now you can talk about 1 billion of meter and of a course that sounds like a really small distance but it's not necessarily easy to understand how small that really is so i like to use a US penny as a visual aid to connect the concept of a nanometer to something tangible that you can actually hold in your hand if you look at the back of shiny new penny it probably has some kind Captain American shield on it but if you look at the slightly older penny it shows Lincoln Memorial and right in the middle of the memorial there's a tiny Abraham Lincoln and if you can imagine tiny Abraham Lincoln's eyelash you would have about a diameter of 100 nanometers so next time you cross a penny take a look at the back and maybe you could try to imagine that small-scale so now we know x 0 we know know what about technology i like to think of technology is what we get when we take all of our knowledge from science and engineering and harness it for some purpose so in the field of bio nanotechnology we're taking the building blocks of life and specifically the nano scale building blocks and