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Nanotech or Nano-Not?
LabRat007 writes "CNN has a story on the current status and future of nanotechnology. This infromative overview on the technology talks about current research and when we can expect nano-parts for our geek gear."
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I would say the best possible example of the last "grey goo is bad!" technology was the advent of restriction enzymes, which cut the DNA chain at specific intervals and are used to study microbiology.
Lots of Universities had all sorts of problems getting these things used in the lab, now they're commonly used in beginning level biology classes.
I'm not saying there's NO danger from nanotechnology, I'm just saying a lot of what people are doing is keying into insanely low probability risks which could really be associated with any item if you put enough thought into it.
I'm not soo concerned about potential dangers, I just wonder if it's actually feasible at all. If you're creating little machines at the atomic scale, then what is the size of a processor required to manage this device? I've seen little motors and joints and so forth being developed, but how much easy is it to say "Grip gold atom, place it next to the other one, let go, repeat"? Wouldn't even the smallest nano-processor be thousands of times larger than the size of the nano-bots people envision? Perhaps they'd be better named "nano-blimps". ;-) But seriously how much processing power do they need to work in a 3-D environment? And how small could that amount of processing power actually get?
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
From a condensed-matter physics grad student who's researching some aspects of 'nanotechnology' - Thank You!!!
It's ridiculous, how so many people on /. think of nanotechnology as nothing less than self-assembling nano-robots. This association is utterly naive, and is no more realistic than the standard 'Hollywoodification' of computer technology used in movies (eg, Hackers).
Sure, nanotechnology is a buzzword, and people in the field prefer to refer to it as research at the nanoscale, or self-assembling nanosctructures, etc. Just like spintronics is usually called magnetoelectronics by the researchers amongst themselves, and spintronics in the popular science media.
Basically, nanotechnology deals with anything at nanometer scale, which is in the realms of molecules. I'm studying carbon nanotubes, and superconducting nanowires of about the same size. I guess it's boring from a slashdot perspective because there's no robotics or selective biological processes going on. But for us physicists there's tons of interesting processes happening here. The systems really behave as one-dimensional (large superconducting wires would be three-dimensional), the standard statiscial-mechnanics starts to break down because of small system size, and there's other interesting quantum effects that manifest themselves. These factors make things act really weird and/or cool, and there's alot to discover. [If anybody thinks this research is pointless, concepts like GMR, which is now implemented in all new hard disk read heads, started the same way.]
Other nanotech researchers are looking at DNA (another guy in my lab is studying conductivity of various DNA systems). DNA is interesting because it can assemble itself, and some groups have made interesting self-assembling structures.
But this is nothing at all like the grey-goo concepts that are ever so popular and cliche here at slashdot. Every time 'nanotech' is mentioned on /. there's immediate posts about grey-goo and bio-enhancement nanites, yada yada yada. I'm actually relieved to hear of at least one other person here that gets past the hollywoodification of it all.
make world, not war
It's gotten so bad that true nanotech had to rename itself "molecular manufacturing" in order to avoid confusion with the nifty materials science stuff.
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Power to the Peaceful