parts . There are parts which are. 006 millimeter. So that means a half the thickness of a hair. Wow. Hundreds of precision metal pieces, all driven by a simple mechanism that all clocks have in one form or another the oscillator, the beating heart of the machine. Its the piece that puts the tick and the tock in time. Gygax you know the time is flowing. And its always difficult to measure something flowing. So, what we do is we cut the time in slices. And the oscillator is counting the slices. Pogue the original oscillator was the pendulum, slicing like a knife through time, with each swing counted by the movement of circular gears. But pendulum clocks work only if theyre upright in a fixed position. So in the middle ages, clocks were confined to immovable structures like towers or furniture. But in the 15th century, the invention of the mainspring changed everything. It was essentially the first battery a metal coil that could store mechanical energy. As it unwound, the mainspring powered a compact wheel. It was a major breakthrough. Suddenly, gravity and the pendulum were no longer necessary. The new springdriven mechanism made it possible to shrink the clock to fit into a hand or a pocket. And the pocket watch was born. Gygax this watch is absolutely amazing. It shows the exact position of the sun and the moon all around the earth from the top of the north pole. Pogue oh man, thats really cool. And how much does this watch go for . Between 80,000 and 90,000. laughs pogue but no need to spend 90 grand to find out what time it is. Nowadays, super accurate watches are disposable. Thanks to another great clock revolution, which began in the 1960s. Out went the spring and mechanical oscillator, replaced by a tiny sliver of solid mineral quartz. Slice a piece of quartz small enough, send an electric current through it and it vibrates fast. A quartzdriven clock can accurately chop time into millionths of a second. But the biggest selling point for quartz is that its cheap. Thats because quartz is actually silicon commonplace sand, the second most abundant element on earth. For the first time, a material replaced a machine, opening a door to a new era of miniaturization. But silicon can do more than just mark time. Its a member of a strange class of elements called semiconductors found on the table of the elements. As the name implies, they occupy a middle zone between metals, which conduct electric current, and insulators, like rubber and plastic, which dont. Think of water flowing through a pipe. An insulator is like a pipe thats frozen electrons cant get through. Semiconductors are materials that change from freeflowing conductor to a frozen insulator and back again simply by zapping them with an electric current. Switches made out of semiconductors are called transistors, and their amazing on again, off again switching ability made the computer revolution possible. But how did they get to be so small . One great place to look for answers is intel, a pioneer in squeezing tiny transistors onto computer chips. Ive met a lot of scientists who talk about switches and semiconductors, and somehow theyre fulfilling the same function. But what is it . Stephen smith what were trying to build with a semiconductor is a switch. This is one from the wall, something youd use to turn on a light and turn off. And, in fact, when we push the switch up, we give an input, the light is the output. Pogue so, in science fair terms, a switch, then, lets electricity go through or stops it. Exactly, based on the input, we change the flow of electricity. Electricity on or off. Its the only language computers understand. When the switch is off, the computer reads a zero. When the switch is on, the computer reads a one. String a bunch of switches together and you can create a code. With just eight switches, you can represent any symbol on a keyboard. For a page, you need about 25,000 switches. 1. 4 million will get you a second of music. Photos need tens of millions. And videos . Were talking about tens of billions. The more switches, the more power. The story of the computer revolution is the story of the shrinking switch. Early computers used mechanical relays and vacuum tubes as switches. Building a machine with just a few thousand took up rooms of space. But the silicon transistor changed all that. Because its a material, not a machine, its easy to shrink. Smith well, the exciting part about silicon transistors is were actually using the Atomic Properties of the silicon. So rather than actually having to craft something, to build a switch, to build the pieces, to build a spring, i, actually, by doing some smart engineering, can get the electrons to flow by using the properties of the atom. And we brought some material to illustrate that. What we have here. You just happen to have a hunk of cheese lying around the lab . A hunk of cheese. So think of this as the silicon material. I can actually take a slice of that silicon and i can use the Atomic Properties of this slice to build those transistors. Ladies and gentlemen, the pentium cheesium five. Um, i understand it works really well with the computer mouse. You can use that. All right, so youre saying that one beauty of silicon is that you can cut it in half, and its still silicon. And you can slice it again, smaller and smaller and smaller, but it still does just as good a job of passing along the ones and zeros. Absolutely. And i can use those Material Properties until i get down to the size of only a few atoms of silicon. Wow. Which is not something you could do to make mechanical switches smaller, right . Like, if i wanted to make this smaller, you know, i cant just go like this. Wow . And you can have a smaller one. Clearly, this is not going to be a smaller, good switch. Right. laughing but this is silicon. It is a purified element that one mines. All right, so what does it look like in the computer, then . Well, by the time it gets to the computer, it actually is one of these devices. So this shiny surface is a piece of refined silicon. It has transistors built into it. Weve actually flipped it over so the transistors are on the other side and what you see is the back of that piece of silicon. And this is how many of those little on off switches . This is almost a billion transistors. Wow. Pogue a billion switches on a oneinch chip. Whats even more astonishing is that one of the founders of intel saw this coming. In the 60s, gordon moore predicted that the size of transistors would shrink by half every two years, each time doubling the number that could be squeezed onto a single chip. This idea is known as moores law. And it has proved to be incredibly accurate. But now, 50 years later, moores law may be finally running out of steam. The transistors that power our stuff are about as small as they can get unless scientists can come up with a new way of packing them ever more tightly together. To see one of those possible solutions, ive crossed the country to visit the ibm research and development. Kitchen . So this is moores law of italian cooking. Thats right. What were going to do is explain why its so important to get the transistors smaller and smaller. Pogue frances has a pretty appetizing way of visualizing this law and its limitations. Like pepperoni slices, the transistors on a silicon chip are flat. Okay, so heres our. Silicon wafer. Silicon wafer. Now these are the oldfashioned transistors. Theyre much larger and you can see that you cant put that many onto each wafer. So this would be a 1960 ipod . I think so, yes. This would be a 60s type of thing. So lets take off these old transistors and replace them with some new transistors. Oh, these are much smaller. Yes, these new transistors are much smaller. Technology has marched on. Thats right, its moores law in action. So, in other words, all we have to do is make the transistors smaller every year forever and our gadgets will always be more powerful and more compact. That would be wonderful, but we cant make our pepperoni slices much smaller than this. And these transistors are now packed together about as close as we can get them. Pogue the pizza party cant go on forever. Theres a limit to how small you can shrink the transistors. If you reduce the surface area of a transistor too much and place it too close to its neighbor, electricity starts to leak, causing a short circuit. Not good. Weve run out of area, so theres only one way to go, and thats upwards. Slim jims . Thats right. This is a vertical transistor. Instead of having flatter, smaller transistors, we go in the other direction. Excuse me, vertical transistors . Vertical transistors. With little toothpicks on the bottom . Thats just for demonstration purposes. Pogue by building vertical transistors, called nano wires, frances can increase surface area without bringing the transistors closer to together, so no short circuit. Ingenious. So this is what youre doing at ibm, youre making these . Thats right. Theyre called nano wires. And the real thing is about a million times smaller than this. A million times smaller . Thats right. Well, thatd be hard to see. Pogue theyre hard to see, but this is not a nano wire. This is a silicon sliver frances uses as a surface to grow them. Ross we get tens of millions of wires on each of these specimens. Come on now youre hurting my brain. Pogue she carefully loads the wafer into a molybdenum clip and slides it into a custombuilt oven where shell bake it at 1,100 degrees fahrenheit. You know what i was just thinking, frances . I dont think you have enough aluminum foil on this oven. Ross yes, its the question everyone asks. It holds the heat better. Aluminum foil . Thats what we use. Isnt that a little low tech . Thats right, whatever works. Pogue oh, my gosh. So those little spires. Ross those are the nano wires. So you bake those up . We just grew these, yes. Pogue we can see them because this oven doubles as an electron microscope. All right, so these are them, huh . Ross this is 30,000 times magnified. Pogue 30,000 times . thats right. So heres the column of silicon thats the nano wire and heres the gold droplet on the end that actually makes it grow. Its weird, it looks like matchsticks or weird mushrooms. They do, mushrooms. Thats right, they look to me like mushrooms. Pogue thats amazing. Ross so were trying different catalysts, different recipes, but this here is the future of transistors. Pogue wow. While scientists like frances try to find ways to push silicon to its limit, others are pinning their hopes on a new material that lets electrons flow a thousand times faster than they can in silicon. Its ultra thin and super strong, and its called graphene. Pablo jarilloherrero when graphene happened, i just couldnt stop myself from going into it. It was so beautiful, i just couldnt stop. I immediately jumped onto it. Pogue this is dr. Pablo jarilloherrero, a professor at mit and graphene guru. Jarilloherrero here i have graphene. Graphene is the thinnest material that exists. This is just one atom thick sheet of graphene. And you can see that its perfectly visible. So, its part of the magic of graphene that you can just see it, even with your eyes. Pogue you heard that right this gray square of graphene is just a single atom thick. Although graphene was first discovered only recently, its been hiding in plain sight for ages in a material you probably have on your desk graphite, also known as pencil lead. Jarilloherrero you can write with a pencil because graphite is a layered material. And as you write, you are leaving traces of these layers on your piece of paper. So graphene is really just one sheet of this graphite material, a one atomthick sheet. Pogue that makes graphene an ideal conductor. At only one atom thick, theres nothing to restrict free electrons, which flow across the surface of the material like water across flat ice. Jarilloherrero graphene is a very special conductor, is the best conductor, and were now studying those properties and learning how fantastic this material is. Pogue and scientists have also figured out how to make transistors out of graphene, giving it the ability to speak the language that electronics and computers understand. Jarilloherrero so, im excited. Its beautiful. Here you have a material that will enable ultra highspeed electronics working at very low power. Pogue but it gets even better. Turns out the only tool you need to make graphene is a piece of tape. Jarilloherrero it is so simple any High School Student can indeed make one atomthick devices with this. Its really amazing. That scotch tape is going to be folded into two, and then when we separate the tape, this graphite naturally exfoliates into two pieces. Then were going to fold it again to split into four pieces. Then eight, do it again. And again, making the piece of graphite thinner and thinner and thinner, basically until we cover the entire tape with graphite. Were then going to take a silicon chip, deposit it on top of the tape. And what were hoping is that the graphite pieces, which are on the tape, are going to get in intimate contact with the silicon. So when you remove the chip and you look then with optical microscope, you can see the one atomthick material. And thats graphene. Pogue graphene promises to make the impossible possible letting electrons move across its surface at virtually the speed of light and generating almost no heat. In fact, graphene is such a revolutionary material that in 2010, a mere six years after its discovery, the two russian scientists who first made it received the nobel prize in physics. The computer chips of tomorrow could be a quantum leap Forward Computers with nearly limitless processing power; every book ever written stored on a tiny chip; a highway system so smart it could control millions of cars without a single accident. And its not just about our gadgets, its about us. While the electronics story continues to unfold in amazing ways, the story is beginning all over again with a materials revolution in medicine. Its not a new idea. Remember this . Man phase one calls for miniaturizing a submarine and injecting it into the carotid artery. Pogue fantastic voyage. It was the scifi smash of 1966. Man phase one. Phase one. Pogue scientists shrink a team of doctors and send them into a sick mans body on a mission to cure him. Man all stations stand by. Inject. Pogue today, as our devices get smaller and smaller, fantastic voyage is beginning to look like prophecy, the kind of thing that can change lives. Hi, courtney, how are you . Hi, dr. Mishkin, how are you . Good, yourself . Pogue today courtney will be taking a pill, but its not just any pill. Its a miniaturized camera. This capsule is a miniaturized camera. Every time it blinks its actually taking a picture. Its acquiring images at a rate of two frames per second. Okay. And what im going to get you to do is actually to swallow the capsule. And as the capsule goes through the gi tract, its going to be taking pictures of whats going on inside. Pogue its called the pillcam and it travels through the body just like a piece of food, taking 55,000 pictures over the course of eight hours. Why dont we actually put it inside your hand. Pogue pictures that can provide a diagnosis that once would have required surgery. As you move it around, we can actually see the folds of your hands with excellent magnification. So once we actually go ahead and ingest the capsule, its going to give us that same magnification of whats going on inside. Wow, thats really cool. It actually has a wireless transmitter thats going to transmit the images to a data recorder that youre wearing over the course of the day. And im going to download the images and be able to look at them and analyze exactly whats going on. Pogue the pillcam is made of an inert plastic that doesnt create a toxic response in the body. Inside is a minicatalog of the Electronics Industry a tiny video camera and flash, a radio transmitter, a battery, and, of course, a computer chip to drive it all. 25 years ago, all of those components would have taken up a cubic yard of space. Today it all fits inside a oneinch capsule that weighs only a fraction of an ounce. So lets go ahead and ingest it. Okay. Ready, into your mouth. Ill give you a glass of water. So now i see your teeth. And go ahead, down the hatch. Okay, great. So thats it, thats the hardest part. Okay. Just remember, over the next two hours do not drink anything. Okay. Pogue as the pillcam moves through courtneys digestive tract, it records what it sees, eventually giving dr. Mishkin a frontrow seat as he looks for abnormalities. Mishkin right now were looking at the small intestine. Its able to see 360 degrees such that its like looking down a gun barrel. The capsule is great at acquiring images, but im hoping that as the next generations of this capsule develop that its not only going to be able to take pictures, but it will be able to potentially biopsy, sample the tissue in that area. Or even deliver a treatment, such as placing a clip on a bleeding site, or even deliver medications. Pogue the pillcam is the pocket watch of today a superminiaturized machine that liberates the patient. It took centuries to make the leap from mechanical watches to computers. But in the world of microscopic medicine, the story of smaller is unfolding on a vastly accelerated time frame. In fact, scientists are on the verge of realizing a 21st century version of the fantastic voyage story. Theyre developing microscopically small robots that travel into the bodys deepest reaches to diagnose, treat, and even destroy deadly illnesses. Pogue this is your lab . Bradley nelson this is my lab. This is where you build your robots . This is where we build the robots. Pogue this is brad nelson. Hes created a robot that could help cure blindness. Its incredibly lifelike. Nelson thats a mannequin. Pogue oh, sorry. These are the ones we build. What . thats a robot . Thats a robot. Looks like a splinter. Well, this is a micro robot. We use them to help perform surgeries on the eye or inside of the eye. Pogue the device is only a hundredth of an inch wide, small enough to fit into the needle of a syringe, like the tiny sub in fantastic voyage. But the similarity ends there. This unmanned device is designed to treat a type of blindness caused by blocked blood vessels in the retina, the tissue where images are formed. The robot delivers an extremely small dose of medicine to restore blood flow and vision. That makes me think that this little tiny thing has batteries and little propellers and some kind of knowledge to know where to go in the eye. I have a hard time believing that. Thats right, so the way we energize this is we use externally generated electroMagnetic Fields. So basically, its a magnet, and. Pogue to make the device small enough, brad had to abandon the idea that robots have to be mechanical. Instead he focused on finding a material that would let him eliminate bulky moving parts. He chose two elements samarium and cobalt. Combined, they form a material highly sensitive to Magnetic Fields, which means that brad can direct the movement of the robot without touching it. Once again, a material replaces a machine and the device gets smaller. So then besides just the robot, what we also have is this system here of electromagnets, and so what each of these copper coils do is they generate Magnetic Fields. Oh, man. Yeah, you got a bunch of them in every direction. And so we have eight of these here. Thats why we call this the octomag. Octomag . Thats right. Pogue the octomag. By adjusting the strength of these eight electromagnets, the surgeon can move the micro robot any direction along the x, y or z axis, pushing or pulling it through the eye. But landing it on the tiny section of retina thats used for seeing in sharp detail takes lots of practice. And youve been practicing with dummy eyeballs so far . Nelson we use that, but we also use animal eyes as well. We get pigs eyes from our local butcher, so. You buy eyeballs from the butcher, from cadavers . Thats right christos, one of my ph. D. Students here, christos goes in the morning, early in the morning to the butcher and asks for eyeballs. Pogue christos, how are you . Fine. laughing oh, my god. These are the pig eyes. Exactly. Twenty pig eyes fresh from the butcher. Ready to be prepared for experiments. You must be a big hit around halloween. And what about this guy, whats this all about . Ah, we call him mr. Pig eye guy. Mr. Pig eye guy . Well, you have to give them a name. Then we put the eyes in this hole here. pogue laughing pogue once the eyeball is secured inside the socket, we insert a light probe. Christos thats the light there. Oh, i can actually see the light in it very cool. Pogue this tiny led lets us see what were doing when we drive the robot. So, this is the robot right here . Mmhmm. Okay, and this isnt fake. Were really seeing this live from the microscope right now, right . Yes. You can move this guy around. Okay, sure enough. I push right, he goes right. Left he goes left. Lets see when i go down over here. And then you can pull up. Oh, its getting bigger. Exactly, this means that its moving higher, away from the retina. Oh, man i think i just banged the top of the. Exactly, so. Cornea or whatever you. Thats the very top, and this is where the liquid ends, so you see this effect. Now let me push down. When you push down it starts slowly going into the retina. Im sinking. Sinking wow, thats really cool. So now youve reached the bottom. Youre touching the retina. Yeah, its quite responsive. Can go right up here. Pogue eventually brad hopes that there will be a commercial version of his Device Installed in doctors offices. The magnets will be arranged in a housing that surrounds the patients head while the doctor peers through a microscope to guide the drugfilled robot. Brads initial success combining materials and Magnetic Fields to make tiny devices has encouraged him to be even more ambitious. His goal is to build a robot that can swim through blood vessels. But along the way hes discovered that the smaller you go, the stranger the world becomes. Oh, dear, looks like the grad students have left their things out again. Pogue and the harder it is to get around. Nelson so what weve seen so far are the micro robots for the eye. Were interested in going even smaller and trying to make smaller robots. So i set up an experiment here to kind of show you what some of the problems are when we try to make small things swim and why its so much different than how big things like fish or toys like this swim in water. Okay. So what weve got here are two tanks. One is just regular water, out of the tap. This other one is glycerin. Its much thicker, kind of like oil or corn syrup, something thick like that. So lets look at how Something Like this toy goldfish is going to swim in water. Wind her up . Wind her up and let her go. toy clicking okay, the tail goes back and forth. Just the way youd expect. Id say that swimming is fairly effective. Okay, hes got a twin over there. Lets see how he does in glycerin. And this one is going to go in the goop. toy buzzing and he wags his tail and he laughs . Doesnt move at all. This helps us illustrate how water feels when you get small. So if you took yourself and you made yourself about 10,000 times smaller and you jumped in this pool of water, you would actually feel more like you were swimming in glycerin here, or goopy stuff like honey or something thick like that. Pogue a swimmer the size of a bacterium would never be able to get around using flippers or the breast stroke, because at that size, the friction from the water molecules becomes a major drag. For a long time, scientists couldnt figure out how bacteria were able to swim. But eventually they discovered the secret. The tail or flagellum seems to move back and forth. But viewed from another angle, its clear that it moves in a totally different way. A corkscrew tail. A corkscrew tail. Pogue brad and his team have developed corkscrew robots that mimic bacteria. Bacteria like e. Coli and salmonella have developed these flagella that twist. This part is the flagella . This flagella twists through the liquid just like a corkscrew going into a bottle of wine. So instead of propelling itself or using its inertia, its actually kind of cutting through the fluid. Its almost pulling itself instead of pushing itself. Its pulling itself in a sense, like a screw going into wood or Something Like that. Its a completely different material interaction. Very cool. Pogue they use the same samariumcobalt material and Magnetic Fields to set them in motion. Pogue so its literally, like, drilling its way through that liquid. Its drilling its way up. Wow pogue this is the biggest one. The smallest one is only 30 microns long. Thats 30 millionths of a meter, about a third the width of a human hair. Nelson so, now just in the last few years, weve actually been able to build small things of a similar size and shape to real bacteria that swim just like they do, potentially deep inside a persons body. Pogue the magnetdriven robots in brads lab the eye bot, the flagella bot and even a soccerplaying robot that his students created are each no bigger than a dust speck. Brads learned to modify his robots to overcome the physical obstacles in the microscopic realm. But hes only scratched the surface of the Strange Properties in that infinitessimal world. An atom is actually a fraction of a nanometer. Pogue chad mirkin is an explorer and pioneer in this weird realm the nano world. You keep saying youre building things on the nanometer scale. I dont even know what a nanometer is. So this is a meter, this is a centimeter, this is a millimeter. Is this a nanometer . Whats a nanometer . Let me try to illustrate it for you. If we shrink you by a factor of two, youre about the size of a small child. We continue to shrink you by a factor of two four more times, youre about the size of a golf ball. We go to ten, youre now the size of an ant. We keep going another seven times, and now youre about the diameter of a human hair. Thats roughly what we can see with the naked eye. Pogue even after so much shrinking, im not even close to the nano scale. Cut me in half five more times, and im the size of a red blood cell. Five more times, im a virus. Seven more times and im finally one nanometer in size one billionth of a meter. Thats less than half the width of dna. It seems unimaginable that we might harness materials this small. But in fact, its not all that new. People have been using nanotechnology almost unknowingly for centuries. For example, back in the middle ages, when stained glass windows were made, they were using tiny little particles to get the beautiful colors. You simply need to go to Canterbury Cathedral and you can see the effects of nanotechnology in the beautiful glass windows. Pogue Canterbury Cathedral. Some of the stained glass in here is nearly a thousand years old. With so much history under one roof, its no surprise that the cathedral needs a fulltime staff of glass preservationists. So this is the paint station. This is like my local home depot with different swatches, right . Its a little bit like that, yes. Pogue this is leonie seliger, the head restorer at the cathedral. Ive come in search of ancient nanotech secrets. Um, what were looking at here are stains. The stain gets fired, so its like pottery glaze. Its fused onto the surface of the glass. Okay. The trouble is that you dont just paint a yellow color on glass and you know how deep and how rich it is. You have to use a chemical process. So, to make yellow, you mix silver with clay. Silver and the heat actually produces a yellow glass. Wow pogue shes using silver chloride, which in its natural form looks like small, silvery crystals. Leonie mixes a tiny amount with red clay. Seliger its a silver salt that is mixed with this clay. I got you. You cant see it; what you see is the clay. Okay, okay. You would then paint that on. Ive made a little series here where ive now applied this clay, and after its fired if i then wipe that off. Presto. Oh, look at that from silver clay comes a golden color. Theres some kind of voodoo chemistry going on there for sure. Thats the mystery. Pogue somehow this is nanotechnology at work. In the heating process, the silver crystals break down into tiny nanoparticles and turn yellow. But it only works on this glass. Pogue and thats not all. Leonie assures me that there are several other metals used in stained glass where nanotech creates surprising color results. Copper would give you. Brown. Or red. Red . Or green. Thats just bizarre. Gold gives you beautiful rich pink glass, even rich ruby glass. And why is that . Why is something that we think of as gold, why does it come out red . Ask a chemist. both laughing its magic. It is a bit. I mean, in the middle ages, of course, it was always a closely guarded secret, what makes what color, at which temperature. Pogue when artists first learned how to change the colors of metals, it must have seemed like alchemy. But in fact, it had something to do with changes at the smallest possible scale. I want to get to the bottom of that mystery. So this is your inventory here . This is our stock. Pogue so im digging a little deeper at the english antique glass company, which makes the colored glass used to repair canterburys windows. These come all blues. Wow. Pogue these sheets are crafted by hand, still using the same techniques that were developed in the 12th century. Pogue how many establishments are there . Making this . One. Were the only makers of flat glass, traditional methods, in the uk and ireland. Pogue this is mike tuffey, the head of production here. He and his team of glassblowers are able to achieve the same rich colors found in the cathedral. But they start with clear glass, which is made from a mix of sand, limestone, sodium carbonate and other minerals. Oh, my gosh, thats it . Thats it. Thats the next great cathedral window right there . Thats the next great cathedral window right there. It looks like kitty litter. It doesnt even look like glass. We just put that in the furnace. This is a rod we use for the different colors. Pogue the rods contain concentrated amounts of the metals that create color when added to the clear glass. The color appears when its fired at 1,200 degrees fahrenheit. So, what does it look like when it comes out . Is it a sheet . Is it a blob . Its a blob. Pogue the journey from molten blob to colored glass is an intricate process of shaping, blowing and refiring, resulting in a glass cylinder called a muff. Its this heating and cooling process that creates the final color, thanks to the action of the metal nanoparticles. You slit it and then you have a flattening machine that uncurls it . Thats it. Thats a gold, pink muff. Theres gold dust in there . Yes. But it doesnt look gold, it looks pinkish. No, gold gives you pink. Gold gives you pink . Gold gives you pink. Why would that be . Um, you would need to talk to a chemist on that one. laughing i plan to do that. Pogue same answer. Im 0 for two with the stained glass people. So i went to Canterbury Cathedral, and i actually spoke to the guy who makes the glass and the lady who does the repairs on those windows and they said, sure enough, they add gold to the glass to make it red. It doesnt make any sense. And you know what they told me . We have no clue. But youre the scientist man. You should. You should be able to explain why gold makes red. Well, it turns out if you can control the size of a gold particle, if you can shrink it to this nanometerlength scale, you have completely different optical properties. Gold is no longer gold. When taken to the 13nanometer size, its ruby red in color. Pogue when light rays hit a colored material, some colors are absorbed and some are reflected. Thats why roses are red and violets are blue. Many metals, like gold and silver, reflect most of the colors in visible light, which is why they can be polished to shine like mirrors. But when a particle of gold is made very small below 100 nanometers, 100 billionths of a meter the particle begins to absorb shorter wavelengths of light, toward the blue end of the spectrum. The smaller the particle, the more blue is absorbed and the redder it appears. But it gets even stranger. Because not only size matters, shape does too. Each of these vials contains water with silver nanoparticles dissolved in it. The only difference between them is the shape of the particles. In this test, silver rods give you yellow, silver triangles green, silver prisms give you blue. If metals behaved like this in our big world, then just changing the size or shape of your car would alter its color. Chad sees tremendous potential in this weird nano phenomenon. With almost an infinite number of possibilities, you no longer have to take what nature gives you. You can adjust color simply by becoming a nano architect. Pogue scientists call this strange property of small materials structural color. The living world figured this out millions of years ago. Structural color on the nano scale creates the iridescent pigments in butterfly wings, beetle shells and peacock feathers. Well, why do we care . I mean, cool, little tiny gold particles are really red. I mean, how does that help mankind . Well, the reason we care is that once you discover new properties, those new properties almost always lead to new applications. There are already a number of medical applications. Chad mirkin has developed a technology that harnesses the unique properties of gold and silver nanoparticles to test for genetic variations in patients. Sequencing dna is expensive and time consuming. But chads revolutionary test takes less than two hours. I offered to bleed for science to see how it works. And your name is . David. Okay, so were doing a little blood draw today. You can relax. Is this the, uh, extraction bench . Yes, this is. Pogue first, a technician extracts pure dna from my blood sample. This is my dna . This is your dna. Pogue he then loads it into a small, disposable cartridge and inserts it into the machine for testing. This test can actually read the letters of my dna. And using gold nanoparticles, it flags variations that might make me unusually sensitive to particular drugs, or even mutations that signal heightened risk for disease. Less than two hours after drawing my blood, the results are in. It turns out that the test has some interesting news for me about my sensitivity to a blood thinning drug called warfarin, or coumadin. Its commonly prescribed to stroke and cardiac patients. Its a potentially lifesaving drug, but if the dosage is wrong, it can cause fatal bleeding. So whats my warfarin dosage . What they call a double hit, im sorry to say. laughing a double hit . Youre a double hit. So you have two genes that are mutated, and therefore youre very sensitive to warfarin and your calculated dose is 2. 7 milligrams. See, i knew it my mother always said it would be like 2. 6 or 2. 5, but i always said, no, mom, mines 2. 7. You should always listen to your mom, though, david. Pogue the nanosphere test gave me some crucial information. Technician this is the mutation. Pogue quickly enough to save my life, if id been ill. Its a diagnostic tool. The next goal is to fight illness in the body at the same tiny scale. Samuel wickline okay, so when we inject this, it will go in the blood stream and find the cancer, like a rocket guidance system. Pogue sam wickline has invented a nano device thats smaller than a virus. Engineered atom by atom, his hunterkiller robots are designed to travel by the billions in the bloodstream. Theyre preprogrammed by a doctor to seek out specific types of cancer cells and then destroy them with none of the side effects associated with current drug therapies. Its the ultimate fantastic voyage dream. And its borrowing a page from these little guys. Pogue wow see here now. Whoa this is full of honey. See, theres probably 35 pounds of honey in there. Oh, my gosh. In fact, ill take it out and show you. Pogue hes brought me to meet beekeeper ted jansen to get a closeup look at the inspiration behind the science. Jansen now, see, heres one thats already stung me, see . What, what . But arent you gonna say ow or something . No, that. See. Oh, my gosh. See, thats the little venom sac that they leave. Its not the stinger that hurts you, its the venom going in you. Pogue a bee sting may seem like a minor irritation, but actually the venom is extremely toxic to cells. Jansen immediately when you get it out of there, the pain stops. So why would it have been bad for you to just pluck it out . Because you squeeze the sack and squeeze all the venom. Oh, i see, i see. So, sam, youre not here to see how they make honey. Wickline no, we like the bees because they make a toxin. The toxin is melittin. And we use it to specifically treat cancers. Bee venom is a cancer drug . Yes, bee venom is an excellent cancer drug. Its been known for quite some time, but the problem is how to deliver it. Pogue melittin is not being used yet to fight cancer, because it will destroy any cell it bumps into, including healthy ones. But realizing its potential, sam set out to engineer a nanoscale robot to carry the toxin safely through the body and release it only when it finds its target. Not surprisingly, he calls his invention nanobees. Each nanobee has three parts. So, what weve got here is a model. Pogue sam explains with a simple demonstration of how they fit together. This basically is a sphere of carbon and fluorine atoms that forms the carrier for that melittin. Pogue the center of the nanobee is a nanoparticle constructed out of several thousand carbon and fluorine atoms arranged in a spherical cluster less than 300 nanometers in diameter. And then we have a coating on that, which is a fatty kind of a coating. And this fatty coating allows us to insert the melittin toxin into this particle here. They would be all over this thing. Exactly. Pogue this outer layer holds the deadly bee poison in place. Its like a holster that keeps a gun safe until its drawn. Every tumor cell has a distinct chemical makeup. The outer layer of the nanobee is programmed to selectively lock on to only those cells that need to be destroyed. So, if you take this balloon as a cancer cell, this nanoparticle will come up next to the cancer cell and basically merge with it. The coating will come off, and the melittin itself forms a hole in the cancer cell and pops it. Pogue like its namesake, a nanobee can sting only once. So swarms of them are required for any treatment. Sams lab has decoded the chemical makeup of the bee venom so he can manufacture it in large quantities for his nanobee swarms. I say goodbye to our beekeeping hosts in order to pay a visit to sams lab at Washington University to see how the nanobees work in the body. Wickline so here we are in the Magnetic Resonance imaging suite. Im going to show you what its like to be a patient as if we were looking for nanobees inside of you. And may i just say what a boost this gives my dignity to wear a sundress and slide into a giant bagel. Well, lets go toast you. Pogue an mri uses strong Magnetic Fields and radio waves to detect certain molecules in the body. Hi, come on in. Pogue this machine has been tuned to detect fluorine atoms, which are part of the nanobee molecules but are otherwise very rare in the body. Wickline okay, you having fun in there yet . Were rolling. Pogue i think i remember this ride. I think i did it at six flags. Pogue if sam had actually injected nanobees into me and if i had the cancer that theyd been trained to fight. Youre going to start hearing some noise. Pogue . They would travel in my bloodstream and stick to any target tissue they encounter. The images that the technicians see would show bright yellow areas where the individual nanobees were finding and killing the diseased cells. And best of all, there would be no toxic side effects as with traditional chemotherapy. Pogue so, sam, how far away are we from using nanobees in everyday human Cancer Patients . Well, now this material is being tested in whats called preclinical stage. And we hope that within about a year or so that well have approval to test this in humans. Well, thanks, sam. I appreciate this experiment. So, typically how long would you leave the patient, uh, lying in this tube . Guys . Guys . Hello . Hello . Pogue like the nanoscale transistors that came before them, nanobees get their power from their tiny size. But nanobees and other emerging Nano Technologies go even further. Wickline so this is where melittin is made. Pogue nanobees are part of a new breed of small materials that selfassemble. No need for big complicated machinery to make nanobees. Put the right ingredients together in the right conditions and they make themselves. This revolution in medicine, working at the tiniest of scales, would never have been possible without the revolution in electronics that preceded it. Both are transforming our world and our lives at an astonishing speed. As we see the power in this new ability to design and build atom by atom, there may be no more important goal in the science of materials than mastering the art of making stuff smaller. Biodegradable plastics. Weve gone from this to this. A new approach to fuel cell cars. Here it is, folks, the future of American Hydrogen storage. Host david pogue investigates new materials on the cutting edge of clean. Seems like a scene from willy wonka. Oh, look at this the soy foam is taking over the soybased seat cushions are performing well at 40 miles an hour. Major funding for rnova is provided by the following we know why were here. To chart a greener path in the air and in our factories. Man to find cleaner, more efficient ways to power flight. And harness our technology for new energy solutions. Around the globe, the people of boeing are working together to build a better tomorrow. Thats why were here. Supporting nova and promoting public understanding of science. And the corporation for public broadcasting and major funding for making stuff is provided by the National Science foundation. Additional funding by [we shall overcome we shall overcome vo kennedy tried to talk the aders out of the march oh, deep in our hearts vo we have to put an end to segregation i do believe vo we have to have a National Protest and we need to do it now. We shall all have peace, lord, lord one day yeah yeah yeah yeah the exploration continues on novas website, where you can watch this and other nova programs, see expert interviews, interactives, video extras and more. Follow nova on facebook and twitter, and find us online at pbs. Org nova. Captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org this nova program is available on dvd and bluray at shoppbs. Org, or call 1800playpbs. Im susie gharib with a nightly Business Report news brief. No clarity from the Federal Reserve today about when the central bank might begin pulling back on the massive bond buying stimul stimulus measures. That uncertainty led to wild swings in the stock market. The dow was lower for the sixth session in a row falling 105 points ending below the level. The nasdaq lost 13 points, the s p off by nine points. Hewlett packard netted 1. 5 billion profit in the last quarter but sales of pcs fell 8 . Sales of existing homes in july shot up 6. 5 , far more than expected but wells fargo is laying off 2,300 mortgage lending workers with a drop in refinancing. Be sure to tune into rose welcome to the program. Its summertime, and were looking back at some of the our most interesting conversations with the past year. Tonight, we return to our recent conversation with Kate Blanchet. She stars in the latest film by woody allen blue jasmine. Its also a wonderful australian playwright who unfortunately passed away, nick enwright. I encountered him at drama school, a very, very dear and special man. He went around table in our first year and said why are you here . And what do you want why are you an actor . And no one said it, but he said, well, i actually we always came up with selfish reasons, and he said i think acting reveals what it is to be human. And it is a hell thing, and thats why i maybe keep doing it because its it humanizes me. Rose kate branchet for the hour, next. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications rose Kate Blanchet is here. She is an academy awardinning actress. In the aviator she was kate hepburn. In im not there she was bob kill an, in woody allens new movie, kate plays a woman on the verge. David benbee of the new yorker calls it most complicated and demanding performance of her movie career. Here is the trailer for blue jasmine. Let. What do you think . I love it you spoil me so. Who else am i going to spoil . He met me at a party and swept me off my feet. I fell in love with the name jasmine. No, i have never been to san francisco. Ill be staying with my sister. Jasmine. Look at you your place is homey. The flight was bumpy. The food was awful. Youd think first class. I thought you were tapped out. Im dead broke. Really. I mean the government took everything. All i can say is you look great. Oh, now whos lying . Is there anything you want that you dont have . Sweetheart, its beautiful. When your sister had all that money she wanted nothing to do with you. Now that shes broke all of a sudden shes moving in. Shes not just broke. Shes all screwed up. Excuse me, are you talking to me. One minute youre on top of the world, the next, the guy turned out to be a crook. How long are you planning on staying with ginger . No one wants to get out of here as a matter o as a matter. Im sure this is a big comedown for you. I want to to know i lost every cent of my own money. I was
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.