A Good and Accurate Turn of Phrase
Joel Johnson from Gizmodo had a great link to a CNN article on nanotechnology.
Nanotech is yet another one of those topics that popular culture doesn’t quite understand, so it ends up writing bad books and making bad movies about the stuff. Kind of like all the radiation-created monsters from 1950s movies (e.g., 1954’s Them).
Anyway, it’s not just the CNN article that’s good. It’s Johnson’s blurb about it. He writes:
CNN has a decent overview on nanotechnology, so if you’ve missed the last ten years of science fiction or bad movies (or worse, not missed them), it offers a pretty good place to start. Nanotechnology, as a term, is slowly changing from ‘tiny robots’ to encompass atomic-scale manipulation in general–although it’s hard to stop thinking about the robots, I know. The article also has a picture of this scanning tunneling microscope, which is easy to get excited about, because it is shiny.
Yep, that “shiny” comment is pretty accurate. It’s easy, especially in 30-second news bytes, to skip the less picturesque but more interesting stuff and head right for the big shiny machine. Nanotech robots in our blood stream are cool (or at least newsworthy). Nano-composite materials that make better airplane skins… well, not as much.
