Headline of a story in the December Scientific American about the current craze for all things nano.
The article notes that even companies that have nothing to do with nanotechnology are jumping on the bandwagon.
MicroSignal Corporation, a Las Vegas-based maker of software for MRI machines, late last year changed its named to NanoSignal Corporation.
Nanogen, a San Diego company making microarray chips for genetic research, creates products whose active sites are 80,000 nanometers across, way too big to be considered nanotech.
A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter long.
"Nano" when used in nanotechnology means 100 nanometers or less.
A human red blood cell is 8,000 nanometers in diameter.
Then there's General NanoSystems of Minneapolis.
This personal computer vendor never claimed to have anything to do with manipulating molecules.
Owner Khalid Mahmoud explained laughingly to Scientific American that "micro" was a very popular word in the computer industry when he started his company seven years ago.
"We just decided to go one step further," he said.
Ha.
How does bookofnanojoe sound?
Or nanobookofjoe?
I'm thinking, I'm thinking....
Article comments
1 - Victor Plenty
Our nanosecond attention spans make us easily fooled by this kind of deceptive marketing scheme, so we can expect to see lots more of it.
But maybe we should be glad there aren't more companies working on real nanotechnology. When we stop and consider the vast power such technology could unleash, we may realize it would be wiser to slow down such research until humans have had a chance to grow just a tad bit more socially mature.
2 - The Theory
agreed Victor. though I wouldn't mind never seeing nanotechnology take shape.
i like "bookofnanojoe"... maybe I should start going by "The NanoTheory?"
3 - Jon Sobel
There's a great deal of discussion of nanotechnology that will be put to medical use in the coming decades in the book I recently reviewed, Fantastic Voyage. Exciting and scary at the same time. For example, nanobots that you inhale and that go directly to cancer cells and kill them, or repair damaged DNA.