Nano is a prefix (from the Greek word for dwarf) meaning a billionth of something.
Apple said this week that its iTunes store had sold its 25 billionth song.
Cook also announced Wednesday that the 25 billionth app has been downloaded from the App Store.
The water droplets themselves can be as small as a nanometre (a billionth of a metre) across.
Broadly speaking, nanotechnology describes work on materials whose critical dimensions are measured in nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter.
Their new drug is a nanoparticle, measuring about one billionth of a metre.
Think nanotubes of atoms, coated in titanium, a billionth of a meter thick, say the Yale and Rice teams.
One day in the next few months Nokia will put a phone into the hands of its billionth customer.
Kim Vandegriff and her colleagues have been using polymer wrappers a mere nanometre (a billionth of a metre) across.
Each electron carries about one nanowatt (a billionth of a watt) of energy.
Last year the billionth acre was planted, and growth rates remain in the double digits (see chart on previous page).
The company shipped its billionth chip in 2008, its 2 billionth in 2012 and now expects to sell a billion per year by 2015.
Earlier this year, a major milestone for the health of children around the world was the immunization of the billionth child against measles.
On Wednesday in San Francisco, Intel talked about its next big shift: to processors with features just 22 billionth of a meter wide.
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The iPod digital music player is a huge hit, with more than 42 million units sold, and in February 2006, Apple's iTunes Music store sold its one billionth song.
Nanotechnology is the science of the very small, where machines and materials are built at the molecular level, and key components are measured in nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter.
Furthermore, unlike most examples of nanotechnology, these new materials may be able to make the elusive transition from nano-sized materials (a nanometre is a billionth of a metre) to macro-sized components.
Scientific discoveries at nanoscale -- one billionth of a meter -- are finding their way out of the lab and into production, creating more efficient computer chips and coatings for glass.
So, on a Friday night, shortly before its nine billionth airing of some episode of Beavis and Butt-Head, I got to make my national television debut alongside spasmodically obnoxious MTV personality Kennedy.
It can then release the light it absorbs in quick bursts that last a few femtoseconds each (with one femtosecond lasting one millionth of one billionth of a second), which is what ultrashort-pulse lasers do.
The nebulous field of nanotechnology, freighted with as much hype as legitimate promise, boils down to the process of manipulating matter on a molecular scale (a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, about the width of ten hydrogen atoms).
While it is next to impossible to know who exactly is the seven billionth baby born on the planet, the United Nations Population Fund in Russia symbolically welcomed baby number 7 billion with a framed plaque recognizing the magic number.
The nebulous field of nanotechnology, freighted with as much hype as legitimate promise, boils down to the process of manipulating matter on a molecular scale (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter, about ten times the width of a hydrogen atom).
Today, it has 435 million registered users in 119 countries and recently served up its 25 billionth song, downloaded by a man in Germany. iTunes also now sells much more than music: Customers can download movies, TV shows, games, books, podcasts and more.
Just one square inch, the chip contains 2, 056 microvalves that can selectively mix reagents together (in this case to test for the activity of a particular enzyme in a bacterium) in 256 reaction chambers, each one holding less than one-billionth of a liter of fluorescent dye.
We call this new imaging technology femto photography because we capture a segment of the image with a flashlight (in this case, a laser pulse) on for a few millionths of a billionth of a second (or a few femtoseconds) and an exposure time approaching a trillionth of a second.
At the laboratory of Aurora, a San Diego-based firm specializing in such mass screening, little needles squirt a billionth of a liter of a potential drug into 3, 456 millimeter-wide wells. (The squirters come from another silicon-based business: ink-jet printers.) In the wells are biologically interesting molecules, such as enzymes, or cells that may present targets to new medicines.
Similar to the recent difficulty of identifying the seven billionth human born on earth (that prize went to Danica May Camacho, a girl born in the Philippine capital of Manila, symbolically chosen by the UN to mark the global population milestone), it is understandable if Apple used location as an important factor in calculating their tiebreaks.
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