Nanoparticles C

Photographs of lifeguards from forty years ago show a white stripe painted across the nose. The cream that made the stripe was zinc oxide, and it worked: nothing gets past it. Walk into a pharmacy today and you can buy a sunblock that contains the same zinc oxide, at a similar strength, that goes on completely clear. No new element was discovered to achieve that, and the formula on the tube is still ZnO. The one thing the manufacturer changed was how large the pieces of solid are.

That is the whole surprise of this topic. Chop a familiar substance small enough and it stops behaving the way the textbook says it should. It may melt at a lower temperature, catalyse a reaction it used to ignore, change colour, or lose its colour altogether. This lesson explains where the cut-off lies, gives you the piece of arithmetic that predicts the change before you ever see the substance, and then asks the question that governments are still arguing over: if a material behaves like a different substance at this size, is it safe to assume the old safety data still applies to it?