One of the startups that fizzled out was Nanorex, which is where Nanoengineer was made. Thankfully they were open to releasing the source code and version control repository when they decided to shutdown. The results of that are here: https://github.com/kanzure/nanoengineer
Because positional, precise molecular manufacturing still doesn't exist, I have been increasingly interested in using DNA synthesis (using phosphoramidite chemistry) to combinatorially build proteins that lock together in pre-defined shape based on ligand-specific binding affinities between the blocks. The Nanosystems book left out a lot of biology that can be hijacked to help out goals like these.
Our lab is working on ways to screen large libraries of designed proteins for engineered orthogonally interacting libraries. The thought would this would be a start of a modular resuasable library for molecular self-assembly. If you are interested, we're definitely hiring!
As I see it, proteins are our best bet of making custom nanomachines. They're proven to work. The hard part is understanding protein folding and predicting protein function from the amino acid sequence.
Doesn't nature have a lot of inherent stochasticity down at the molecular level that makes it very difficult to do positional, precise molecular manufacturing, due to everything jittering around randomly?
I love that curve and thinking about how it maps to other "futuristic" tech.
Space flight is probably coming out of its trough of disillusionment right now, as is renewable energy (solar/wind).
Genetic engineering is deep in the trough with anti-GMO sentiment, the supposed failure of the human genome project to pay out, and general paralysis in the field. Nuclear power is also probably still deep in the trough with Fukushima and us still being stuck on overgrown submarine reactors.
The interesting thing is in research at least, 'nano' is starting to deliver. We've had artificial molecular switches, motors, transistors, and other components for years but we have not been able to put them together. Now we're starting to organize these components to make 'machines' and systems. Not very complicated machines, but machines nonetheless.
A great example of this is rotaxane containing metal organic frameworks. A rotaxane is molecule consisting of a ring on a rod. Make your molecule just right and you can get the ring to move back and forth using electric charge which allows you to store bits. Recently, there has been success of organizing these rotaxanes spatially by putting them in a self-assembling molecular space frame type structure called a metal organic framework. This is getting us closer to making ultra-high density data storage that just self-assembles. Some well respected researchers(not Drexler) are even starting to seriously consider robot arms capable of moving individual atoms.
There is even a name for this sort of research: supramolecular chemistry. In short, 'nano' is coming back, it's just not going to be called nano.
I feel the term "nanotech" is meaningless. Everyone piled into the term and it has became too broad an umbrella and includes what one would usually describe as "materials science", "biochemistry" and "molecular biology" among others. "Data science" feels like another similar, ultimately meaningless umbrella term.
The way electronic Turing-complete machines resulted in a new industry segment with market leaders dedicated to vertical integrated products in the field is very unusual.
Usually it happens a lot more like LASERs. There is no giant LASER segment of the economy. There are just lasers in barcode readers, medical gear, machine tools, lasers in robots, lasers in survey gear, lasers in hand held power tools, lasers in pointers, all manner of things not sold by LASER Inc a giant conglomerated manufacturer or even made by a LASER economic segment of dedicated LASER companies.
My gut level guess is Data Science will be more like LASERs and less like computers, as will nanotech.
Everyone will be doing nanotech, they'll just call it plain old ore refining, or plain old medical care, or plain old IC manufacturing, and they'll be no Nanotech Inc company or even market sector.
I would totally disagree with the term "Data Science." It maybe used loosely but it certainly is more than statistics and more akin to science. Any inter discipline study has these issues.
It is science since you are taking data to answer a question. If your not answering a question or using a scientific method it falls short.
Yeah. This is the basic point many people decrying nanotechnology as a pipe dream are missing - that life itself is nothing but nanotechnology, only one that we didn't design and we don't know how to control yet.
They're really different points of view, with different goals. There's studying how life works at various levels, and there's designing systems from the ground up. Both complementary!
The only technology that has consistently grown at an exponential rate of doubling each year is IC/computing. It is utterly unreasonable to expect other sciences and technologies to exhibit similar growth. There doesn't exist a Facebook for nanotech because nanotech doesn't grow and scale like computational resources.
Now, if you consider nanotech as a new term for some or all of the traditional fields of materials science and pharmaceuticals, then it is bullshit to claim that the hype died out. The traditional materials science companies soldier on and continue to grow at very impressive rates (stocks returning an annual 10-30%): P&G, Dow, Du Pont, 3M, etc.
The barrier for entry for startups is too high. Forget about building a manufacturing line, running a manufacturing line for a couple of days can cost in the order of millions of dollars. It is hardly a thing that one can do in one's parents' basement or garage. That is how most materials science-y and pharma companies have all been in the business for 50-100 years or more. Naturally, the successful companies in this area will be rather few in number.
I don't know that you could measure it with something like Moore's Law, but aerospace capabilities grew at an astonishing rate at the beginning of the 20th century. From the Wright Brothers' first powered flight in 1903 to the first commercial flight in 1914 to flying around the world in 1924 to fighters and bombers and rockets in WW2 to breaking the sound barrier in 1947 to landing on the moon in 1969 . . .
That sort of progress over 70 years strikes me as very comparable to the progress made in computing since the 1950s. Small wonder the science fiction writers of the previous generation thought we'd have flying cars by now!
I would expect to see such an explosion of capability in a brand new field, in a society that had a lot of resources to dedicate to exploring it. It could happen with anything we really, really cared about, I think. Aerospace and computing both saw tremendous amounts of commercial, scientific, and military research during their accelerated growth phases.
I don't know about nanotech. I'd say that sort of energy in this generation seems to mostly be going into building our society a hivemind. And I'm not gonna say that's wrong.
"Nanotechnology" was originally about building "assemblers" to move atoms around and build structures at the atomic level. Then the name was take over for surface chemistry technologies, and then it was used to describe finely divided powders. Hence the declining interest in the term.
I'm tempted to say, thank god, now that all the idiots are out of the way the real science can get funded, tested, and refined. But that offers up a question, does a whole lot of popular buzz really help out a field, or does it usually just turn out to be noise? Is there a measurable "actual progress" delta during times of increased popular attention and is it positive?
I did my PhD work on colloidal semiconductor quantum dots right at the peak of the nano fad. I would say that popular buzz doesn't help or hurt, it's mostly noise. Academically, we're expected to spend some time on outreach, so if your field is in the public eye at the moment it does make outreach easier.
Believe it or not, the hype among scientists was even worse than among the public, to the point of (in my opinion) hurting good science. Everyone was shoehorning "nano" into their proposals, regardless if their work was legitimately nano[1], and that really hurt the SNR for manuscripts and grant proposals.
[1] I define nanotechnology as dealing with something sufficiently small to access properties not seen in bulk materials. For many materials, restricting one or more dimensions below 100nm will lead to side-dependent properties. There was a lot of stuff during the Great Nano Hype that was claimed to be nano, but was say 500nm—that would be "submicron".
of course there is, you just don't hear about it. Incremental progress is not always news-worthy, but it certainly matters and is happening all of the time.
I just finished "The Forever Peace", a book in-part about with the economic implications of nanotech. Using nano-forges, machines that take raw materials like carbon as input and can turn them in to diamonds, America is able to gain an extremely huge foothold.
I found it extremely interesting, and finished it in 2 days.
If you haven't already, check out "The Diamond Age" as well. Different story but deals with the sort of "idealized" form of nanotech that people dreamed of when the concept was getting a lot of hype in the 1990s (along with socio-economic conflict and plain old sci-fi, action, and adventure).
Nanotech "assemblers" are coming in a sense, but they got the scale wrong. They're called 3d printers and they operate at the macro scale, but they are not really any less disruptive.
As far as true nanotech goes, we've had it for about 4.5 billion years. It's called biology. You are basically made of nano-assemblers holding hands. Genetically engineered biology and "wet artificial life" are engineerable nanotech, but if you want to see Turing-complete universal assemblers in action right now go plant a tree.
In other words, I sort of think nanotechnology is a useless neologism for biology and bioengineering and I doubt that anything other than carbon-based systems are going to do much better than biology... and those are basically synthetic biology.
Where's the disruption exactly? Everytime I look at the 3D printing scene its a bunch of neckbeards printing Star Wars figures and other useless knick-nacks. What industry has cheap 3D printing attacked? The argument seemed to be "Oh we'll make spare parts and such," but that never happened. It was supposed to make a new market, but seems to have completely fizzled out.
If someone is interested in real technical description of molecular manufacturing, you may read Eric Drexler's "Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation".
Most parts of this book can be read on the author's website http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Nanosystems/toc.html , and if you know how to google you can find the whole book.
The book contains a careful physical analysis of molecular machines. The technical material is unchallenged to the present day.
I guess they're calling it "3D XPoint" now, which is a shame because memristor has such a cool retro-future sound to it. 3D XPoint sounds like what a bunch of bored marketing execs would whip up over a short lunch.
While I'm at it, what ever happened to 3D printing? It was supposed to change everything, except its expensive and everything it makes looks like piled spaghetti. The resin/liquid based printing never took off and the few that did were troublesome and crazy expensive for materials.
Or that quantum computer that company was selling, except it was huge and cooled with liquid nitrogen and no one could prove it was doing quantum anything.
I'm also skeptical of the new VR fad. Yeah FPS addicts will probably love it, but grandpa and grandma aren't putting giant tissue boxes on their faces to watch a movie or skype with the grandkids.
All the cool stuff from just a year or two ago are either dying, forever in the "we're working on it" stage, or were just vaporware. Nano hype has been here from the 80s and, unsurprisingly, has gone nowhere.
3d printing has been around since the 90s, but just recently did the public start to hear about it. It didn't change everything, but now 3d printers are affordable for hobbyists. Aviation companies are using it to make weird ultra-light parts for that can't be made any other way, but save huge money on fuel costs. Various companies are using it to make low production runs of widgets directly because it's not worth the cost of injection molding/CNC machining.
The whole industry is about to be disrupted though. HP has a new machine coming out in 2016 that does the same thing as industrial 3d printers except faster, cheaper, and in color. They have probably made a bunch of 3d printing processes obsolete. These machines might be fast and cheap enough to put in every kinkos in the country to locally produce moderate value plastic stuff(action figures, keychains, overpriced as seen on TV products), offer customized products(3d selfies, your face on an action figure), or consumer 3d printing.
In short, big companies are starting to get into the 3d printing game. The days of kickstarter 3d printers and 3d printers made by a bunch of guys in a garage are over.
Actually, Intel has been almost totally opaque about what 3D XPoint is, except it's not a phase change media like that is used in optical disks, and per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10366907 "We learned that 3D XPoint used a bulk material property change (rather than a stored charge) to address each cell."
Companies that claimed to be doing "nanotechnology" in 2005 or 2015 are basically fraudulent. "Nanotechnology" is a well-defined term: it means, as kanzure said, "positional, precise molecular manufacturing." Unfortunately, lots of gold-digging hucksters jumped on the term to tout anything involving small particles, extending the term to the point where it could plausibly be used to describe the process of smoking meat.
I've read a lot about graphene recently (including claimed breakthroughs [1] by IBM and Graphene 3D Lab regarding the cheap production of carbon nanotubes). Perhaps some of this tech just requires more patience to fulfil its promises?
Nanotechnology couldn't come to fruition since nano-fabrication at this point in time just doesn't exist in an effective form. Having to manually assemble a complex nanomachine one molecule at a time isn't viable. Until there's a way found to make the machines assemble themselves from the simplest possible unit then we're going to be stuck with just nanomaterials which is great IMO. Nanodust has many uses and we're discovering many dangers (health hazards) now.
[+] [-] kanzure|10 years ago|reply
I think everyone is stuck wondering how to make the tooltips from the tooltips paper: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/nanotech/Optimal%20tooltip%2...
All of that was motivated by goals of making nanofactories like shown in this eye candy video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEYN18d7gHg
Because positional, precise molecular manufacturing still doesn't exist, I have been increasingly interested in using DNA synthesis (using phosphoramidite chemistry) to combinatorially build proteins that lock together in pre-defined shape based on ligand-specific binding affinities between the blocks. The Nanosystems book left out a lot of biology that can be hijacked to help out goals like these.
Long-term we might be able to coerce enzymes into creating molecular machines anyway: https://groups.google.com/group/enzymaticsynthesis
[+] [-] skosuri|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianN|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lacker|10 years ago|reply
I wonder how we can hope to make nanofactories, when we don't even have a robot arm that can fold my laundry for me.
[+] [-] FeepingCreature|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ph0rque|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
"We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara
[+] [-] dredmorbius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swalsh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benchtobedside|10 years ago|reply
Interesting to see what has / hasn't moved.
[+] [-] api|10 years ago|reply
Space flight is probably coming out of its trough of disillusionment right now, as is renewable energy (solar/wind).
Genetic engineering is deep in the trough with anti-GMO sentiment, the supposed failure of the human genome project to pay out, and general paralysis in the field. Nuclear power is also probably still deep in the trough with Fukushima and us still being stuck on overgrown submarine reactors.
[+] [-] sigmar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gene-h|10 years ago|reply
A great example of this is rotaxane containing metal organic frameworks. A rotaxane is molecule consisting of a ring on a rod. Make your molecule just right and you can get the ring to move back and forth using electric charge which allows you to store bits. Recently, there has been success of organizing these rotaxanes spatially by putting them in a self-assembling molecular space frame type structure called a metal organic framework. This is getting us closer to making ultra-high density data storage that just self-assembles. Some well respected researchers(not Drexler) are even starting to seriously consider robot arms capable of moving individual atoms.
There is even a name for this sort of research: supramolecular chemistry. In short, 'nano' is coming back, it's just not going to be called nano.
[+] [-] fluidcruft|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|10 years ago|reply
Usually it happens a lot more like LASERs. There is no giant LASER segment of the economy. There are just lasers in barcode readers, medical gear, machine tools, lasers in robots, lasers in survey gear, lasers in hand held power tools, lasers in pointers, all manner of things not sold by LASER Inc a giant conglomerated manufacturer or even made by a LASER economic segment of dedicated LASER companies.
My gut level guess is Data Science will be more like LASERs and less like computers, as will nanotech.
Everyone will be doing nanotech, they'll just call it plain old ore refining, or plain old medical care, or plain old IC manufacturing, and they'll be no Nanotech Inc company or even market sector.
[+] [-] baldfat|10 years ago|reply
It is science since you are taking data to answer a question. If your not answering a question or using a scientific method it falls short.
Good example is all the medical data science that has been happening in the past decade or so. http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/how-data-science-is-transfo...
[+] [-] 88e282102ae2e5b|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shas3|10 years ago|reply
Now, if you consider nanotech as a new term for some or all of the traditional fields of materials science and pharmaceuticals, then it is bullshit to claim that the hype died out. The traditional materials science companies soldier on and continue to grow at very impressive rates (stocks returning an annual 10-30%): P&G, Dow, Du Pont, 3M, etc.
The barrier for entry for startups is too high. Forget about building a manufacturing line, running a manufacturing line for a couple of days can cost in the order of millions of dollars. It is hardly a thing that one can do in one's parents' basement or garage. That is how most materials science-y and pharma companies have all been in the business for 50-100 years or more. Naturally, the successful companies in this area will be rather few in number.
[+] [-] Dove|10 years ago|reply
That sort of progress over 70 years strikes me as very comparable to the progress made in computing since the 1950s. Small wonder the science fiction writers of the previous generation thought we'd have flying cars by now!
I would expect to see such an explosion of capability in a brand new field, in a society that had a lot of resources to dedicate to exploring it. It could happen with anything we really, really cared about, I think. Aerospace and computing both saw tremendous amounts of commercial, scientific, and military research during their accelerated growth phases.
I don't know about nanotech. I'd say that sort of energy in this generation seems to mostly be going into building our society a hivemind. And I'm not gonna say that's wrong.
[+] [-] ThomPete|10 years ago|reply
From self assembly of socks to breaking down pollution and gray goo.
Now it's just doing what science does best, sit in the background and provide the basic building blocks of progress.
But yeah building a nanotech company is not like putting a dating app on the app store that much is certain :)
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinceguidry|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OopsCriticality|10 years ago|reply
Believe it or not, the hype among scientists was even worse than among the public, to the point of (in my opinion) hurting good science. Everyone was shoehorning "nano" into their proposals, regardless if their work was legitimately nano[1], and that really hurt the SNR for manuscripts and grant proposals.
[1] I define nanotechnology as dealing with something sufficiently small to access properties not seen in bulk materials. For many materials, restricting one or more dimensions below 100nm will lead to side-dependent properties. There was a lot of stuff during the Great Nano Hype that was claimed to be nano, but was say 500nm—that would be "submicron".
[+] [-] mcnamaratw|10 years ago|reply
The investment case behind it was wrong, but we got an incredible tech advance in less than 10 years.
[+] [-] DarkTree|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] escherize|10 years ago|reply
I found it extremely interesting, and finished it in 2 days.
[+] [-] soylentcola|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
[+] [-] api|10 years ago|reply
As far as true nanotech goes, we've had it for about 4.5 billion years. It's called biology. You are basically made of nano-assemblers holding hands. Genetically engineered biology and "wet artificial life" are engineerable nanotech, but if you want to see Turing-complete universal assemblers in action right now go plant a tree.
In other words, I sort of think nanotechnology is a useless neologism for biology and bioengineering and I doubt that anything other than carbon-based systems are going to do much better than biology... and those are basically synthetic biology.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|10 years ago|reply
Where's the disruption exactly? Everytime I look at the 3D printing scene its a bunch of neckbeards printing Star Wars figures and other useless knick-nacks. What industry has cheap 3D printing attacked? The argument seemed to be "Oh we'll make spare parts and such," but that never happened. It was supposed to make a new market, but seems to have completely fizzled out.
[+] [-] lovemenot|10 years ago|reply
Small nitpick. Earth is around 4.6 byo. Life, as far as anyone knows, is about one billion years younger.
[+] [-] Jweb_Guru|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonmeow|10 years ago|reply
The book contains a careful physical analysis of molecular machines. The technical material is unchallenged to the present day.
[+] [-] reasonattlm|10 years ago|reply
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|10 years ago|reply
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/hp-and-sandisk-join-f...
I guess they're calling it "3D XPoint" now, which is a shame because memristor has such a cool retro-future sound to it. 3D XPoint sounds like what a bunch of bored marketing execs would whip up over a short lunch.
While I'm at it, what ever happened to 3D printing? It was supposed to change everything, except its expensive and everything it makes looks like piled spaghetti. The resin/liquid based printing never took off and the few that did were troublesome and crazy expensive for materials.
Or that quantum computer that company was selling, except it was huge and cooled with liquid nitrogen and no one could prove it was doing quantum anything.
I'm also skeptical of the new VR fad. Yeah FPS addicts will probably love it, but grandpa and grandma aren't putting giant tissue boxes on their faces to watch a movie or skype with the grandkids.
All the cool stuff from just a year or two ago are either dying, forever in the "we're working on it" stage, or were just vaporware. Nano hype has been here from the 80s and, unsurprisingly, has gone nowhere.
[+] [-] gene-h|10 years ago|reply
The whole industry is about to be disrupted though. HP has a new machine coming out in 2016 that does the same thing as industrial 3d printers except faster, cheaper, and in color. They have probably made a bunch of 3d printing processes obsolete. These machines might be fast and cheap enough to put in every kinkos in the country to locally produce moderate value plastic stuff(action figures, keychains, overpriced as seen on TV products), offer customized products(3d selfies, your face on an action figure), or consumer 3d printing.
In short, big companies are starting to get into the 3d printing game. The days of kickstarter 3d printers and 3d printers made by a bunch of guys in a garage are over.
[+] [-] hga|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retra|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperion2010|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tepix|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://3dprint.com/98086/graphene-3d-lab-patent/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-claims-breakthrough-on-carb...
[+] [-] hugh4|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] norea-armozel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varelse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] transfire|10 years ago|reply