By Jay Mayfield

Throw the rulebook out.

We’re not talking about track and field drug testing here, but about the incredibly tiny world of nanotechnology. It’s a field that is changing the way scientists, researchers and increasingly, big business look at the world around them.

By creating and manipulating materials at sizes that were once unimaginable, nanotechnologists are finding that when you reduce things to such a tiny scale, they behave completely differently. These new particles are finding their way into an amazing array of products, and no field may be more promising than making new medicines using this technology.

At the same time, researchers are faced with a new set of questions: Just how far can something so small penetrate the human body? Can it even work its way into individual cells — our basic building blocks?

A team of scientists at UT Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Lab led by physics graduate student Laurene Tetard and UT-ORNL joint researcher Ali Passian has found a novel way to answer those questions with a new approach that for the first time will allow researchers to see these particles inside a living cell. The work was published in a recent issue of Nature Nanotechnology.