Photo courtesy Digital Art/Corbis

Imagine having a cell phone or a GameBoy where the batteries last four or five weeks without recharging. Then, when you do need to recharge, it only takes two minutes. The display is brighter, larger and much sharper than any display today. And the computer inside it is so fast; it's like using a desktop computer today.

A cell phone like this may soon be possible, and it will all happen thanks to nanotechnology. Over the next several years, nanotechnology will probably be touching just about everything you buy or use on a daily basis.

Nanotechnology is the science of the super-small. The "nano" in nanotechnology comes from a measurement -- the nanometer -- that equals one one-billionth of a meter. A nanometer is so small that it is nearly impossible to imagine. But here is one way to think about it. The smallest single atom in our universe is a hydrogen atom. It is about a tenth of a nanometer across. One sugar molecule is about 10 hydrogen atoms wide, so it is about a nanometer wide. Remember, we're talking about a sugar molecule, not a grain of sugar. A virus particle is about 50 nanometers wide. A red blood cell in your blood has a diameter of about 5,000 nanometers. Now, look at a strand of hair on your arm. It has a diameter of about 75,000 nanometers. So if you had a way to do it, you could line up about 15 red blood cells across the end of a strand of hair. As you can see - a nanometer is very, very, very small.