Science & Technology Quiz: Nanotechnology and New Materials

The correct answer is B, one billionth of a metre. The prefix nano stands for ten raised to the power minus nine, so one nanometre is one billionth of a metre, which is also ten angstrom, and nanotechnology is defined as work in the band of one to one hundred nanometres. Option A is wrong because one millionth of a metre is a micrometre or micron, the unit used for bacteria and for the thickness of a hair in older textbooks, and it is a thousand times larger than a nanometre. Option C is wrong because one thousandth of a metre is a millimetre, a length visible to the eye on any ruler. Option D is wrong because one trillionth of a metre is a picometre, a unit used for bond lengths inside a molecule and a thousand times smaller than a nanometre; the diameter of an atom is of the order of a hundred picometres.

The correct answer is B, Norio Taniguchi. The Japanese engineer Norio Taniguchi used the word nanotechnology in 1974 to describe machining to tolerances of a nanometre, and that is the coinage examiners expect. Option A is wrong, and it is the usual trap: Richard Feynman gave the famous lecture There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom in 1959, which set out the idea of building with individual atoms, but he never used the word, so he is credited with the concept and not with the term. Option C is wrong because K. Eric Drexler popularised the word through his book Engines of Creation in 1986 and through the phrase molecular nanotechnology, which is popularisation rather than coinage. Option D is wrong because Sumio Iijima reported carbon nanotubes in 1991, a landmark material but much later than the naming of the field.

The correct answer is A, Richard Feynman. The American physicist Richard Feynman delivered the talk There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom to the American Physical Society at Caltech in December 1959, in which he argued that there is no law of physics forbidding the manipulation of individual atoms, and the lecture is treated as the conceptual birth of nanotechnology. Option B is wrong because Albert Einstein, who died in 1955, worked on relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion, and had no part in this lecture. Option C is wrong because Gerd Binnig built the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope at IBM Zurich in 1981 with Heinrich Rohrer, giving the field its eyes rather than its founding idea. Option D is wrong because Harold Kroto shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of fullerenes in 1985.

The correct answer is A, 12. Buckminsterfullerene, discovered in 1985, has sixty carbon atoms arranged in a closed cage of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, exactly the pattern of a stitched football, and the twelve pentagons are what allow a flat hexagonal sheet to curve into a closed ball. Option B is wrong because twenty is the number of hexagonal faces, which the question itself supplies, and swapping the two counts is the standard trap in this item. Option C is wrong because thirty two is the total number of faces of the molecule, twenty plus twelve, not the number of pentagons alone. Option D is wrong because sixty is the number of carbon atoms, that is the vertices of the cage, and the molecule was named after the architect Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles.

The correct answer is B, Sumio Iijima. The Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima, then at the NEC laboratory, reported multi walled carbon nanotubes in 1991 using a transmission electron microscope, and the date and the name are the facts asked. A nanotube is a sheet of graphene rolled into a cylinder, is about a hundred times stronger than steel for the same weight, and conducts heat and electricity very well. Option A is wrong because Harold Kroto was part of the fullerene discovery of 1985 and shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996. Option C is wrong because Andre Geim isolated graphene in 2004 with Konstantin Novoselov at Manchester and shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. Option D is wrong because Richard Smalley too belongs to the fullerene team of 1985, a related but earlier discovery.

The correct answer is C, 2010. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for groundbreaking experiments on graphene, the single atom thick sheet of carbon they had lifted from graphite with ordinary adhesive tape. Option A is wrong because 2004 is the year of the isolation itself, and the gap between the discovery and the prize is the trap in this question. Option B is wrong because the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2008 went to work on broken symmetry and quarks, with no connection to graphene. Option D is wrong because the Nobel Prize in Physics of 2014 honoured the blue light emitting diode, a different materials achievement. Graphene is the strongest material yet tested, an excellent conductor and almost completely transparent.

The correct answer is B, the Department of Science and Technology. The Nano Mission, formally the Nano Science and Technology Mission, was launched in 2007 under the Department of Science and Technology, which had already been running the Nano Science and Technology Initiative since 2001, and the mission works on basic research, human resources, infrastructure and the transfer of results to industry. Option A is wrong because the Defence Research and Development Organisation funds defence oriented materials work but does not run the Nano Mission. Option C is wrong because the Department of Atomic Energy looks after nuclear power, reactors and institutions such as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. Option D is wrong because the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology handles electronics manufacturing and digital programmes, which only overlaps with nanotechnology at the chip.

The correct answer is A, nickel and titanium. Nitinol is an alloy of roughly equal parts nickel and titanium, and even its name records this, being formed from nickel, titanium and the Naval Ordnance Laboratory where it was developed. Heated above a transition temperature it returns to a shape it was trained to remember, and it is also superelastic, which is why it is used in arterial stents, orthodontic wires, spectacle frames and actuators. Option B is wrong because nickel and tin form ordinary plating and bearing alloys with no shape memory effect. Option C is wrong because niobium and tantalum are refractory metals used in superconducting magnets and capacitors respectively, and their alloys are not shape memory materials. Option D is wrong because nickel and tungsten alloys are chosen for hardness and for high temperature strength instead.

The correct answer is B, mercury. In 1911 the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who had already liquefied helium, cooled mercury to about four kelvin and found that its electrical resistance vanished completely, which is the discovery of superconductivity and won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913. Option A is wrong because lead was shown to be superconducting soon afterwards, in 1913, so it is a later confirmation and the classic distractor here. Option C is wrong because niobium, although the elemental superconductor with the highest critical temperature and the material of most superconducting magnets, was identified much later. Option D is wrong because tin too followed mercury. A superconductor also expels a magnetic field from its interior, the Meissner effect, which makes a magnet levitate above it.

The correct answer is B, quantum dots. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry of 2023 went to Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov for the discovery and synthesis of quantum dots, semiconductor nanocrystals whose emitted colour depends on their size because of quantum confinement, and which are used in television displays, in light emitting diodes and as biological markers. Option A is wrong because graphene was honoured with the Nobel Prize in Physics, not Chemistry, in 2010. Option C is wrong because carbon nanotubes, reported by Sumio Iijima in 1991, have never been the subject of a Nobel Prize, although the related fullerenes won the Chemistry prize in 1996. Option D is wrong because aerogels, first made by Samuel Kistler in 1931, have also never carried a Nobel Prize of their own.

The correct answer is C, the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope. Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer built it at the IBM laboratory in Zurich in 1981; a sharp metal tip is moved a fraction of a nanometre above a conducting surface and the quantum tunnelling current between tip and sample maps the atoms one by one, work that brought them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Option A is wrong because the Scanning Electron Microscope images surface shape at far lower resolution and cannot resolve single atoms. Option B is wrong because the Atomic Force Microscope came in 1986, after the tunnelling microscope, though it has the advantage of working on insulators as well. Option D is wrong because the Transmission Electron Microscope, built by Ernst Ruska in the nineteen thirties, looks through thin specimens instead of scanning a surface.

The correct answer is B, a very high surface area to volume ratio. When a solid is divided into nanoparticles its total surface area grows enormously while the mass stays the same, so a very large fraction of the atoms lies exposed on the surface with unsatisfied bonds; chemical reactions happen at surfaces, so reactivity and catalytic activity rise sharply, which is why gold is inert as a bar but catalytic as nanoparticles. Option A is wrong because a lowered melting point is itself a consequence of the same surface effect, not the cause of the reactivity. Option C is wrong because the density of a nanoparticle is essentially that of the bulk material and does not drive reactivity. Option D is wrong because the atoms are unchanged in size; only the particle is smaller.