The Economist reports that “…a bright future beckons, and some of the nanohype that has been swirling around might actually get translated into a useful product.”
The reason is that “…adding a sprinkle of nanoparticles to water can improve its thermal conductivity, and thus its ability to remove heat from something that it is in contact with, by as much as 60%.” Measured by potential impact on cooling efficiency (cost, performance, energy consumption), this could be quite important.
Measured by fulfillment of the vast, free-floating promise of nanotechnology, though, I doubt that this application (based on a phenomenon “discovered almost two decades ago”) will be perceived as entirely satisfying.
How did nanotechnology garner such high public expectations — and support — long before either payoffs or a clear sense of what the research was all about? History, of course.
The explanation for the phenomenon, by the way, is thought to involve changes in the structure of water near the particles. Here’s a review of the complex and important area of water structure in biomolecular interactions: “Structure and reactivity of water at biomaterial surfaces” [pdf]. These phenomena are crucial to nanotechnologies based on biomolecular self-assembly.
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I’ve suspected for a while that microbes should be able to sense things at a distance based on long-range order of water. Both large particles/surfaces (food, enemies) and concentration gradients.
Following a concentration gradient of a molecule by integrating semi-random chemoreceptor hits seems possible, but inefficient, compared to sensing the properties of the molecule-water complex. You get to sample a lot more molecules with the latter method.
Chris
The scale length for ordering of water at a surface or around a particle is only about 1 nm, which is of course very small on the scale of bacteria and their motions.
The same thing happened to the field of artificial intelligence. Hopes, dreams, and desires running ahead of results and fueled (hyped) by a barely knowledgeable news media. Hopefully, nanotechnology will not experience something similar to what was experienced in the AI field and which is now called “AI Winter”.