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Comment by Eduardo3rd | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to grow a little bit numb toward all the revolutionary materials science papers that I've seen since starting grad school. I don't mean to malign the work done here, but if I had a dollar for every paper I've read that claimed to be the foundation for a new class of devices I'd be rich enough to start my own seed fund.

When will we see some actual commercialization of this nano tech? The nano future has been five years away for the last 20 years. Let's make some devices already.

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"Let's make some devices already."

That's genius. We need to relay this idea to the science people. Is there a mailing list?

Oh! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nanotechnology_applicat... , Nevermind! :P

Chips with small feature sizes and paints with nanoparticles in them are not really what was originally meant by "nanotechnology". We still do not have the capability to design and build arbitrary machinery using individual molecules as building materials. In the meantime, the word "nanotechnology" got appropriated to refer to anything that involved small feature sizes and needed funding grants, so Drexler started calling it "molecular manufacturing"...

I've seen "revolutionary technology" articles for the last 15 years. Some of the stuff does eventually trickle in. Most of it seems to influences and tweak existing manufacturing.

I think the problem is three fold: First, it is a really hard engineering problem to get from a logic gate on an atom thick sheet to something actually useful. Second, manufacturing processes are all tailored around the exists ting, so even if they figure out the material, they still have to build supply chains, which is really expensive. Third, they are dealing with incremental evolution of the existing technology along the way, which reduces the massive benefits seen when the technology first came out of the lab.

But I agree. More science fiction in real life, please. :)

What is the path for this research to be developed into new products, and can new businesses be built around this technology? When can we start hacking with these materials outside labs in garages to disrupt the big materials companies? I these questions are the ones HN readers want answered.

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