Quotes About Nanotechnology

People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.

If we can reduce the cost and improve the quality of medical technology through advances in nanotechnology, we can more widely address the medical conditions that are prevalent and reduce the level of human suffering.

The lessons learned as we try to build ever more sophisticated nanomachines will almost certainly inform our understanding of the origins of life.

Graphene is a single plane of graphite that has to be pulled out of bulk graphite to show its amazing properties.

Already we see a trend in our own technological societies towards the fabrication of smaller and smaller machines that consume less and less energy and produce almost no waste. Taken to its logical conclusion, we expect advanced life-forms to be as small as the laws of physics allow.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

If we are ever to cross the 100-nano barrier in electronics, we need to develop nano structures that let electrons move through, as they do through wires and semiconductors. And these structures must survive in the real world of air, water, boiling temperatures.

found graphene hiding out in the graphite from an ordinary pencil.

A molecular manufacturing technology will let us build molecular surgical tools, and those tools will, for the first time, let us directly address the problems at the very root level.

Encrypted digital watermarking," explains Balthazar. "Information gets hidden in information, like a code inside the pixels. Only visible with the right kind of key. It's called steganography. Here," pointing at the cylinder, "they're using a similar technique, but done at the nano-level, with DNA as the information carrier. GFP is green fluorescent protein, in this case jellyfish genes woven into the atoms of the metal. The heat from your hand is the key.

I believe one day nano-robots will play an important role in medicine.

A test. Other races on other worlds have tried it and failed. Wiped themselves out. Overpopulated to the point of total ecological collapse. Destroyed themselves in wars. We've got to make sure that the human race discovers nanotechnology in the right way and develops it wisely, usefully. Not for power. Not for weapons. Humanely. Then we'll be ready to meet the other races that have succeeded, that have passed this test and become truly intelligent, truly adult.

Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.

Unable to construct genuine nanoassemblers, Xymos was using bacteria to crank out their molecules. This was genetic engineering, not nanotechnology.

The buckyball, with sixty carbon atoms, is the most symmetrical form the carbon atom can take. Carbon in its nature has a genius for assembling into buckyballs. The perfect nanotube, that is, the nanotube that the carbon atom naturally wants to make and makes most often, is exactly large enough that one buckyball can roll right down the center.

You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third.

Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.

New technologies are rapidly giving rise to unprecedented methods of warfare. Innovations that yesterday were science fiction could cause catastrophe tomorrow, including nanotechnologies, combat robots, and laser weapons.

The Pentagon has been looking into the possibility of developing "smart dust," dust-sized particles that have tiny sensors inside that can be sprayed over a battlefield to give commanders real-time information. In the future it is conceivable that "smart dust" might be sent to the nearby stars.

It is also possible to carve atomic devices using electron beams. For example, scientists at Cornell University have made the world's smallest guitar, one that is twenty times smaller than a human hair, carved out of crystalline silicon. It has six strings, each one hundred atoms thick, and the strings can be plucked using an atomic force microscope. (This guitar will actually play music, but the frequencies it produces are well above the range of the human ear.)

Atomic machines are actually found in nature. Cells can swim freely in water because they can wiggle tiny hairs. But when one analyzes the joint between the hair and the cell, one sees that it is actually an atomic machine that allows the hair to move in all directions. So one key to developing nanotechnology is to copy nature, which mastered the art of atomic machines billions of years ago.)

Cuando estamos sentados en una silla, creemos que la tocamos, pero en realidad estamos suspendidos sobre ella, flotando a menos de un nanometro sobre el asiento

Negative energy may seem like the holy grail to a physicist building a starship, but for a nanotechnologist, the Casimir force is so strong at the atomic level that it becomes a nuisance.

To do this, we will have to exploit the fourth wave of science, which consists of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.