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Carbon nanotubes in medical technology: one of the more important classes of material to emerge from the recent developments in nanotechnology has been the carbon nanotube. A variety of nanoscale carbon tube structures have been prepared and this article discusses their structure, properties and potential medical applications.

Article Excerpt
The versatility of nanomaterials

Nanotechnology has been discussed a few times in this column in recent years, perhaps not surprisingly because the products of nanotechnology seem to be finding applications in almost every sector of manufacturing and consumer goods. The defining character of a nanomaterial, or a nanostructured material, is that the material has a physical form that may be measured in one or more dimensions at the nanoscale, which is usually taken to mean from atomic diameters up to 100 nanometres. At these dimensions, two factors determine that the nanomaterial has properties extremely different from those of the same chemical substance in bulk form. These are the exceptionally high surface area to volume ratio and that quantum effects maybe displayed. Some nanomaterials are virtually identical to commonly used bulk materials, but are prepared by specific techniques to provide the nanostructured features, for example, nanocrystalline silver and nanoparticulate titanium dioxide. In other cases, the actual molecular structure at the nanoscale may be different from that of any other form of the substance. Into this category comes carbon. Several forms of bulk carbon exist, including diamond and graphite, which obviously have different properties depending...

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