Think of an object one metre long. Now divide it lengthways into one billion pieces, each measuring 0·000000001 of a metre. That is a nanometre (nm), a unit of length equivalent to the diameter of a helium atom. Or - to give a relative dimension - the size of a nanometre compared to a metre is the same as that of a marble relative to the Earth. Over the past 30 years, the introduction of new technology such as the atomic force microscope (AFM) has enabled scientists to both study and manipulate matter at the atomic level, a innovation that has led to the development of nanotechnology, the science of manipulating structures of between 1nm-100nm in at least one dimension.
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