
Nobody’s Talking About Nanotech Anymore - ThomPete
http://time.com/4068125/nanotech-sector/
======
kanzure
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](https://github.com/kanzure/nanoengineer)

I think everyone is stuck wondering how to make the tooltips from the tooltips
paper:
[http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/nanotech/Optimal%20tooltip%2...](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/nanotech/Optimal%20tooltip%20trajectories%20in%20a%20hydrogen%20abstraction%20tool%20recharge%20reaction%20sequence%20for%20positionally%20controlled%20diamond%20mechanosynthesis.pdf)

All of that was motivated by goals of making nanofactories like shown in this
eye candy video:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEYN18d7gHg](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](https://groups.google.com/group/enzymaticsynthesis)

~~~
lacker
_All of that was motivated by goals of making nanofactories_

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.

~~~
TeMPOraL
We had such arms for decades already. Just because nobody bothered to make a
laundry folding product out of them doesn't mean we can't do it with a robot
arm. For better or worse, many (if not most) interesting projects aren't
viable as business products.

~~~
dicroce
The arm is not the hard part. That is why this doesn't exist.

------
ThomPete
As always Amaras law comes to mind:

"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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara)

~~~
dredmorbius
Are there any specific instances which Amara poses? Neither Wikipedia nor its
PC Magazine reference list any.

~~~
ThomPete
Not that I know off. But the first internet bubble seems to be a good example
to illustrate the point.

~~~
wcarss
Just to flesh out my parent's point, while the internet existed and was widely
available in 1995, its impact over 3 years was far less impressive than
expected, but its impact over 20 years is far more impressive than expected.

The internet "bubble" is the surest sign of this. Many people thought that
everyone would buy groceries via the internet by the late 90s. Grocery
delivery via the internet can be a good business, but it wasn't ready 3 years
after web browsers got popular. The experience wasn't good enough, the cost of
operation was too high, and not enough people were there to use it.

Today though, I can speak a few sentences to a wireless black glass box I keep
in my pocket, and groceries will arrive at my house in the hour. Beyond that
though, I can instantly feel a tingling buzz when someone on the opposite side
of the globe wants my attention. Major celebrities have lived their entire
careers on the internet. World leaders converse and issue statements via a
short-message public-ish broadcast system we can all see instantly. Multiple
currencies powered solely by shared public work and cryptography are in wide
use. Major mathematical discoveries have been made by free associations of
mathematicians in blog discussion threads.

That's just the tip of the iceberg, but it's already far more profound than
online groceries. The effects of the internet over decades are essentially
unfathomable, but we were far too optimistic about them in the short term.

------
swalsh
Thus is the natural course of the hype curve:
[http://na1.www.gartner.com/imagesrv/newsroom/images/HC_ET_20...](http://na1.www.gartner.com/imagesrv/newsroom/images/HC_ET_2014.jpg;wadf79d1c8397a49a2)

~~~
sigmar
wow. Gartner seems spot on with this. Seems like a ready-made guide for
investors.

~~~
sbierwagen
Gartner made a a while ago:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

------
gene-h
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.

------
fluidcruft
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.

~~~
baldfat
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.

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...](http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/how-data-science-is-transforming-
health-care.csp)

~~~
fluidcruft
I think the danger with opaque terms like "nanotech" and "data science" is
they are so ill-defined that they become Rorschach tests. This is very good at
attracting buy in--people see what they want to see and the get cover by
joining a larger movement and get to ride the trend's growth. But then
eventually everyone's doing "nanotech" or "data science" and people need to
use other terms to clarify.

Data science is already much more than statistics. That's why the term was
invented in the first place.

Additionally, your definition of science seems pretty lacking. Merely using
data to answer questions isn't what defines science. Some questions are
scientific and some are not.

------
twsted
"Nanotechnology never had its Facebook."

"And while Facebook, like the most celebrated of Silicon Valley’s startups,
went from idea to ubiquitous product in less than a decade, most
nanotechnology applications taking much longer to find a market."

Does anyone, even here on HN, think that it is really absurd to make these
comparisons? Comparing Facebook with an advanced technology? Come on.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "Does anyone, even here on HN, think that it is really absurd to make these
> comparisons? Comparing Facebook with an advanced technology? Come on."

It is a bizarre comparison, but the author appears to be using it as a
colloquial way to describe a runaway success, which makes sense even if the
industries are not directly related.

From the limited knowledge I have on nanotech, I'd suggest the closest it's
come to a runaway success so far has been in superhydrophobic coatings. If a
food-safe and long-lasting superhydrophobic coating was discovered, I could
imagine the market would be huge. Consider plates/bowls/cutlery that you'd
never/rarely need to wash up, that could take off massively.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhydrophobic_coating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superhydrophobic_coating)

------
88e282102ae2e5b
I went back to school to get into "nanotech". Then I quickly realized it's
been around for 3.5 billion years, and promptly switched into biology.

~~~
TeMPOraL
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_.

~~~
aetherson
Clearly it is possible to use self-replicating microscopic things (cells) to
produce macroscopic objects. Life does indeed prove this.

But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20 years to
produce a simple structural element able to support maybe a thousand lbs and
20 feet long (ie, to grow a tree). We notably do not see anything in nature
that does "molecular assembly" from microscopic cells to differentiated
macroscopic objects in a time-scale of less than months.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Well, having already a working process, speeding it up will be easier. In
nature, you don't really have dedicated nanoassemblers that do only structure
scaffoldings with no other considerations - they have to support a whole
organism. So when, for instance, growing a skeleton, you need it to go slow
enough that the more complex parts like veins and nervous system can keep up.
But if we needed biology to grow us a particular object, we can learn how to
put the relevant process on overdrive and ditch the rest.

Also, even if the initial version of nanotech worked as fast as tree grows,
you could still put _a lot_ of products in parallel, so for most intent and
purposes, after few months of waiting, you'll be getting new copies daily. We
do that a lot with traditional manufacturing today.

> _But, you know, it takes billions-of-years evolved plantlife about 20
> years..._

Well, evolution is _really stupid_ and really slow. Having brains, we can now
iterate many orders of magnitude faster, so I wouldn't worry. Comparing things
to evolution is comparing to the simplest and dumbest possible process
imaginable that still works.

------
shas3
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.

~~~
Dove
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.

~~~
shas3
A good analysis of this is by Vaclav Smil (One of Bill Gates's book club guys)
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/moores-
curse](http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/moores-curse)

------
Animats
"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.

------
vinceguidry
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?

~~~
OopsCriticality
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".

~~~
stan_rogers
As an alternative medicine/new age wellness woo moneymaker, any product _at
all_ that's labelled "colloidal semiconductor quantum dots" would clean up.
(I'm thinking little colourful stickers, perhaps with a bit of glitter in a
varnish suspension.)

~~~
OopsCriticality
I decided when I heard about the maple water fad that if I ever Break Bad, I'm
going to sell snake oil patent medicines to the Whole Foods crowd. Walking
down their alternative medicine section was… inspirational. I especially liked
the colloidal silver[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria)

------
escherize
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.

~~~
soylentcola
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).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age)

~~~
TeMPOraL
There's also the classic of Eric Drexler, who coined the very term
"nanotechnology", "Engines of Creation". I highly recommend the read. It's
very good at extrapolating possibilities and issues, though I personally don't
agree with the conclusions about 'defense against nanotech attacks' outpacing
the offensive capabilities.

------
api
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.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>but they are not really any less disruptive.

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.

~~~
api
SpaceX is 3d printing rocket engines, for one.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Yeah but that has absolutely nothing to do with home 3D printers that make
cheap junk using plastic. We've had 3D printing, in some form or another, for
decades for industry.

------
anonmeow
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](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.

------
reasonattlm
Nanodot still exists; worth reading if you want a view of what is going on
these days.

[http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/](http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/)

------
drzaiusapelord
Or memristor. By now we were supposed to have all memristor storage. At least
Intel is still working on bringing it to market:

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/hp-and-sandisk-
join-f...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/hp-and-sandisk-join-forces-
to-finally-bring-memristor-like-tech-to-market/)

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.

~~~
Retra
You're the grandpa or grandma in the story of VR.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Maybe, but you would have said the same thing when I was skeptical of
practical gaming applications of the Kinect. Now, its not even bundled with
the Xbox and pretty much dead. Nintendo can't sell motion games anymore
either. Four years ago this all would have been unheard of.

Be careful about buying into hype, grandson.

~~~
Retra
I'm not buying into hype, I'm simply pointing out that if your grandparents
aren't willing to do something, that doesn't mean you won't be willing to do
it. We're not talking about an age-dependency, but a culture-dependency. I
couldn't care less about commercial VR.

------
kragen
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.

------
hyperion2010
Yet everyone is talking about biotech. What are proteins if not nanomachines
that we actually have the tools to make?

------
Tepix
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?

[1] [http://3dprint.com/98086/graphene-3d-lab-
patent/](http://3dprint.com/98086/graphene-3d-lab-patent/)

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-claims-breakthrough-on-
carb...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-claims-breakthrough-on-carbon-
nanotubes/)

~~~
hugh4
Graphene is a hype cycle all of its own.

------
norea-armozel
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.

------
varelse
s/Nanotech/Big Data/ s/Big Data/Machine Learning/ s/Machine Learning/Deep
Learning/ s/Deep Learning/???/

~~~
mring33621
s/Deep Learning/Parametric Omniscience

I hear there's at least one stealth mode startup in SV working on it...

------
venomsnake
With the average size of the transistors in the teens of nanometers - nanotech
is here.

~~~
nutate
Yea as someone with a PhD in Materials Science, I'd say nanotech rules
everything around me. :D

~~~
agumonkey
Biology and medicine are walking smoothly into this territory. Organ
generation seems plausible in a few decades.

------
transfire
Awaiting molecular 3D printing.

------
waiquoo
as someone who just finished a doctorate on nanotech and is looking for a job
in nanotech, this is incredibly disheartening

------
oldmanjay
The Time demographic likes patient explanations, but I like quick analogies,
so in that vein; do people talk excitedly about all this air we breathe?

