For all the people not attending the INASCON:

This afternoon we had a workshop about scaling and dimensionalities in science and especially biology. It was quite a lot of fun and interesting discussions were started. To give you some insight, I picked a few especially funny scaling examples. They are all taken from J. B. S. Haldanes „On Being the Right Size“ written in 1928 that served as an introductory article.

• Let us consider a giant human around 18m tall. This man is not only 10 times as high as a normal human, he is also ten times as wide and ten times as thick. So that his weight is about 1000 times larger, or about eighty tons. Unfortunately, the cross section of his bones were only a hundred times larger, so that every cm of giant bone had to support ten times the normal weight. This giant human would break his legs every time he takes a step.
  This example shows quite clearly, that the size of things is limited by laws of nature.
• The next example we can see, how one of the main physical principles affects life on earth: gravity.You can drop a mouse down a hundred meters mine shaft;  on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken and a horse is splashed. Because the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and heights each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the same small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.
• A lot other examples could  be mentioned at this point, like a wet mouse has to carry its entire weight in water as well, or big animals have to extend their surface (lungs are made to have a big surface) to uptake enough oxygen. Furthermore, small animals are not able to live in really cold regions, because they would lose to much heat due to their large surface to volume ratio.

Well finally, all these examples are placed here to show you which large influence size has. This is especially true for nano-sized objects because surface properties contribute much more than bulk properties. When handling really small stuff, classical physics laws are not always applicable and characteristics can change a lot.

That is wat makes it so interesting but sometimes quite difficult, as well.