Nanotechnology

In his weekly email message David Pogue, the NYTimes Circuits columnist reported on an interview with Steve Jurvetson, a nanotechnology venture capitalist.

We define nanotechnology as the manipulation and control of matter at the nano scale, nano scale being a billionth of a meter. It's about 70,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. It's smaller than the wavelength of light, something you would normally not ever be able to see. And it's much smaller than anything we manufacture today.

The reason that it's so exciting, though, is not just that it's small. It's that everything changes at that scale. The physics you may have learned in school is completely different. In fact, it's wrong and doesn't apply at that level. Notions like temperature and electricity and magnetism are completely different. …

Right now, nanotech is second only to the space race for Federal funding of basic research and development. So the US government absolutely believes that this is the future technology wave. The National Science Foundation of the US estimates it will be a trillion-dollar market.

And I might point out that internationally, the U.S. is not number one or number two. We're number three, if you consider the EU as an entity and if you consider Japan as an entity.

Credit for the original idea of nanotechnology is given to Richard Feynman, whose December 29th 1959 talk to the American Physical Society was entitled, There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom.

Here are too many (mostly) relevant web sites.

• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI): Nanotechnology
  
  
• SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES: Thinking Big in NANO sized World Nanoscience and Technology
  
  
• National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) is an integrated networked partnership of user facilities, supported by the National Science Foundation, serving the needs of nanoscale science, engineering and technology.
  
  
• University of Michigan: Center for Biologic Nanotechnology
  
  
• IBM Research: Nanoscale science department
  
  
• London Centre for Nanotechnology
  
  
• Nanotechnology Is BIG at NIST
  
  
• Rice: CBEN Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology
  
  
• "Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties". Report of the UK Royal Society, the UK national academy of science, the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, the UK national academy of engineering.
  
  
• Center for Responsible Nanotechnology: What is Nanotechnology?
  
  
• US NSF - Crosscutting and NSF-wide Active Funding Opportunities
  
  
• Nanotechnology.net: Nanotechnology news, events and suppliers - Home
  
  
• The ASME Nanotechnology Institute
  
  
• University of Washington: Welcome to NanoTech
  
  
• Northwestern University: Institute for Nanotechnology
  
  
• Nanotechnology Now
  
  
• European research consortium: CORDIS: Nanotechnology: Home Page
  
  
• NASA-AMES: Center for Nanotechnology
  
  
• Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Nanotechnology
  
  
• Institute of Nanotechnology, UK
  
  
• US Govt. cross-agency: National Nanotechnology Initiative
  
  
• Nanotechnology - Foresight Institute