1. What is a Nanometer? What is a Nanometer? PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
What is a Nanometer?
Science of Technology
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2. How Nanotechnology Works
What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology deals with materials and machines on an incredibly tiny scale, less than one billionth of a meter.
How Nanotechnology Works
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How Nanotechnology Works
2:19 minutes
Nanotechnology deals with materials and machines on an incredibly tiny scale.
When Things Get Small $19.95 purchase from: or click on link to show.
First Aired: 11/30/ minutes What could a stadium-sized bowl of peanuts, a shrinking elephant, and a crazed hockey player have to do with nanoscience? Those are just a few of the goofy excursions that await you when witty host Adam Smith and wacky physicist Ivan Schuller take you on an irreverent, madcap, comically corny romp into the real-life quest to create the smallest magnet ever known.
What’s Nano
~ 5 minutes
Faneuil Hall only gets about 300,000 visitors a year--not even close to a billion! The number of candy hearts made in a factory each day was 5 million--closer, but still not a billion. Finally, we counted the blades of grass in a football field and discovered that there are about 995 million blades of grass in an entire football field! That's almost a billion! Then we went to Harvard to meet up with Dave, Ellen, Richard and David in order to find something that was one nanometer long. We tried a bacterium, which was about 2000 nanometers; a virus, which was 631 nanometers; a path on a computer chip, which was 200 nanometers; and finally a little piece of nanowire, which was only 1 nanometer across! Our nanoquest was complete!
When Things Get Small
What’s Nano

3. Nanotechnology How big is a nanometer?
What is a Nanometer?
Nanotechnology
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How big is a nanometer?
A nanometer is 10-9 (a billionth) of a meter.
The prefix nano is Greek for dwarf.
If a DNA helix is approximately 2nm, how many nanometers is:
The length of a typical bacterium? 1,000nm
The width of a red blood cell? 10,000nm
The width of a piece of hair? 100,000nm
Diameter
of human
hair
Red
blood
cells
Bacterium
DNA
helix
1cm 1mm 100μm 10μm μm nm nm nm Ǻ
BIG
μm = micrometer or micron nm = nanometer Ǻ = Angstrom
SMALL

4. Nanoscale Examples What is a Nanometer? PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
All dimensions are approximate.

5. What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Big Is a Billion?
1,000,000,000 or 109
How many grains of salt are in a salt shaker?
How tall would a stack of 1 billion pieces of paper be?
How long would it take you to count to 1 billion?
Record student answers on the board.

6. How Big Is a Billion? How many grains of salt are in: 1 pinch 1 cup
What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Big Is a Billion?
How many grains of salt are in:
1 pinch
1 cup
1 gallon (16 cups in a gallon)
How many cups of salt are needed for 1 billion grains?
~1,000 grains
~1,000,000 grains
~16,000,000 grains
Discuss with students that the answer is an approximation – how difficult would it be to count every grain of salt?
~1,000 cups

7. What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Big Is a Billion?
How big is the container that holds 1,000 cups or 1 billion grains of salt?
The size of your bathtub!
60 gallons x 16 cups per gallon = 960 cups

8. How Big Is a Billion? How tall is 1 billion sheets of paper?
What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Big Is a Billion?
How tall is 1 billion sheets of paper?
Measure the height of 25 sheets of paper to the nearest mm.
Therefore, the height of 100 sheets of paper is?
So, the height of 1,000,000,000 sheets of paper is?
Have a student measure a stack of 25 sheets of paper using a metric ruler.
25 sheets is ~ 5 mm, 100 sheets is 20mm or 2cm.
1,000,000,000 = 20,000,000 cm or 200,000 m

9. What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Big Is a Billion?
One story of a building is approximately 3 m high. How many stories would a billion sheets of paper be?
~ 66,667 stories or 125 miles high

10. What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Big Is a Billion?
How long would it take you to count to 1 billion?
Have someone time you while you count from 1-10 at a normal speaking rate.
How many seconds would it take you to count from 1-100?
How many seconds would it take you to count from 1-1,000?
~ 7 seconds to count to 10, therefore 70 seconds to count to 100 and 700 seconds to count to 1,000

11. What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Big Is a Billion?
How many seconds would it take you to count from 1-1,000,000,000?
How many minutes would it take you to count from 1-1,000,000,000?
How many years would it take you to count from 1-1,000,000,000?
Therefore, 700,000,000 seconds to count to 1 billion, which is equal to 11,700,000 minutes or 22.3 years

12. How Small Is a Billionth?
What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Small Is a Billionth?
Which number is larger, 1 billion or 1 million?
Which quantity is bigger, one part per million or one part per billion?
Would you prefer to have a concentration of toxic substance in your drinking water at one part per billion or one part per million?

13. How Small Is a Billionth?
What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Small Is a Billionth?
What does it mean when you say that you have one in ten chances of winning a game?
1 out of 10 chances means a 10 percent chance. If there were 10 players, only 1 would win. Lead a discussion of what a percent is. How many cents in a dollar, how many years in a century, etc. Root word cent means 100. Percent equals parts per hundred.

14. How Small Is a Billionth?
What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Small Is a Billionth?
This is a 10% solution of water and food coloring. How was it made?
Hold up beaker of water with 95 milliliters of water in it. If you want a 5% salt solution in the beaker, how much water and how much salt should be in it?
Hold up beaker of water and red food coloring, a 10% solution. How was it made? 10 parts of red food coloring and 90 parts of water.

15. How Small Is a Billionth?
What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
How Small Is a Billionth?
What is a nanometer?
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Molecular Gears
Molecular Propeller

16. Nanometer A unit of measure One billionth of a meter, 10-9
What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
Nanometer
A unit of measure
One billionth of a meter, 10-9
So small that you need a scanning probe microscope or an atomic force microscope to see an object this size

17. What is a Nanometer?
PLTW Gateway
Unit 5 – Lesson 5.2 – Nanotechnology
Image Resources
Microsoft, Inc. (2009). Clip Art. Retrieved January 30, 2009, from
National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). (n.d.). Big things from a tiny world. Retrieved February 3, 2009, from