Nano: The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology

by Ed Regis

It's the ultimate technology: nanotechnology - the attempt to build ordinary objects from the atoms up, molecule by molecule. So named because its building blocks are the smallest pieces of matter, nanotechnology will give us complete control over the structure of matter, allowing us to build any substance or structure permitted by the laws of nature. Placing atoms as if they were bricks, nano-machines could turn grass clippings into prime sirloin - directly, without cows. They could turn coal into diamond, and sheets of diamond into rocket engines. Suitably reprogrammed, the tiny machines could repair all of your body's ailing cells. Science fiction? Alchemy? Craziness? Actually, scientists have already isolated individual atoms and moved them at will, even using them to spell out words on a scale so small that the entire Encyclopedia Britannica can be written on the head of a pin. Conceived by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feyman and pioneered by the remarkable K. Eric Drexle