h+ Magazine

Until the mid-1990s, the term "nanotechnology" referred to the goal of creating vast arrays of nanoscale assemblers to fabricate useful human-scale products from scratch in an entirely automated process and with atomic precision.

For all the optimism about humanity‘s impending ascent into the digital realm, writ large with logarithmic graphs from Ray Kurzweil and given life by the fiction of Charles Stross, there‘s an obstacle we haven‘t been able to bound over.

What do a clown's makeup and a spinning wheel have in common? Boron nitride is the white material found in clown makeup and face powder.

In 1992, seminal nanotechnology pioneer Dr. K. Eric Drexler introduced the term "molecular manufacturing," which he defined as the "chemical synthesis of complex structures by mechanically positioning reactive molecules, not by manipulating individual atoms.”

Cancer is the number two cause of death in the United States, killing over 550,000 people annually according to the American Cancer Society’s 2009 Cancer Statistics report.

For years, engineers have been working on making smaller and smaller UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). DARPA (Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency) has been taking the lead for years, and is now pushing the envelope by providing a second round of funding for the development of nano-UAVs, unmanned flyers with a mass of just 10 grams, approximately equivalent to two nickels.

On a strange and inhospitable waterworld circling Tau Ceti, a spaceship crash-lands, wrecked beyond repair. Its crew, doomed to die within a month from their rapidly dwindling stores and the planet’s poisonous atmosphere, work feverishly to leave a legacy and in some sense complete their mission.

The breathless BBC headline read “Do Nanobacteria Rule the Earth and Mars?” But this scoop was in 1999. Did we actually discover evidence for extraterrestrial life ten years ago?

Ever hear the saying that most people anticipate too much change in the short term and too little in the long term?