What are nanotechnologies? What changes will they bring to the future? The nanotechnological revolution has already begun, profoundly changing our existence. Just think of the mobile phone and the internet. However, nanotechnologies are much more. They can provide answers to urgent problems, such as producing sustainable energy, improving the quality of the environment, reducing the consumption of rare raw materials. And they will influence how we treat ourselves tomorrow. Nanosystems capable of conveying drugs, nanosensors capable of accurately indicating diseased organs, are just some of the goals pointed at by nanomedicine.
And finally there is the biggest challenge: learning to create processes on a molecular scale with the efficiency that nature has achieved in millions of years of evolution.

Gianfranco Pacchioni is Vice Rector at the University of Milan Bicocca where he was director of the Department of Materials Science. For his research he has received numerous prestigious international awards, including the Humboldt Award and the Pascal medal of the European Academy of Sciences. Among other things, he published Idee per diventare scienziato dei materiali (Zanichelli, 2006), Quanto è piccolo il mondo (Zanichelli, 2008) and Scienza, quo vadis? (Il Mulino, 2017).