Nanomaterials are impossibly tiny—one nanometre is a billionth of a metre, or about 50,000 to 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. So what is it about them that Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington's Associate Professor Natalie Plank finds so endlessly fascinating?
"The whole point of working on the nanoscale is that certain materials behave in radically different ways than they do when they're bigger," explains Plank, associate professor in Physics at the University's School of Chemical and Physical Sciences. "They can become more sensitive and have different kinds of interactions—for example, they might change the way they interact with light or conduct electricity. For us, as scientists, it's about exploiting those new properties."
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