As the 21st Century unfolds, the top-down techniques for creating the materials, which have served us so well up till now, are approaching fundamental limits.  Fortunately ingenious synthetic chemistry-based approaches are now being developed which are focused on the creation of new materials with extended, exactly-specified atomic and molecular infrastructures.  These bottom-up chemical assembly methods are the crucial key to the nanoscale structure control necessary in order to achieve the paradigm shifting technical advances that are promised.  As the synthetic problems are overcome, so nanoscale structures are being created with novel advanced function, vastly improved effective tensile strengths, infinitely more efficient electronic and magnetic behavior and the �intelligence� needed for medical applications etc.  This intrinsically modern, synthetic perspective has evolved almost overnight and the associated new materials field has acquired a new name, Nanoscience & Nanotechnology (N&N).  It is of course not new at all as biology has done things this way since the first organisms appeared.  All living systems are created by bottom-up synthesis ie atom-by-atom, protein molecule by protein molecule assembly on the basis of a chemically coded blue-print stored in DNA.  If life can do it - so can Chemists.  In fact, the cross-disciplinary field of N&N which conflates condensed matter physics, molecular biology and materials engineering and may be considered the �Frontier Chemistry of the 21st Century�.  Over the last decade or so, we have examined a wide range of methods for nanostructure formation and from these studies important new insights have been gained.  We have focused particular attention on the factors governing the creation of materials with intrinsically 1- and 2-D nanoscale infrastructures.  Although some advances in materials behaviour have already been achieved the technological paradigm shift that N&N promises will require further improvement of fine control over bottom-up (chemical) self-assembly. As these new approaches were starting to develop, a totally unexpected new form of pure carbon with fascinating properties was discovered.  This was the family of carbon cage molecules, the Fullerenes (Buckyballs) together with their elongated cousins the Nanotubes (or Buckytubes).  This breakthrough came about partly as a consequence of the discovery, by radioastronomy, that colossal quantities of molecules existed in space and partly as a consequence of technical laboratory advances in studying clusters of atoms.  Molecular radioastronomy surveys have shown that the very cold interstellar medium was a veritable Pandora's Box, full to the brim with fascinating and exotic molecules, dust particles and also some highly puzzling material responsible for some as yet unidentified spectroscopic features.  The fact that C60, Buckminsterfullerene had been hiding from us and only sighted at the end of the 20th Century suggested (at least to me) that it might have been hiding in the dark recesses of the Galaxy since time immemorial.  This conjecture was confirmed last year by NASA's Spitzer satellite born telescope. This is yet another example of the remarkably synergistic relationship between terrestrial and space science.  In these difficult times it lends useful support for the fundamental value of 'Blue Skies' or perhaps more accurately �Black Skies� cross-disciplinary research.

Chemistry in nano and outer space

247th National Meeting (2014)

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