 TGIF, likeable science on a Friday, with Ethan Allen. Hi, Ethan. Hi, Jay. We have more for you. You know, we really enjoyed the discussion about graphene last week. It sort of opened my mind, it opened yours, I think, just to compare notes about the incredible things that could happen with graphene. And it is already, you know, discovered. It's just a matter of implementing that discovery and commercializing that discovery, and it will be disruptive, I guarantee it. Absolutely. So it opens new thoughts, new discussions for us to follow that track, you know? I must say over the weekend I saw a movie which I urge everybody to watch. It's a documentary movie. It just came out. It's on cable. It's called Zero Days. Zero Days is about the Stuxnet virus. Very interesting. It was a collaborative effort, you know, as revealed, because it was secret for a while, between the United States and Israel. They didn't always agree on things, but at the end they dispatched a virus. It went worldwide, but it had the skill, the smarts to find its way into the centrifuges in the Iranian atomic, you know, plant in Iran in order to stop what the making of the nuclear bomb there. And this virus was able to penetrate a certain electronic control device made by Siemens. It knew well enough what control device there was, and it, you know, it didn't touch anything else in the world. Just this control device and just this device in Iran, amazing, cost billions and billions, like 50 billion dollars to make this, could put on a thumb drive, you know? Anyway, it destroyed a lot of these centrifuges, many, many hundreds of them, and it set the Iran nuclear program back for a while. Not for that long, but for a while. You're talking about a computer virus. Yeah. Okay, I thought you were talking about it. Sorry, if I didn't make that clear. As a biologist, I tend to think of viruses as the strangest, one looks at what is already in one's mind. But the point about that is it was unprecedented. Zero days, the name of the movie, means that this proliferates without the necessity for clicking on your mouse. You don't have to download the file. You don't have to, you know, open a file on your browser, nothing like that. It just touches your machine and bingo, you're infected. Now, infected isn't necessarily bad because it's not attacking you, attacking somebody else, but it's going worldwide. They found it all over the world. But it only attacked these one control devices, one type of control device in Iran. So, I mean, this opens new doors on the possibility of electronic viruses, computer viruses, and for that matter, cyber war. And the bottom line there is that we are probably already in a cyber war where nation states play, where they spend tens of billions in order to develop these things, where they have very smart groups of young people who understand about programming and understand about building viruses. And they line up on companies and governments and other places, and they attack them on a regular basis. There are multiple different kinds of attacks. They don't necessarily do anything destructive, but they're feeling a lot of information, and they're filling their own database with information from somebody else for whatever purpose, however long in the future. But the point is that it's happening now, and we are in a war of cyber war deterrence, because I can bring your city down. I can bring your utility company down. I can bring your grid down if I want. But I don't do that because if I do that to you, you're going to find a way to get back and do that to me. And before you know it, we have cities going down all over the world, so we don't do that. Sort of like mutually assured destruction back from the nuclear. It's like nuclear deterrence. It's the same concept, and it's the same thing happening right now. And in many ways, it's the same players. Anyway, I don't think Russia is definitely involved in this. So it just shows you that science in general is moving so quickly that the public, ordinary guys like me anyway, don't realize how fast it's moving. And they don't realize that we're in a cusp in some ways of the implementation of science that was not known by the public. But all of a sudden, the commercialization, the implementation of it is going to have a huge disruptive effect on our society. And I find that very interesting. For example, one of the elements that's coming up on our program on Energy on Tuesday is the effect of hydrogen. Hydrogen is remarkable as a storage device, as a way to do clean energy, and the technology is quite impressive right now. And one of these days, it's going to go mainstream, center stage, and we're going to see, you know, hydrogen as a substitute for many other devices and many other different kinds of renewables that we have now. But you come with gifts. Well, thank you, Jay. You come with gifts and it's the same kind of thing. It's nanotechnology in many areas, which is not well known by the public, which has been under the hood for maybe a few years anyway, which is almost ready to, for prime time, come out and do either very positive things or possibly very negative things. And I think the public, you know, and what's cooking, literally cooking, it's funny that the ocean had crossed the street over here, had a subsidiary and then it was spun off called Nanotech Hawaii or something like that. They're not in business as far as I know anymore, but they were visionary in the sense that they realized, this is 10 years ago, that nanotechnology would change the world. You know, you can call it on a gross basis, material science, but it's material science on such a small scale that you need another word to define it like nanotechnology. So let's talk about some of the incredible things you listed here and what they can do for us and how we can implement them and whether, you know, you can do this at home. Okay. First, you hit a key point. A lot of this stuff is now the science of the very small. You know, it's science on a scale that we couldn't manipulate matter on before. Nano is a prefix meaning a billionth, basically. It's from the Greek word nanostore and so it means very, very tiny stuff. And a lot of the measurements in this field are done in nanometers. A nanometer is plus a billionth of a meter and since a meter is about three feet, that's not very much. Indeed, the definition I like for a nanometer is a nanometer is the amount your fingernails grow in one second. Whoa. Okay. They don't grow much. So, yeah, it's a tiny measurement and scientists are now able to manipulate matter on that scale, on that size scale. So it's literally moving atoms around in some cases or small or small molecules around and building things up atom by atom by atom. So if I asked you how they do this, is there a simple answer? There are various techniques, none of which are dead simple, but typically they start with some substrate, they spritz stuff into the air over or into the vacuum over it, some of it adheres, and they may spritz something else on that only adheres the spots where the first stuff stuck and they begin to stack things up, different compounds, and they've just gotten very good at controlling all this now by knowing what materials to use and what conditions, and they can build very elaborate and very structured bits and pieces of literally a few atoms, a dozen atoms, 20 atoms, 100 atoms, and now they're going beyond sort of simple shapes. They're actually starting to develop working parts, little tiny atomic level machines basically. You say machine, but that's so interesting. You know, don't we have little machines that go do medical things in your body, but they're actually machines. We can instruct them, but how much of a machine are they? Do they have little gears and things? Those screws that hold them together? How does that work? They're literally now developing literally a wheel and axle kind of devices on an atomic level. Yeah, we're literally, your axle is one molecule with a couple other molecular wheels attached to it and something else is riding on that. There's another, you know, a bigger protein, for instance. Stopping there, I mean, if I can do that, if I can build a machine, instruct a machine at an atomic level, God knows where I can send that, deploy that. God knows what kind of amazing things I can do with that. I mean, this is very much how your fibers of your muscles all work, right? They're full machines sort of ratcheting along basically on an molecular level, clicking along, locking, lock, click. And so it's the same kind of control. Yeah, and if you're controlling matter on that level, there's sort of no end to what you can do. And you can make a lot of them too. It's not just one. Typically, right, that's the thing is they're getting better and better at scaling this stuff up and being able to make billions of these things at once now. Yeah. So, I mean, what comes to mind is that old movie, I can't remember the name right now, it's about deploying new machines in your body to do biological things and either save you or kid you whenever it was. Oh, yeah. Remember that movie was a movie? Yes, that's it. Yeah, that was it. But what you say sounds like we could go in our bodies now and with these little machines we could change the way things work. They're already doing some of that. That is, even some years ago scientists realized that, for instance, tumor, cancerous tumors have to have blood vessels flowing into them. But the blood vessels in cancerous tumors are slightly different than your standard little capillaries. The joints between the individual capillaries are leachier. They're a little bit bigger. They're sort of sloppy in their tumor. And because they're a little bit bigger, if you slip just the right size, a little tiny particle of gold into your bloodstream, they will leak out through those joints and they'll leak out and accumulate only in your tumors. They have a chemical effect. It's just a physical effect. Do we know why this happens? Well, it's sort of simple physics. They can't leak from tight capillaries in your healthy tissue, but the looser leachier capillaries in your tumors are where they leak out by default. And then they accumulate in a tumor. You can then shine long infrared light, which is harmless to you, passes through our tissue quite painlessly. And the little gold nanoparticles grab this stuff, start to... The light activates the gold. They vibrate, basically. Vibrates the gold. And become very hot, basically. So what is your tumor then? Heat's up, basically. It's got all these little gold nanoparticles stuck in it. You fry the tumor. And you fry the tumor, essentially touching nothing else. And this is the atomic... No, the molecular. Well, yeah. These are clusters of probably a few tens of thousands of molecules, basically, you know. But it's still really tiny stuff. Yeah. And that sort of crew level stuff, that was happening five, ten years ago, working on that. Well, I mean, it suggests... I mean, you know, cancer goes in many different directions and other diseases. But the most promising seems to me is when you get right down there, you know, in or with the cancer cell, and you attack it with something you can control, and now you've beaten it, at least at that location. Right. And if you can do that all over your body, then you can really change the way things are working. Right. And again, because of the control they now have, they can take a very potent cancer drug encapsulate it in a shell so that it's protected and won't get digested, won't be degraded, put specific things on the outside of that shell that will only bind to cancer cells. So this encapsulated drug now goes through a system, locks onto cancer cells, and then at a given signal, perhaps, will unleash that drug right into the cell, basically. I mean, this kind of control is just completely unheard of. But will it go to that certain electronic control device in the nuclear facility in Iran? Well, I mean, this is the same thing, isn't it? It is. It's the biological. That's why you were telling me about this, and I was thinking, real viruses. How do they get into the centrifuge? I don't understand. Viruses aren't really going to invade uranium, you know? This is an unrehearsed show. We're going to take a short break so we can recover from that. We'll be right back. Hi. 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That was in different products now. Okay. It's Ethan Allen and me exploring very small things. You know, fact is the small things of the future. Not big things, small things. It's all a world of miniaturization and getting down there between the atoms. We're an exciting thing, incredible, as it were, incredible journey. Okay. So we have a little footage. We're going to play a footage about Gekko Adhesives. And that's also a nanotech phenomenon and one we can control. And Ethan's going to tell us about it as we play this movie. Sure. So Gekko, of course, can climb walls, run across the ceiling. You've seen all of this. And you wonder how does this happen, right? Because how do they stick? And that's always intrigued people in this video. You see this guy climbing a glass wall, basically. And what it is, is Gekko feet have little tiny ridges on them. And these ridges have little tiny, tiny filaments, little hairs on them, basically. And hairs on the ends don't have much surface area. But if you press the hair down, then suddenly it's lying on a substrate and it's got a lot more surface area, basically. And there are actually small attractive forces between things that are pushed together. And when you multiply those times, a gazillion, as in these hairs, you get good adhesion. And so the Gekko can then control by sort of rolling his feet on and off how much he wants to stick, just as this guy, basically, is pressing in and lifting off and sliding up and pressing in. Is he using some Gekko adhesive to press on them? Those pads on his hand have essentially lots of little pads that have lots of little filaments, basically, on them that basically are just sticking to the glass simply from what are called Van der Waals forces. These forces that exist between anything that's pressed to anything else. So the Van der Waals have to be a certain kind of material, or just small enough? Yeah, just small enough. The size is critical. That's the whole thing with nanotechnology. It's all size-dependent phenomena. It's truly an amazing thing. And you can begin to see right there there's highly useful things. But now they're already making what they call tape that runs on the same principle. So you peel off this tape, stick it down on something, and peel it off. They're making this tape that can work underwater, which is a really nice thing to be able to tape something. A footnote to that, when I saw your notes that I thought to myself, you know, the big problem in ocean energy, or for that matter, ocean energy, thermal conversion, ocean thermal conversion, Otec is the corrosion aspect and dealing with, you know, all the things in the ocean. But if you had these natural molecular-level nanotechnologies like adhesive that works the same way a gecko works, you might be able to beat that corrosion. It might be a nanotechnology down there that would actually be sustainable. Possibly, the other route to that is they can now create what they call superhydrophobic surfaces. Surfaces that cannot get wet because of their atomic structure. Basically, water can't actually intrude down to the surface. It's kept away by a coating. You're suggesting that the only way things can get wet is if the surface has a certain porous quality. Well, a certain flatness to it. If you make your surface rough in the right way, you can keep water molecules from ever touching your surface, basically. So if I could make clothing, for example, out of that, it would never get wet. And it would never intrude through. It would never go through the material. So on the thread, say, weave the clothing, so it's still breathable, lets air flow through, but literally when you wash a shirt made with this stuff and your shirt itself is actually not getting wet, which is a strange phenomenon. It washes the dirt off of it without the shirt actually getting wet. The dirt gets wet, but the shirt doesn't. Miracle clothing. Yeah, and you could envision if you could do this well or not, you could coat whatever you wanted sitting down underwater with this stuff and it wouldn't ever get salt water. I guess I could also make a shirt that wouldn't get dirty. Actually, there's a guy who used to go around at the nanotech conferences in his white suit and with chocolate sauce, and then he'd ladle the chocolate sauce onto his white suit and it would just basically flow off and leave his suit untouched. Think how much money would save on cleaning bills. Exactly, exactly. And this stuff is all out there. It's around now. Now it's got some downsides. There are people... Expensive. Well, some of it's expensive. A lot of it has to do with... they've dumped a lot of nanoscale silver around in products that now is washing down into the sewage treatment plants and killing off all the beneficial bacteria in the sewage treatment plants. Oh, that's so good. Yeah, and they're wondering, is this going to cause trouble down the road? Well, you know, that raises the whole parallel to GMO. You know, I personally don't think there's any danger from GMO, but a lot of people do and they say we don't know the four corners of the effects of GMOs. They haven't had the experience of it. It could make you green. It could dissolve you like the night of the living dead or something. You step on it and your ankles dissolve. That's not so, but you worry about that. Now, in the case of nanotechnology, that does these remarkable, miraculous things, we don't know all the effects such as with the silver particles. Could it be that there are really destructive effects out there that we have to watch out for? Well, again, there's nothing particularly new. We've been dealing with nanoscale stuff in our environment all along. Little salt crystals are blowing the air all around Hawaii here, on nanoscale, and you breathe them in every day, and they don't seem to have any pretty bad effect on us. There are classes of things that have become more common now, and you get particles of certain kinds of size ranges. They tend to get in your lungs better than they get out of your lungs. They tend to accumulate in your lungs and clog up. You probably don't want a lot of that stuff floating around the environment, because there are some things like your species that get into microorganisms and disrupt them. The silver is a classic example. Microbes do not do well with atomic silver, and it kills them. That's why it's good side and it's bad side both. This raises a very interesting... We talked about weapons of mass destruction and chemical warfare, biological warfare and all this. This is not chemical, necessarily. It could be. It's not biological, necessarily. And yet, this kind of nanotechnology could be destructive, and thus it could be a weapon of war, too. Get into your system, do bad things, or you're exposed to it, it goes to the right place. Sort of like my Stuxnet example. It goes to the right place and does the wrong thing. It's possible. If you found the right thing that could target your specific enemies and not come back and target you, that's, of course, the trick. That's the trick. Essentially, we're all... You found yourself at the wrong end of the stick. Exactly. We're all pretty similar, if I'm not mistaken. Another deterrence. Again, as we understand living systems in greater and greater depth, though, I mean, that kind of... The situation is not completely unrealistic. People find that there are certain groups that may be more susceptible to some peculiar little molecular species than most the rest of us, and yes, than somebody who doesn't like that particular group might choose to unleash a bunch of that. What's remarkable is that we get it from nature, like the gecko thing, and it was another... It was adhesives from geckos, and there were other things where atoms play a role in the natural process of the world, and we learned from them. Yeah, absolutely. The other sort of adhesive is that the muscles, the little muscles that sit on the rocks on the shore, if you think about it, they're really tightly attached to those rocks, right? You know, the little... There it is. ...what they call the beard from the muscle. Those are called Bissell threads. The special properties? Yes. That's not microscopic. No, no, that's just... You can see that. ...standard muscle, but those Bissell threads are a very interesting thing. How do you stick something onto a rock that can be hot and dry, bakingly dry, it's rough, it can be pounded by surf, it can be cold and wet and underwater? You know, you can't walk up there with the elements glue and stick that on it. You can't walk up there with a tube of epoxy and stick that on it. You can't walk up there with a hot glue gun and make things stick on that. You know, and yet these muscles do it like that, you know? How? Well, it's... Do we understand that? Yeah, they're actually beginning to understand that the genes are that produce the particular weird proteins that are able to work and stick so well between this... the sort of the core of the thread and the rock, whether the rock is wet, dry, hot, cold, salty, it does not matter, you know? This stuff has sort of... through selection has been selected to be a very effective adhesive. You know, so far you've talked about adhesive, but I think we ought to address the question of whether this could be happening in some other way. You know, the opposite of adhesion, a push-away or some kind of chemical reaction that happens at the natural level that we could use in some way, positive or negative. Sure. Well, I mentioned the superhydrophobic stuff. Yes. It's the same thing. It's keeping water off. And they make, you know, hydrophobic clothing now to keep your clothing dry. Yes. You can coat your glasses with the stuff and have water essentially never really get on it. But I said, it'd be run off immediately. Yes. Interestingly enough, with water, you can take the other approach, too. You can make it very hydrophilic, so it pulls the water flat onto it so the water never beads up on it. As soon as the water hits it, it's a smooth sheet of water instead of being a droplet. This reminds me of an OC-16 movie we made with Angelia Nagihara at the university. And she's like the world's expert in box jellyfish. Uh-huh. And she, you know, does lots of testing and samples, right off like a key. Get these box jellyfish and see how they sting you. And it's remarkable how they sting you. I don't think it's completely known exactly how that sting works, but certainly you can duplicate it and you can take a look microscopically and what's going on. Maybe, you know, atomically even, too. But the question is, you know, what is it doing to give this huge, some of these stings are really awful. They just tear the flesh apart. It eats you. And so it's not only the jellyfish. It's the bacteria, which is a larger-sized thing. You know, and that also eats you. So what I'm saying is you could learn from the environment, from the natural environment about processes we don't fully understand yet and you can apply that to, you know, human beings or otherwise. If we could figure out exactly how to copy it and change a lot of things in the world using natural processes that are right out there now. So it's an area called biomimetics, mimicking biology, basically. And it's a very hot field. That's what the echo feet thing was, the Bissell threads. They're developing underwater adhesives now. But yes, it's all over the lotus leaves with the first classic example of a very hydrophobic surface that was studied in nature, you know, and they looked at why does the lotus leaf, the water just beads up and runs right off of it and they never really get wet. Just beginning, isn't it? Yeah. You know, one of our think tech staff, a guy named Michael Rodriguez, a very competent guy. He's in the engineering school at UH at Holmes Hall. And he's on an internship now. That's why you won't see him around here today. At UCLA, I think. And what he's working on, he's in the medical school there. He's an engineering student working in the medical school on these miniature things that have to do with biomedical engineering. It's a big field. That's a huge field, yeah. When I was at University of Washington we had graduate students in chemical engineering doing rotations through a clinical program working with the clinicians to help them figure out like how do we do this process, you know, and do it less invasively or less harmfully or faster or, you know, yeah, whatever. It's the intersection of the sciences. That's where a lot of very hot stuff is happening now, yeah. So what you learn in one area, you can apply any other. You can bring them all together. Exactly. Phenomenal results. Exactly, exactly. It's why collaboration is so critical in science. Okay, last question before we're done. Does the United States government recognize the importance of this work and the science and this phenomenon of the intersection of the sciences and nanotechnology? You can give me a one-word answer if you like. Yes, in a qualified way. Yes, but... Yes, but... Exactly. Don't you think it ought to? Oh, yes. Yes, definitely. You know, the problem is that the economy in general has, you know, a serious effect on funding for research and science, and these things, you know, they may not appear to the government or to the people of the public to be all that important because they're sort of speculative at first, but then when you get down into it and you find out more about it, you realize the potential is huge and disruptive, and then you're sorry you didn't put the money in in the first place. Right. So take camera one, Ethan. Talk to the government. Talk to them now. Tell them what they should do. So there is actually a move afoot now from the National Academy of Sciences. They have posted a list of 20 questions that they think presidential candidates should address and to really... They're important questions. They're big questions. You know, what are we going to do in space? What are we going to do in biomedicine? And we need to be aware of this and we need our presidential candidates to articulate very clearly where they stand, what they would do, how their administrations would act towards these topics. Funny you should say that. This very day, Iroflato on Science Friday, which, you know, that's the one on NPR. It's just like this show. You know, I was talking about why isn't science a platform position for these candidates? They talk about everything but science. We have to force them to take positions to understand science and then, you know, tell you what they platform it is. Right. And they should. Science is more and more impacting on everyone's life every day. Right. And you're going to continue to be that way. Okay. That's Ethan Allen doing science, lackable science on Friday. Thank you so much for being with me. Thank you. You appreciate it. Thank you. More.