"The New Nanofrontier" in Scientific American

from the our-old-friends-at-SciAm dept.
Robert Trombatore writes "Scientific American has come a long way in the past few years from when they basically took the position that any of the MNT technologies Foresight founder Eric Drexler proposed were improbable at best. While they still aren't ready to leap to defend MNT, the tone of this article is much more positive in comparison. Starting with an overview of recent breakthroughs in nanotech and then going into detail about 3 specific breakthroughs, this piece helps illustrate just how far "mainstream" scientific acceptance of MNT has come. There are a couple of disparaging comments such as "In June, nanotechnologists from the Foresight Institute–a think tank where Drexler is chair–followed suit, issuing their own prophylactic guidelines to stop goo. But other scientists–many of whom air their views in news items that accompany Science's special section–dismiss the grim predictions." This shows that while Scientific American has come a long way, the editors still feel it necessary to make light of some of the issues surrounding nanotech."