The Butterfly Effect

If you live in the UK and happened to have tuned into BBC 1 at 9pm on Monday, you would have noticed a programme called Richard Hammond's Miracles of Nature. If you missed it, the first episode entitled: Super-Bodies can be seen on the BBC iPlayer now (UK only).

But why highlight this you maybe asking? Good question. Well, the answer is quite simple, we featured in it from 45 minutes in :)

The show, which has three, one-hour episodes, follows Richard Hammond around the world as he takes a closer look at some amazing animals and how their natural abilities are inspiring new technological developments. In the show, we learn how the way a giraffe controls it blood pressure when bending down to drink has inspired the development of fighter pilot suits to combat the stresses of g-forces. In addition, did you know that a woodpecker's skull is teaching us how to develop more protective crash helmets - demonstrated in the show by dropping a light bulb from space in a protective casing designed to be like the scull of the woodpecker.

As the episode approaches its conclusion, attention turns to South America, in particular the rainforest, where a creature with a unique ability lives, the Morpho Butterfly.



The Morpho Butterfly - As seen of BBC 1s Miracles of Nature

So what makes this butterfly unique? As you can imagine, living in the forests of South America, it rains alot, and if only a fraction of water was to be absorbed into its wing, the result would cause the butterfly to be unstable as the water would make their wings heavy and flying impossible. However, the butterfly combats this with a clever adaption, its wings are totally water repellent, meaning that any rain drops that do come into contact with it, simply bead up and roll off. Sounding familiar?

In nature, there are many examples of animals and plants that have developed water repellent surfaces to ensure they stay dry - the lotus leaf being one particular example. And of course, we have all heard of the expression 'like water off a duck's back'? Which although has different connotations, does originally refer to the way a ducks feathers repel water, staying light and dry even when submerged.

How is it then that the Morpho butterfly, lotus leaf and feathers from a duck repel water so well? To answer that you need a microscope with significant zoom. While the wings on the Morpho butterfly look and feel smooth, when viewed on the nanoscale (x1000) it is clear that they are actually made up of millions of tiny ridges. Although we can't see it with the naked eye, these invisible ridges ensure that only the smallest amounts of water actually comes into contact with the surface, resulting in the water remaining in droplet/bead form and simply rolling off.

If you are familiar with our technology you will know that any water that comes into contact with our coating beads up and rolls off. There is however a difference as to how this roll off effect is created. Our technology is applied as a surface chemistry, meaning the coating is molecularly bonded to the surface of products given it a low surface energy in order to repel water. The butterfly however, has a natural surface roughness to its wings which creates an air-liquid interface which effectively lowers the surface energy and repels water. In nature this technique works well but the reason we use a surface chemistry over roughness is due to its durability. When a roughness coating is applied to man-made objects it is not chemically bonded to its surface resulting in the durability and repellency diminishing very quickly. Not a problem in nature as the butterfly can replace its surface when required but in man-made products, a surface chemistry such as P2i technology is a more effective and reliable option for repelling water.
 
We achieve this water repellency by placing complete products within a chamber where our coating is applied in a gas form, molecularly bonding to both the external and internal materials, altering their surface energy. The result: a completely water repellent product. You can see how our coating is applied to smartphones in our video below:

For Miracles of Nature, the BBC wanted to take it one step further and we were tasked with treating more unusual items, such as a newspaper, egg carton and an entire white suit. To see the results you will have to watch the show, it is worth it we promise, but below are some stills to give you a little teaser:

Water repellent newspaper

 

Water repellent egg carton

Hydrophobic suit (As seen on BBC 1s Miracles of Nature)

As a finale, Richard discusses a dilemma that a lot of us have perhaps experienced but never really spoken about... dropping our phones down the toilet. According to the show, 19% of us admitted to having suffered this first hand! And in the majority of cases the results have not been good, e.g. a broken and dead phone.

 

This however is no longer a problem, as Richard demonstrates by dropping a P2i treated smartphone down the toilet, retrieving it when a call comes through and answering it. This showcases that with our water repellent coating, smartphones and other electronics need no longer fear accidental splashes, spill and the dreaded drop down the toilet.

 

Do check out the show if you can and if you have any questions about our technology, don't hesitate to ask in the comment box below or you can also reach us on Facebook and Twitter.

 

We will leave you will a slow-motion clip of a smartphones meeting with water but don't worry this phone was treated!

 

 

The Importance of Being Wet - Nature's Nanotech (4)

Image from Wikipedia

The image that almost always springs to mind when nanotechnology is mention is Drexler’s tiny army of assemblers and the threat of being overwhelmed by grey goo. But what many forget is that there is a fundamental problem in physics facing anyone building invisibly small robots (nanobots) – something that was spotted by the man who first came up with the concept of working on the nanoscale.

That man was Richard Feynman. His name may not be as well known outside physics circles as, say, Stephen Hawking, but ask a physicist to add a third to a triumvirate of heroes with Newton and Einstein and most would immediately choose Feynman. It didn’t hurt that Richard Feynman was a bongo-playing charmer whose lectures delighted even those who couldn’t understand the science, helped by an unexpected Bronx accent – imagine Tony Curtis lecturing on quantum theory.

Feynman became best known to the media for his dramatic contribution to the Challenger inquiry, when in front of the cameras he plunged an O-ring into iced water to show how it lost its elasticity. But on an evening in December 1959 he gave a lecture that laid the foundation for all future ideas of nanobots. His talk at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society was titled There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, and his subject was manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.

Feynman pointed out that people were amazed by a device that could write the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin. But ‘Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin?’ As he pointed out, the dots that make up a printed image, if reduced to a scale that took the area of paper in the encyclopedia down to pinhead size, would still contain 1,000 atoms each – plenty of material to make a pixel. And it could be read with technology they had already.

Feynman went on to describe how it would be possible to write at this scale, but also took in the idea that the monster computers of his day would have to become smaller and smaller to cram in the extra circuits required for sophisticated computation. Then he described how engineering could be undertaken on the nanoscale, and to do so, he let his imagination run a little wild.

What Feynman envisaged was making use of the servo ‘hands’ found in nuclear plants to act remotely, but instead of making the hands the same size as the original human hands, building them on a quarter scale. He would also construct quarter size lathes to produce scaled down parts for new devices. These quarter scale tools would be used to produce sixteenth scale hands and lathes, which themselves would produce sixty-fourth scale items… and so on, until reaching the nanoscale.

The second component of Feynman’s vision was a corresponding multiplication of quantity, as you would need billions of nanobots to do anything practical. So he would not make one set of quarter scale hands, but ten. Each of those would produce 10 sixteenth scale devices, so there would be 100 of them – and so on. Feynman points out there would not be a problem of space or materials, because one billion 1/4000 scale lathes would only take up two percent of the space and materials of a conventional lathe.

When he discussed running nanoscale machines, Feynman even considered the effect on lubrication. The mechanical devices we are familiar with need oil to prevent them ceasing up. As he pointed out, the effective viscosity of oil gets higher and higher in proportion as you go down in scale. It stops being a lubricant and starts being like attempting to operate in a bowl of tar. But, he argues, you may well not need lubricants, as the bearings won’t run hot because the heat would escape very rapidly from such a small device.

So far, so good, but what is the problem Feynman mentions? He points out that ‘As we go down in size there are a number of interesting problems that arise. All things do not simply scale down in proportion.’ Specifically, as things get smaller they begin to stick together. If you unscrewed a nanonut from a nanobolt it wouldn’t fall off – the Van der Waals force we met on the gecko’s foot is stronger than the force of gravity on this scale. Small things stick together in a big way.

Feynman is aware there would be problems. ‘It would be like those old movies of a man with his hands full of molasses, trying to get rid of a glass of water.’ But he does effectively dismiss the problems. In reality, the nano-engineer doesn’t just have Van der Waals forces to deal with. Mechanical engineering generally involves flat surfaces briefly coming together to transfer force from one to the other, as when the teeth of a pair of gears mesh. But down at the nanoscale a new, almost magical, force springs into life – the Casimir effect.

If two plates get very close, they are attracted towards each other. This has nothing to do with electromagnetism, like the Van der Waals force, but is the result of a weird aspect of quantum theory. All the time, throughout all of space, quantum particles briefly spring into existence, then annihilate each other. An apparently empty vacuum is, in fact, a seething mass of particles that exist for such a short space of time that we don’t notice them.

However, one circumstance when these particles do come to the fore is when there are two sheets of material very close to each other. If the space separating the sheets is close enough, far fewer of these ‘virtual’ particles can appear between them than outside them. The result is a real pressure that pushes the plates together. Tiny parallel surfaces slam together under this pressure.

The result of these effects is that even though toy nanoscale gears have been constructed from atoms, a real nanotechnology machine – a nanobot – would simply not work using conventional engineering. Instead the makers of nanobots need to look to nature. Because the natural world has plenty of nanoscale machines, moving around, interacting and working. What’s the big difference? Biological machines are wet and soft.

By this I don’t mean they use water as a lubricant rather than oil, but rather they are not usually a device made up of a series of interlocking mechanical components like our machines but rather use a totally different approach to mechanisms and interaction that results in a ‘wet’, soft environment lacking flat surfaces and the opportunities for small scale stickiness to get in the way of their workings.

If we are to build nanomachines, our engineers need to think in a totally different way. We need to dismiss Feynman’s picture of miniature lathes, nuts, bolts and gears. Instead our model has to be the natural world and the mechanisms that evolution has generated to make our, admittedly inefficient, but still functioning nanoscale technology work and thrive. The challenge is huge – but so is the potential.

In the next article in this series we will look at the lessons we can learn from a specific example of nature’s ability to manufacture technology on the nanoscale – the remarkable virus.

An Introduction to Nature's Nanotech

Did you know that aspects of nature are built on nanotechnology? Brain Clegg, popular science author has written a series of posts (seven in total) exploring the nanotechnology that exists in nature. The series which is sponsored by P2i begins with an introduction which you can read below.

When we think of nanotechnology, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that we are dealing with the ultimate in artificial manufacturing, the diametric opposite of something that’s natural. Yet in practice, nature is built on nanotechnology. From the day-to-day workings of the components of every single biological cell to the subtle optics of a peacock feather, what we see is nanotechnology at work.
 Not only are the very building blocks of nature nanoscale, but natural nanotechnology is a magnificent inspiration for ways to make use of the microscopic to change our lives and environment for the better. By studying how very small things work in the natural world we can invent remarkable new products – and this feature is the first in a series that will explore just how much we can learn and gain from nature’s nano tech.

As I described in The Nanotechnology Myth the term ‘nanotechnology’ originates from the prefix nano- which is simply a billionth. Nanotechnology makes use of objects on the scale of a few nanometres, where a nanometre is a millionth of a millimetre. For comparison, a human hair is around 50,000 nanometres across. Nanotechnology encompasses objects that vary in size from a large molecule to a virus. A bacterium, typically around 1,000 nanometres in size, is around the upper limit of nanoscale items.

A first essential is to understand that although nanotechnology, like chemistry, is involved in the interaction of very small components of matter, it is entirely different from a chemical reaction. Chemistry is about the way those components join together and break apart. Nanotechnology is primarily about their physics – how the components interact. If we think of the analogy of making a bicycle, the ‘chemistry’ of the bicycle is how the individual components bolt together, the ‘nanotechnology’ is how, for example, the gear interacts with the chain or pushing the pedals makes the bike go.

This distinction is necessary to get over the concern some people raise about nature and nanotechnology. A while ago, when I wrote my book on environmental truth and lies, Ecologic, I had a strange argument with a representative of the Soil Association, the UK’s primary organic body. In 2008 the Soil Association banned nanoparticles from their products. But it only banned man-made nanoparticles, claiming that natural ones, like soot, are fine ‘because life has evolved with these.’

This is a total misunderstanding of the science. If there are any issues with nanotechnology they are about the physics, not the chemistry of the substance – and there is no sensible physical distinction between a natural nanoparticle and an artificial one. In the case of the Soil Association, the reasoning was revealed when they admitted that they take ‘a principles-based regulatory approach, rather than a case-by-case approach based on scientific information.’ In other words their opposition was a knee-jerk one to words like ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ rather than based on substance.

Of themselves, like anything else, nanoparticles and nanotechnology in general can be used for bad or for good. Whether natural or artificial they have benefits and disadvantages. A virus, for example, is a purely natural nanotechnology that can be devastatingly destructive to living things. And as we will see, there are plenty of artificial nanotechnologies that bring huge benefits.

In nature, nanotechnology is constructed from large molecules. A molecule is nothing more than a collection of atoms, bonded together to form a structure, which can be as simple as a sodium chloride molecule – one atom each of the elements sodium and chlorine – or as complex as the dual helix of DNA. We don’t always appreciate how significant individual molecules are.

I had a good example of this a few days ago when I helped judge a competition run by the University of the West of England for school teams producing science videos. The topic they were given was the human genome – and the result was a set of very varied videos, some showing a surprising amount of talent. At the awards event I was giving a quick talk to the participants, looking at the essentials of a good science video. I pointed out that they had used a lot of jargon without explaining it – a common enough fault even in mainstream TV science.

Just to highlight this, I picked out a term most of them had used, but none had explained – chromosomes. What, I asked them was a chromosome? They told me what it did, but didn’t know what it was, except that it was a chunk of DNA and each human had 46 of them in most of their cells. This is true, but misses the big point. A chromosome is simply a single molecule of DNA. Nothing more, nothing less. One molecule.

Admittedly a chromosome is a very large molecule. Human chromosome 1 is the biggest molecule we know of, with around 10 billion atoms. Makes salt look a bit feeble. But it is still a molecule. The basic components of the biological mechanisms of everything living, up to an including human beings are molecules. Chromosomes provide one example, effectively information storage molecules with genes as chunks of information strung along a strip of DNA. Then there are proteins, the workhorses of the body. There are neurotransmitters and enzymes, and a whole host of molecules that are the equivalent of gears to the body’s magnificent clockwork. These are the building blocks of natural nanotechnology.

So with a picture of what we’re dealing with we can set out to see nature’s nanotech in action and the first example, in the next feature in this series, will show how nanotechnology on the surface of a leaf has inspired both self-cleaning glass and water resistant trainers.

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You can also read this article on the Popular Science website.