Nymphs of certain jumping insects have evolved 400-micrometer mechanical gear strips to precisely synchronize legs when jumping.
Biology is capable of evolving functional mechanical gears

Nymphs of certain jumping insects have evolved 400-micrometer mechanical gear strips to precisely synchronize legs when jumping.
Doug Wolens’s documentary “THE SINGULARITY: Will we survive our technology” premieres at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre September 16, 2013.
A proposed large project to produce a dynamic map of the functional connectome of the human brain will require a convergence of neuroscience, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computation, and may therefore spur the development of advanced nanotechnology leading to molecular manufacturing.
The conceptual history of nanotechnology is usually traced to a classic talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” that Richard Feynman gave on December 29th 1959 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), which was first published in Caltech Engineering and Science, Volume 23:5, February… Continue reading Feynman 1984 talk on Tiny Machines on You Tube
A European Commission-funded video and education portal introduces nanotechnology to students and others.
A talk at TEDxBerkeley includes nanotechnology among the options for digital fabrication, one of five new rules of innovation.
ideo of a superhydrophobic spray-on coating shows chocolate syrup shooting off a white shoe leaving it spotless.
Foldit game players have again out-performed scientists in protein design, this time improving the design of a protein designed from scratch to catalyze Diels-Alder cycloadditions.
An article in The Guardian quotes Christine Peterson and Robert Freitas on the vision of molecular manufacturing. Freitas is quoted as expecting that the development of nanofactories could be done in 20 years for “on the order of” one billion dollars.
Those interested in issues of communication at the nanoscale will be interested to learn that the first volume of the new journal Nano Communication Networks, from Elsevier, edited by Ian Akyildiz, is available free of charge. The volume comprises four issues dated March through December of 2010. Just to pick one article out of dozens… Continue reading Molecular information theory points to robust molecular communications