ABSTRACT
The concept of nanotechnology was introduced by the American physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman in 1959. In his lecture “There’s plenty room at the bottom,” Feynman draw the attention to the potential of small matter (near atomic scales) at the production of enhanced materials, products, and devices (Feynman 1960; Maynard et al. 2006). However, the term “nanotechnology” was rst coined only several years later by the Japanese researcher Prof. Norio Taniguchi, in 1974. Nowadays, nanotechnology is an emerging science, with wide-ranging applications. In fact, the potential of nanomaterials (NMs) and their benecial features are so vast that we are constantly witnessing the rise of applications/ consumer products relaying on nanotechnology. The rising of benets and applications of NMs arise from the increasing ability to synthesize and manipulate nanoparticles (NPs), the building blocks of nanotechnology (Stern and McNeil 2008).
