A carbon nanotube. Image courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

So many advances in renewable energy and transportation depend on battery technology that doesn’t yet exist. We need batteries with a high energy density that are lightweight and cheap for the widespread use of the energy of the sun when it is not shining, and the energy of the wind when it is not blowing. We need better battery technology to make hybrid and electric cars and trucks cheaper to make and cheaper to run than gasoline cars and trucks.

A battery the size, weight, and cost of a piece of paper would be ideal. This isn’t something out of the Jetsons. Today, with nanotechnology, scientists create super lightweight and super conducting tubes and wires using single atoms as the basic building blocks. Scientists at Stanford University are learning how to coat ordinary paper with an ink composed of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires to make an excellent energy storage device.

Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, is leading the research team that is creating the new batteries in the laboratory. The team has put the paper and ink batteries—quite literally—to the acid test. You can crumple the paper, or dip it in an acidic fluid, and it will still work. Dr. Cui and his colleagues published a report, “Highly Conductive Paper for Energy Storage Devices," in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper and ink storage devices, both as batteries or capacitors, may become the ideal energy storage medium for automobiles. Capacitors, which charge and release energy much more quickly than batteries, may be a better fit for automobiles, since car batteries charge and discharge quickly, compared to other energy storage devices. The lightweight, inexpensive, and energy dense batteries may be ideal for use in the electricity grid, to store energy when it is cheap and abundant and deliver it when it is expensive and hard to come by. And, since you can fold the ink and paper battery and it will still work—the self-powered paper airplane is a real possibility. We just need to get the mechanical engineers to come up with some lightweight flappers.

For more on technology, check out QUEST's "Nanotechnology Takes Off":

Lawrence Berkeley Lab's TEAM 0.5 is capable of resolving individual carbon atoms in the honeycomb crystal structure of graphene. See QUEST's video The World's Most Powerful Microscope for more information. Image source: Nano LettersThe twentieth century’s most important physicist after Albert Einstein is almost certainly Richard Feynman. Known as much for his eccentricities as for his brilliance, he spent his adolescent spare time picking locks, translated Mayan hieroglyphics as an adult, and was one of the few people brash enough to attempt viewing the U.S.’s first atomic bomb test without protective sunglasses. Feynman’s chief scientific contribution was the development of QED, a fundamental and astonishingly accurate description of electricity and magnetism. However, he was also a champion of the practical, and in 1959 gave a gave a prophetic speech at Caltech to his colleagues entitled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” The speech described a rich world of possibilities that could arise if we only applied ourselves toward controlling matter on smaller and smaller scales.

Fifty years later, a new field of nanotechnology has exploded. At the cutting edge, researchers are successfully manufacturing everything from corporate logos to radios that are all small enough to be stacked end-to-end perhaps a million items long across the proverbial head of a pin. The advent of personal computers and smart phones has brought the power of such miniaturization into sharp focus for the general public. In a very real sense, we have all become bottom feeders. Below is a brief progress report on the state of the field.

Microscopes: The old adage “seeing is believing” was not lost on Feynman back in the late fifties. He noted that many of the most fundamental questions in biology could be readily solved if we only had the ability to see the molecules directly. Today, new inventions such as the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the atomic force microscope (AFM), and the transmission electron microscope (TEM) have all achieved resolution at the scale where individual atoms can actually be seen and manipulated.

Miniature Motors: Perhaps the speech’s most imaginative scenario, due to Feynman’s friend (and graduate student) Albert Hibbs, was the concept of being able to “swallow the surgeon.” Feynman imagined that we might some day be able to construct robots capable of repairing or investigating the inner reaches of an ailing patient’s body. Mixing engineering and biology like this can run quickly into thorny ethical questions. Nevertheless, interesting progress has been made. Researchers in Alex Zettl’s group at UC Berkeley have recently constructed a nano motor, for example.

Information Storage: Using order-of-magnitude arguments, Feynman argued that the Encyclopedia Britannica could be squeezed into a pin’s area if the text were reduced by a factor of 25,000. He offered a $1,000 prize to the first person capable of printing one page of any book at this scale. Tom Newman, a graduate student at Stanford, first accomplished this in 1986 with an impressive reprinting of the first page of Dickens’ classic A Tale of Two Cities. Today, you can buy the book in its entirety for only 1.9 megabytes. For a high-end smart phone with 30 gigabytes of memory, you could perhaps hold 15,000 books within the palm of your hand. Not bad.

Then again, at the extreme limit, Feynman also reasoned that you ought to be able to squeeze the text of every book that has ever been written (now more than 32 million titles according the Library of Congress) within the confines of a single speck of dust. We still have a long way to go.

When I was assigned to work on our QUEST story on nanotechnology, I braced myself for the complex terrain ahead. The focus is on the public policy implications of the surge in consumer goods containing nanoparticles. And just how big is the market for nano-manufactured goods? According to the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, a partnership between the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, there are hundreds of products available to consumers that contain manufactured nanomaterials. They run the gamut from tennis rackets to toothpaste to air purifiers and even stuffed animals which contain antibacterial nanosilver. Lux Research projects that the worldwide market for nano-manufactured goods will exceed 2 trillion dollars by 2014.

Meanwhile, the federal government has been criticized for failing to regulate more stringently the use of nanoparticles and for not investing enough dollars to study the effects of their exposure. Even when the federal authorities do act, like when they ruled that germ-killing products laced with nanosilver must be registered as pesticides, it makes you scratch your head at how outdated some of our environmental laws are and ill-equipped to deal with materials that came online after the laws were written.

The nuts and bolts of producing this story were challenging as well. To lay out the public policy debate, we needed to get opinions and facts from an environmental organization, the federal government and a firm that is actually manufacturing products at the nano-scale. I was also fortunate to get access to Kent Pinkerton and his colleagues at UC Davis, who are studying the exposure effects of quantum dots and carbon nanotubes on rodents. Special thanks goes to my Associate Producer, Jenny Oh, for securing an important interview with Dr. John Howard, the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. As I was about to commence my interview with Dr. Howard, I ran through with him the list of questions, including one about respirators and whether they would adequately protect exposure to materials that are thousands of times smaller than the human hair. Without missing a beat, Dr. Howard grabbed his pen, asked me for a sheet of paper and drew a sketch of a filter lattice, explaining how yes, thanks to Brownian motion, the tiny nanoparticles would be moving around so wildly that they would bounce off the surface of the lattice. Bigger particles, on the other hand, may get through the lattice.

Discussion about nanotechnology, its benefits, its risks, the knowns and unknowns will continue for some time. Perhaps QUEST will revisit nanotechnology as new breakthroughs emerge and science reveals more clearly how nanoparticles affect the environment and living organisms.

Watch the "Macro Concerns in a Nano World" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.