Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. It's guest time on the show, and those of you who are watching on video at theBusinessMakers.com can tell we are not in the studio. No, we are in an upper-end lab at Rice University, at the Smalley Institute, and my guest is Dr. Wade Adams, the director of the Smalley Institute. Wade, welcome to the BusinessMakers Show.

Dr. Wade Adams: Thanks, Russ. It's great to be here.

Russ: You bet. Well, let's start here. For those who don't know what the Smalley Institute is all about, let them know.

Dr. Wade Adams: Well, the Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nano-scale Science and Technology is one of the eight institutes at Rice that allow us to do collaborative things across departments and schools.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: The Smalley Institute has about 150 faculty associated with it, and we do research in nanotechnology across the whole spectrum, from medicine to energy to electronics to defense to oil and gas. You name it, we do nanotechnology in just about everything that exists.

Russ: Okay, now let's say that we've got somebody in our audience that doesn't know, and is not up to date on what nanotechnology is.

Dr. Wade Adams: Well, a simple definition of nanotechnology that your grandmother can understand -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: Is making small stuff do big things.

Russ: Making small stuff do big things. Now, I like that.

Dr. Wade Adams: And that means that we do research at the nanometer scale. So a nanometer is a billionth of a meter. If you pluck a hair from your head - oops, I don't have any hair left.

Russ: You've done that demo too many times.

Dr. Wade Adams: And feel the thickness of a human hair, that's about 100,000 nanometers.

Russ: Oh, my goodness. So -

Dr. Wade Adams: So they're a little bigger than the size of atoms, but still way smaller than anything that you could see with your eye.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: And it turns out that materials have very different properties when you get down toward the nanometer scale, and scientists study materials and understand what the differences in the properties are, and then try to make new and better things because of those new properties; better magnetic properties, better electronic properties, better physical properties. Much stronger, much lighter weight, and we're taking advantage of those unique properties that we didn't even know existed until we could study things at the nanometer scale.

Russ: Okay, and I keep hearing the opportunity is just limitless. Would that be an accurate description?

Dr. Wade Adams: Absolutely. Nanotechnology is going to impact every other technology on earth. It can make it better. It can make it a little bit better, or a lot better, depending on the properties that we find as we work in a particular area.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: For example, oil and gas, we're now starting to put nanoparticles down holes. Nanoparticles are so small that they can go through the pores of the tightest rock formations. You can interrogate the formation. We will be able to interrogate the formation and find out what - where the oil is, how the gas is bound, and how to get more of it out. We recover only about 40-percent of the oil from all of the oil fields on earth today.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: Nano is potentially gonna make that 50-percent, or 60-percent, or more and more as we learn how to do it.

Russ: Well, and that would be cool, for sure.

Dr. Wade Adams: Big value proposition there.

Russ: Absolutely. Okay, now here we are in the Smalley Institute. I know it's named after Dr. Richard Smalley. Tell us about him a little.

Dr. Wade Adams: Well, Rick Smalley was a chemist. He was also inspired by Sputnik to be in science. He became a chemist. He started working with some very fundamental chemistry. And in about 1985, he made a dramatic discovery that sort of changed the world for the better, and helped introduce the nanotechnology revolution.

Russ: And that discovery was what?

Dr. Wade Adams: The discovery of the Buckey Ball.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: Happen to have one right here.

Russ: Alright.

Dr. Wade Adams: So this is a Buckey Ball. This is a model of a Buckey Ball, and it has a dimension of about a nanometer.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: So it's about the size of ten hydrogen atoms stacked up on top of each other.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: And you may notice it looks a lot like the stitches on a soccer ball.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: So when this was discovered in 1985 here at Rice, they called it Buckminster Fullerine.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: After Buckey Fuller, who was a great architect who did geodesic domes.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: And they thought this looked a lot like a geodesic dome.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: They thought they'd discovered a new structure. They thought they'd discovered a new geometric form.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: Turns out that it's been known for over 2,000 years.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: But nobody ever imagined that carbon could take the shape of a Buckey Ball. So this is 60 carbon atoms all in the form of a perfect sphere here, truncated icosahedron, in fact, and this molecule was the first building block molecule for nanotechnology.

Russ: Okay, and discovered by Rick Smalley?

Dr. Wade Adams: Rick Smalley, Bob Kerl, Harry Croto -

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: And three graduate students -

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: Back in 1985, in this very building. And we're gonna celebrate his 25th anniversary this year.

Russ: Well, that's what I understand, in fact, this week, right?

Dr. Wade Adams: Well, it's actually gonna be on the 10th of October.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: We're starting out with a grand gala at the Hyatt downtown.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: Still seats available for it. Contact nano@rice.edu if you want information about it -

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: Or look on our website, smalley.rice.edu.

Russ: 'Cause it's open to the public?

Dr. Wade Adams: It's open to the public.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: It's a fundraiser, so we'd like you to make a small donation to come to it.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: But we're gonna follow that great celebration on Sunday night with a Monday morning symposium, where the entire Nobel team, minus Rick Smalley, who passed away five years ago -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: And we've got the students back. We've even got the guy from the Army who funded Rick's work that did this.

Russ: How cool.

Dr. Wade Adams: So, it's gonna be the first reunion of this entire team since the discover, in fact.

Russ: Oh, that is so cool.

Dr. Wade Adams: And they're gonna have a fireside chat and talk for a couple of hours about what happened when they discovered it, and then how hard it was to defend it against the chemistry community that couldn't really believe that this was a new form of carbon.

Russ: Alright, now, before I let you go, I know we actually have some sort of real-world samples here as well, right?

Dr. Wade Adams: Right. So these are not Buckey Balls. These are Buckey Ball's big brother.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: The carbon nanotube.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: Take the Buckey Ball and stretch it out into a long cylinder -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: And you get what's known as a carbon nanotube.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: So this wasn't discovered at Rice, but Rick forecast that the Buckey tube, as it's known -

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: Would be discovered soon.

Russ: And turn that over again. And that's floating in air, correct?

Dr. Wade Adams: So this is sort of a black cloud of Buckey Tubes -

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: And these are made right here at Rice. We make the best nanotubes in the world right here.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: And this is about two tenths of a gram.

Russ: Wow.

Dr. Wade Adams: So there - it looks like a lot of material, but it's really - it's probably 100 trillion nanotubes in this container right here.

Russ: Alright.

Dr. Wade Adams: But it only weighs two tenths of a gram.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: A gram, by the way, costs about $200.00, so it's pretty expensive stuff.

Russ: Wow, cool, cool.

Dr. Wade Adams: But these are so cool in their properties. For one thing, they have the potential of being very strong.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: One thing we can do with that fluffy looking stuff -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: Is to make fibers. So your viewers will never be able to see these fibers in here, but these are -

Russ: They look like human hairs.

Dr. Wade Adams: They're smaller -

Russ: They're thin, thin human hairs..

Dr. Wade Adams: They're smaller than a human hair. They're black. Buckey Balls and nanotubes come in any color you want, as long as it's black.

Russ: Alright. That's great.

Dr. Wade Adams: And these nanotube fibers that we're making have the potential, when we figure out all the details -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: And we have a strong science program that's been running for six years to try to get the details down -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: We're going to be able to make the strongest fiber that's ever gonna be available to us in the universe.

Russ: Out of these?

Dr. Wade Adams: Out of these. So Rick Smalley said that. It's kind of an arrogant, crazy statement.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: But he had a lot of reasons to believe that these, in principle, are going to be the strongest thing that we'll ever have available to us.

Russ: Oh, my goodness. And now, I also understand they have great potential for conducting electricity?

Dr. Wade Adams: Right. If you get the right types of nanotubes, and that's where the problem is -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: Because these come in a variety of types, and we have to separate only the one type that's a metallic conductor.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: Once we do that, we'll be able to make these fibers conduct electricity better than copper, silver, or aluminum.

Russ: Okay, well -

Dr. Wade Adams: These are gonna be much better than the grid wires of today. They're gonna carry much more current. They're gonna be much smaller. They're gonna be much stronger. They're gonna be able to wire - rewire the grid of the world to carry much more power anywhere you want it without loss.

Russ: Well, the only time I ever heard Dr. Smalley speak he - the subject was energy, and the role that nanotechnology could play in solving a big part of that problem.

Dr. Wade Adams: Absolutely. When we get these finished -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: And that's gonna happen sometime in the next decade -

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: These are gonna let you carry vast amounts of power from, say, Arizona solar farms to, say, New York City.

Russ: Wow.

Dr. Wade Adams: Or potentially from Australia to China.

Russ: Which is impossible now, right?

Dr. Wade Adams: They can't do it.

Russ: Right, right.

Dr. Wade Adams: The grid wires are good, but they're not that good, and you lose a lot of power in the transmission.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: And they sag when it gets hot out.

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: And these don't do any of that.

Russ: Cool.

Dr. Wade Adams: These are gonna be the answer for the renewable energy revolution.

Russ: Fantastic. Okay, so before I let you go, remind our listeners about the gala, the date, the location, and how they can get some information about it.

Dr. Wade Adams: Okay, it's pretty easy. 10/10/10, a great date. About 5:00 p.m. in the afternoon at the Hyatt Hotel. We're going to have an hour reception -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: About nanotechnology -

Russ: Right.

Dr. Wade Adams: And then another reception for an hour. And then we're gonna have a gala for two hours. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Gonna have some very important people there. The Nobel team is gonna be there. We're gonna have a great speaker. We're gonna introduce two new pieces of music, world premiers inspired by nanotechnology.

Russ: Cool.

Dr. Wade Adams: And one of them is gonna be a nanosymphony.

Russ: Alright, neat.

Dr. Wade Adams: So you ain't heard nothing yet, until you've heard a nanosymphony.

Russ: Neat, and how do they get more information online?

Dr. Wade Adams: Smalley.rice.edu is the website.

Russ: Okay.

Dr. Wade Adams: You can find the information there, or call us at the Smalley Institute: 713-348 - and my number is 6028. Give me a call.

Russ: Great. That's Dr. Wade Adams, director of the Smalley Institute here at Rice University. And this is the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com.