The Trends editors have been monitoring nanotechnology since the late ‘80s, when it was just a gleam in the eyes of a few visionaries. As of the second quarter 2005, several new developments are occurring that make this technology trend increasingly important. Quietly — almost too quietly — nanotechnology products have begun creeping into the marketplace, even as basic research in that burgeoning field spreads worldwide and accelerates its pace.

According to an article in The Economic Times of India, major Indian textile manufacturers that supply The Gap and Banana Republic are already shipping materials made with nanotechnology products woven into them for better stain resistance, crease resistance, and even body-odor-eliminating bacteria resistance.

In the U.S., Glen Raven, a North Carolina company that’s been making textiles for 125 years and, in fact, made the American flag that was planted on the moon, is now using nanotech to make bullet-proof vests. And this is just the tip of a global iceberg in nanotech. This market is heating up fast and moving from basic research to the retail store shelves, while forecasters, including the National Science Foundation, are saying that within a decade, nanotech could be a trillion-dollar business and provide two million new jobs in the U.S. alone.

As reported by the Associated Press, a whole range of nanotech products is now emerging from the pipeline, from self-cleaning windows to fog-resistant eyeglasses to better sports equipment, sunscreens, and computer memory.

Nanotechnology, you’ll recall, is the engineering of materials at an incredibly tiny scale. A nanometer, or a billionth of a meter, is about the width of a dozen hydrogen atoms, which is to say, close to the smallest material measurements in existence, other than subatomic particles.

For comparison, a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide. Nanoscale materials are less than 100 — and often only a few — nanometers in size. This new field has been touted as the next industrial revolution, set to transform everything from medicine to supercomputers.

Part of the allure comes from the fact that when you reduce the size of a sample of material, you change its fundamental characteristics, whether they’re electrical, magnetic, chemical, physical, or even their color. Gold is...