Broadly speaking, nanotechnology describes work on materials whose critical dimensions are measured in nanometers, or one-billionth of a meter.

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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.

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The one-billionth CER was issued on September 7th.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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