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Tuesday, 27th March 2007 (4739 views)

Gold is set to be at the centre of an exciting new technological future that a Canadian physicist has described as 'revolutionary', reports The Edmonton Journal.

Nanotechnology is growing in stature as a means to offer solutions to previously unanswerable problems and according to Robert Wolkow of the National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) at the University of Alberta, Canada, there "will be very big changes as a result of it".

Mr Wolhow made his comments from the institute which has poured tens of millions of dollars into microscopes designed to aid nanotechnology.

Another scientist, John Preston, director of the Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research at McMaster University, stated that nanotechnology was "so exciting" because the smaller a piece of material becomes, "something interesting happens".

He continued: "Take a piece of gold, my wife's wedding band, and cut it in half. It looks the same… but gold is gold no matter how small you cut it, until you get down into the nanometre range, and then the properties start to change."

The Edmonton Journal also states that the nanotechnology market will be worth a cumulative worldwide total of around $1.5 trillion (£660 billion) by 2015.

Canada's NINT is, according to the University of Alberta's website "one of the world's most technologically advanced research facilities and will house laboratory space that will be the quietest in Canada."

 

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