The Repellent Files Continued...

Since we first highlighted The Repellent Files back in May we have being busy investigating whether our liquid repellent nano-coating can successfully stop water absorbant products from, well, abosrbing water.

Our first investigation on Teabags was a great success and from there our research went further still, and we started to test our coating on items that dissolve the moment water or any other liquid comes into contact with them, such as coffee and Berocca (Alka Selzter).

We have now posted five different Repellent Files which you can watch on P2i.TV or alternatively we have highlighted each video below:

Case #1: Teabags

Case #2: Berocca

Case #3: The Biscuit Dunk

Case #4: Anyone for Coffee?

Case #5: Sugar Cubes

As you can see our nano-coating technology has proved successful in turning items that we know should absorb and dissolve when in contact with water into products that are now water repellent. If you have any thoughs on items you would like to see featured in this series do let us know either in the comments box below or on our Twitter and Facebook pages, where you can also be kept up to date when the next file is out.



Most Innovative Company of the Year 2012

Have you heard the news! We have been crowned the Most Innovative Company of the Year 2012 by Best in Biz awards EMEA.

We are delighted to have won this award which was judged by distinguished business journalists and industry analysts from around the world.

What made P2i stand out?

Good question. We were awarded 'Gold' by Best of Biz for the developments we have made from low volume processing into a high volume solution that now sees our nano-coating technology applied to millions of smartphones, tablets and hearing aids across the globe.

It was made even more special to win this award as it echoes our achievements of 2011 where we were named Most Innovative Company in Europe by the International Business Awards, received the Fast Growth Business award for Best Use of Technology and were awarded the Borderless Business (Business Hero) award by Management Today. You can read more about these awards from the links below:

• Most Innovative Company in Europe
• Best use of Technology
• Borderless Business

You can find out more about our nano-coating technology for electronics, Aridion, here.

A Brief History of Nanotechnology: Part 5 - A Glimpse at the Future

Over the last few weeks, we've touched on the history of nanotechnology, tracing its roots as far back as the ancient world, examining its emergence as a field of study in the second half of the 20th century and outlining a number of more recent advances. In this, the final instalment of the series, we look at how nanotechnology might develop even further in the not too distant future.

In 2006 a Scientific American article estimated that between 1997 and 2005, "investment in nanotech research and development by governments around the world soared from $432 million to about $4.1 billion and that by 2015, products incorporating nanotech will contribute approximately $1 trillion to the global economy". This increase of investment in and around nanotechnology could have far-reaching effects, impacting everything from how we manufacture products to how we fight diseases, such as cancer. 

One speculative area of nanotechnology that could be very exciting for instance, is molecular manufacturing, which when put simplistically is "the ability to bring materials to life from the simple molecular reconstruction of everyday beings" an idea that Richard Feynman first described in 1959.  And in 1999, claims went even further, stating that molecular nanotechnology "will let us make remarkably powerful molecular computers. It will let us make materials over fifty times lighter than steel or aluminium alloy but with the same strength. We'll be able to make jets, rockets, cars or even chairs that, by today's standards, would be remarkably light, strong, and inexpensive. Nanotechnology will replace our entire manufacturing base with a new, radically more precise, less expensive and more flexible way of making products."

There are also many potential uses for nanotechnology in medicine as well. A preliminary study has indicated that nanoparticles could be used to target and treat cancer in the future by homing in on certain proteins and delivering medication. Meanwhile, researchers have developed artificial muscles that could help propel nanobots through a person's body in order to diagnose and treat medical conditions. These "doctor bots" as they have been dubbed might sound like the stuff of a mad scientist's dreams, but they're a real possibility.

Of course, these statements about the future of nanotechnology as a field are just speculative at the moment and difficult to predict, as are the scientific and societal implications of such developments. But one thing is clear, at least: nanotechnology is a very powerful science, with huge capacity to influence or change many different aspects of our lives.

And with that, our brief look at the history and developments of nanotechnology has come to an end. If you have any questions regarding nanotechnology and nano-coatings in general or are interested to know more about our own technology, just ask. You can find out more about how our nanotechnology is applied to different markets here: http://www.p2i.com/applications

A Brief History of Nanotechnology: Part 4 - The Early 2000s to the Present Day

Our last post explored the emergence of the field of nanotechnology as we know it in the 1980s and 1990s, including seminal developments by scientists such as Eric Drexler, Richard Smalley, and others.

Now we turn our attention towards the early 2000s, which proved to be an exciting time for nanotechnology. The field could now be explored and debated in greater depth. Drexler and Smalley, for instance, famously engaged in a public discussion about approaches to nanotechnology, with Drexler defending his idea of "universal assemblers" and Smalley offering objections.

Meanwhile, concerns about the broader implications of nanotechnology - a potentially very powerful but still relatively new field - were being raised and addressed with consideration given to both the potential benefits as well as risks involved. In 2003 congressional hearings on the societal implications of nanotechnology were raised and in 2004 the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering published a report on the implications of nanotechnology and nanoscience, which you can read here.

Nanotechnology also began to appear more in more commercial settings during the 2000s, including the emergance of our technology and the launch of ion-mask™ on Hi-Tec shoes:

In the early part of the decade, titanium dioxide and zinc oxide nanoparticles were included in sunscreen and cosmetics, and carbon nanotubes were used to make textiles stain-resistant. By 2011 the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies estimated that there were over 1300 nanotech products publicly available.

In our next and final post of the series, we'll take a closer look at what the future might hold for nanotechnology. If would like to read some of our early posts in this series you can through the links below:

• Part 3: The 80s & 90s
• Part 2: Early Developments
• Part 1: Roots

You can also find out more about our ion-mask™ technology here and as always if you have any questions we would love to hear them.

A Brief History of Nanotechnology: Part 3 - The 80s & 90s

In our last post we looked at some very early developments in nanotechnology, including the possible impact that Richard Feynman's 1959 lecture "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" may have had on later advances in the field. It was certainly an influence on Eric Drexler, "the undisputed godfather of nanotechnology", who encountered Feynman's talk in 1979.

The 1980s saw the real emergence of nanotechnology as a field of study. The publication of Drexler's seminal book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology in 1986 marked an important milestone for the field. In the book, Drexler (unknowingly) appropriated and popularised the term "nanotechnology" itself, which had been initially defined in a slightly different context in 1974 by Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi as "the processing of, separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or by one molecule". In Engines of Creation, Drexler presented his idea of molecular manufacturing and the "molecular assembler": a "proposed device able to guide chemical reactions by positioning reactive molecules with atomic precision". Drexler's 1992 book Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, published after completion of his PhD at MIT (he earned the first doctoral degree on the topic of molecular nanotechnology) continued to build on these ideas.

The 1980s also saw other important advances, including the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) in 1981 and the discovery of fullerenes in 1985. The Scanning Tunnelling Microscope, developed by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Roher at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, allowed surfaces to be examined at the atomic level. In 1985, Harry Kroto, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl discovered fullerenes, sometimes called buckyballs - hollow molecules composed of carbon, which helped lead to the structural assignment of carbon nanotubes. These developments meant that "nanotechnology could develop through the scientific method rather than the conceptual and thus untestable visions of Drexler", and the field as we know it today - diverse and full of possibility - was born.

Next week we'll look at some of the debates and developments that have occurred in more recent years, and get a glimpse of where nanotechnology might be headed in the future.

You can find out more about our nano-coating technology here: www.p2i.com/technology

P2i Presents: The Repellent Files

You may be wondering what the title means. Well, here at P2i we are often asked what other products our technology could be applied to. And this is a question that is regularly brought up by people who have witnessed our tissue demonstration as well:

So this got us thinking and the idea of The Repellent Files were born.

So what are The Repellent Files?

Each week we will upload a new video to YouTube of a different, normally water absorbent item that has been treated with our liquid repellent nano-coating to see how well it copes when subjected to water or other liquids.

In our first file posted yesterday, we investigated whether a teabag, coated with our nanotechnology, could keep the water clear once boiling hot water was poured over it. To ensure it was an even test, we had a regular teabag available as well.

Want to know what happened? Well, have a watch of the video below and you can see the result for yourself:

The Verdict:

Thumbs Up! Although it is not very good if you want a cup of tea, but the test shows that our coating can stop a teabag acting as it should by successfully repelling the water around it.

If you have any suggestions for items that can be put to the test, do let us know. You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube where we will be posting the next file.

Find out more about how our technology works by visiting: www.p2i.com/technology

A Brief History of Nanotechnology: Part 2 - Early Developments

In our first post, we looked at some surprisingly early examples of nanotechnology at work. However, the field is generally considered to be a very modern one, and most major early developments occurred within the latter half of the 20th century.
The history of nanotechnology is often traced to a very specific moment of inception: the 29th of December, 1959, when physicist Richard Feynman delivered an after-dinner lecture called "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" during a meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman's lecture predated the use of the term "nanotechnology" to describe the field of study as we now know it, but many of the ideas he explored and the questions he asked are still highly relevant.

Feynman wondered "why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin?" and spoke of the possibility of building machines on a minute scale by "manoeuvring things atom by atom".

‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’ writes Dr. K. Eric Drexler, whose own work in the 1970s and 80s did much to advance the field, "was a comparatively casual effort - an after-dinner speech at a conference - yet in it he presented a bold and enduring vision of a technological journey leading toward the atomic scale and toward the ultimate boundaries set by physical law. The world has travelled far toward what Feynman saw, and has far still to go."

It's hard to measure the exact impact that Feynman's talk had on the emergence of nanotechnology, of course, but, as Drexler points out, "Feynman was the first to outline a world of technologies that would work and build at the ultimate, atomic scale".

The term "nanotechnology" itself wasn't coined until 1974, when Tokyo Science University Professor Norio Taniguchi defined it: "'Nano-technology' mainly consists of the processing of, separation, consolidation, and deformation of materials by one atom or by one molecule’.' Taniguchi used the term "to describe semiconductor processes such as thin film deposition and ion beam milling exhibiting characteristic control on the order of a nanometer. The ideas contained in this definition were further explored and developed by Drexler in the late 70s and 1980s, culminating in the release of his book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology in 1986, which "is considered the first book on the topic of nanotechnology".

In next weeks post we will take a closer look at these ideas and how they developed.