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3 Oct 2014 BBC Homepage BBC Radio

Radio 4 Today Listen Again Latest Reports Interview of the Week About Today Britain at 6am Have your Say Contact Today PM The World Tonight The World at One Broadcasting House BBC News The Science of Small Things by Tom Feilden For now, nanotechnology exists almost exclusively in the laboratory. But it has the potential to revolutionise our lives. Put simply it's science measured on a scale of billionths of a metre. At that level everything, even life, is reduced to fundamental interactions between atoms and molecules. Nanotechnology aims to manipulate and control these particles to create novel structures with unique properties, and promises advances in manufacturing, medicine and computing. But the Canadian based ETC Group claims the potential for harm is equally dramatic. Their report "The Big Down: Technologies Converging at the Nano-scale" argues that because nanotechnology can be applied to virtually any industrial sector, no one regulatory body is taking a lead, and research into new products is continuing beneath the radar screen of public debate. LINKS Institute for Nanotechnology ETC Group IBM Almaden Research Center Visualization Lab: activities related to visual computing Please Note: The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites. 1st prize, Visions of Science award, 2002. Nanotechnology by Coneyl Jay. This image intends to show one of the possible applications of nanotechnology in medicine in the future - microscopic machines roaming through the body, injecting or taking samples for tests. Listen - Nano technology is it a menace to rival genetic engineering. Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy: atoms were manipulated to form the letters IBM.

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