We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.
How can we live on a planet overflowing with 326 million trillion gallons of water and still face shortages? Even if only about .05 percent of it is drinkable, shouldn’t there be some way to purify the rest? Actually, people all over the world convert seawater to potable water, but the process tends to be prohibitively expensive at large scales. Even so, with looming droughts, natural disasters and the large-scale redistribution of moisture threatened by climate change, the need for a solution grows more essential every day.
Grade schools teach that there are three or four states of matter—solid, liquid, gas and possibly plasma. Nature is much fuzzier than that, however. Depending who you ask, there may be more than a dozen states of matter, along with numerous substates such as glass.
Yes, glass. Scientifically speaking, glass is a highly viscous, noncrystalline substate of matter. It is like a liquid that cools without becoming crystalline. Our everyday silica glass is but one example; many substances, including metals, become glassy under the right conditions.
Physical chemists have struggled for decades to crack the true nature of glass and understand what happens at the transition to and from the glassy state. In 1995, Nobel laureate Philip Anderson called it the “deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory.” Now, C. Austen Angell, a chemistry professor at Arizona State University believes he has translated the Rosetta Stone of glassy substances: water.
A glassy riddle: solving the mystery of water glass
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