this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
159 points (94.9% liked)
Asklemmy
42502 readers
1435 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It split into two.
The “very small scale structure manufacturing” part is alive and kicking. You are holding about a trillion perfect nanoscale devices in the palm of your hand right now.
The “we will make tiny robots that live in your body and fix you” club was always selling snake oil-and they knew it. The technology they were pushing just does not work at atmosphere temperature and pressure and immersed in oxidizing not quite neutral pH fluid.
Thankfully, there a much better way to make tiny machines that live in your body. That’s making/adapting/causing others to make proteins that do what you need them to do. Proteins are essentially bio-robots that can manipulate their surrounding by changes in their folds (conformation), for example by exposing binding sites in reaction to something binding to another binding site.
TLDR: nanotech is one of the largest industries in the planet. A lot of promises were made by idiots in the nineties, but biotech, another huge industry, has picked up the slack very well.
And if we count protein research as nanotech, afaik folding research is having its heyday.