the.com/nanogram
A billionth of a gram — too small to matter, until it is the entire dose.
means A unit of mass equal to one billionth of a gram, used to measure things so tiny that ordinary scales are useless.
from Built from Greek pieces: 'nano-' comes from 'nanos,' meaning dwarf, and was adopted in the modern metric system to mean one-billionth; 'gram' traces back through French to the Greek 'gramma,' a small weight or a written mark. The prefix 'nano-' only became standard for scientific units in the 20th century, as instruments grew precise enough to need a word for almost nothing.
- scale
- a billionth of a gram, basically a thought
- real use
- fentanyl is lethal in low hundreds of nanograms
- measuring tool
- detected via mass spectrometry, not kitchen scales
- fun comparison
- a human hair weighs about 1 million nanograms