Word: nanotech
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...hype is gone from nanotechnology, the term Drexler popularized for his world of very small wonders. But something more interesting has crept in: sales. The khakis and tennis balls are bringing in money, as are dozens of other new products made and enhanced through nanotechnology. To be sure, most nanotech companies are still investing more in R. and D. than they are collecting in revenue. But many commercial applications are in advanced stages of development or already on sale: handheld devices that can sense anthrax spores, hand cream that can protect us from them and computer chips that are faster...
...observed and manipulated. It is a mysterious realm in which the laws of classical physics yield to those of quantum mechanics, in which the powerful bonds between atoms overtake the effects of gravity that rule the big world. Yet scientists have moved beyond the basic exploration of nanotech to its exploitation. The National Science Foundation foresees a $1 trillion market by 2015 for nano products, and businesses and governments around the world are rushing to cash...
...biotechnology is limited by the tasks cells already know how to carry out. Nanotech visionaries have much more ambitious notions. Imagine a nanomachine that could take raw carbon and arrange it, atom by atom, into a perfect diamond. Imagine a machine that dismembers dioxin molecules, one by one, into their component parts. Or a device that cruises the human bloodstream, seeks out cholesterol deposits on vessel walls and disassembles them. Or one that takes grass clippings and remanufactures them into bread. Literally every physical object in the world, from computers to cheese, is made of molecules, and in principle...
...newest technologies--computers, genetic engineering and the emerging field of nanotech--differ from the technologies that preceded them in a fundamental way. The telephone, the automobile, television and jet air travel accelerated for a while, transforming society along the way, but then settled into a manageable rate of change. Each was eventually rewarded more for staying the same than for radically transforming itself--a stable, predictable, reliable condition known as "lock...
Computers, biotechnology and nanotech don't work that way. They are self-accelerating; that is, the products of their own processes enable them to develop ever more rapidly. New computer chips are immediately put to use developing the next generation of more powerful ones; this is the inexorable acceleration expressed as Moore's law. The same dynamic drives biotech and nanotech--even more so because all these technologies tend to accelerate one another. Computers are rapidly mapping the DNA in the human genome, and now DNA is being explored as a medium for computation. When nanobots are finally perfected...