Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: qazibasit on 11/06/2005 11:30:08
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what is nano technology and what are nanobots and how it is progressing what do scientist say about its future and how is it helping us is their any output of this technology.
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Nan O'Technology is a cybernetic Irish grandmother
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Shouting 'Nano!Nano!' got Robin Williams an Academy Award for Mork and Mindy, wasn't it?
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Louis Berlioz
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Rob - I thought about the Mork & Mindy connection but resisted the temptation as I thought it was too silly even for me! [:D]
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Nothing is beneath me.
OK, seriously: nanotech is possibly the most promising, yet frustrating field we currently have in AI. Standard problem of self-learning applies, but also the one of distributed non-central 'swarming' control and Lyapunov-type learning. Very uneven in its progress, it's totally stuck in some sub-fields, and makes astonishing progress in others where we expected none previously, which makes it very frustrating.
Quite possibly the field with the greatest danger of runaway technology, since the autonomous part of it plays such an all-important role...
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I've got a pretty chaotic approach to learning too! heh
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That's because of the extra dimensions all those Stella's must be adding to your perception. [:)]
Nice example of nano: a nanotrojan horse to enter cells to help kill cancer, this time.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/17/1210230&from=rss
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils - Hector Louis Berlioz
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There is currently a lot of dispute about what is nanotechnology, part of this is because the word is used to generate interest by scientists, journalists and SciFi authors. The key element is scale, a nanometre is a billionth of a metre, 10^-9 m, this is about the width of a DNA double-helix. A lot of what is trumpeted as nanotechnology is frequently on the micrometre scale, 10^-6 m, this is larger than most viruses smaller than most cells. Since objects on such a large scale are frequently termed nanotechnology it now becomes impossible to use the defining characteristic, scale, to define the subject. Which is very frustrating: and very strange.
Thus it makes more sense to define the subject - though it is not one subject in the traditional sense, it is a combination of chemistry, biology, physics and engineering - in terms of its goals, eg. to build something smaller than could be acheived by robots, to build new materials with designed structures and to make particles that could be used in medicine.
SciFi authors will have fun for many years to come as to the possible creations of nanotechnology, as we are currently little closer to nanorobots than stone-age man was to the motor car when he invented the wheel. To say different is to underestimate the complexity of biological systems and the nanoscale, where objects simply don't work like minature versions of the human-scale. A very simple example is on the nanoscale an engineer would encounter the problem of nanorobots sticking together due to van der Waals forces, a problem no traditional engineer has ever had.
This leads us to probably a better description of nanotechnology, which is gaining acceptance in some the scientific community. Nanotechnology is the science of objects and materials where the object's properties can only exist on the "nanoscale", eg. a quantum transistor.