Much hype has surrounded the idea of nanotechnology-the thought that manipulating objects on scales of a billionth of a metre will produce useful products .
现在许多炒作都是围绕纳米这一技术做文章其想法是通过操控十亿分之一米尺度的物体可以生产出有用的产品。
The crucial trick is that although both the electrodes and the electrolyte appear solid , they are actually finely structured at the nanometre scale ( a nanometre is a billionth of a metre ) .
This " serial time-encoded amplified microscopy " ( steam ) camera creates each image using a very short laser pulse-a flash of light only a billionth of a second long .
A broken networked intelligence may be able to calculate pi to the billionth digit but not forward e-mail to a new address . It may be able to retrieve obscure texts on , say , the classification procedures for african zebra variants , but be incapable of producing anything sensible about animals in general .
They create antimatter by colliding accelerated particles at very high energies , a process that transforms kinetic energy into mass . But the process is extremely inefficient ; just one billionth of the initial energy gets transformed into an antimatter particle .
These crystals are so small ( three to ten nanometres across , a nanometre being a billionth of a metre ) that they are known as quantum dots , because at dimensions measured in nanometres the weird effects of quantum mechanics start to manifest themselves .
Even the megadalton , or one million daltons , is a tiny unit of measure-a gold particle five nanometers across weighs in at just a few megadaltons . ( One nanometer is a billionth of a meter . )