Ironically, if I had it all to do over again, i'd be called "Cheney"

Elegant, simple and tough! yeah, baby!

Should we start calling you Jake "The Snake" Drake now?

No worries, Ace. We're decades away from molecular machines, much less self-replecating molecular machines.

As for the other concerns, well . . . I don't think the health risks are as bad as they make them out to be. Not because nanoparticles can't do the damage, but because the existence of existence of them just isn't going to be a pandemic-level crisis.

Dude, its fucking dangerous getting out of bed. Especially if Cheney is in it.

Evan "The Snake" Drake was a character on Cheers. At least that what Cliff once called him. Not as cool as Jake though.

I love it when "science" reporters cite works of fiction.

"In other news, more research is urged on the potential dangers of cloning. This reporter once saw Jurassic Park, and let me tell you, those dinosaurs were some nasty shit!"

No worries, Ace. We're decades away from molecular machines

Not so.

Key:

Now, a team of Georgia Tech engineers builds submicron nozzles. “In a year and a half or so,” says Landman, “we will inject biological material through cell membranes.” He adds, “We started from a novel concept, and today we can produce nanojets and, shortly, see them in electron micrographs, as well as record their momenta and energy deposited to a target through deflection measurements and infrared imaging when the jets impact on atomic force microscope cantilevers.”

Of course, I don't understand any of the words with a greek etymology.

It's really not going to be that big of a deal for a long time.

http://crnano.org/BD-Goo.htm

Has anyone else read Stephenson's The Diamond Age?

This is a really well-thought out tale of nano + society + morality. Plus it's Stephenson - what more to ask for?

However many years or decades may intervene, it seems that if the Chinese get there before we do, we might as well start teaching our children to bow and speak Mandarin now.

Kralizec... agreed. It is imperative we reach a mature stage of nanotechnology before anyone else. Sorry, but Western values trump Asian values.

I don't worry much about nano-stuff. We've been making much smaller things (molecules) for a long time. Some cause troubles that are obvious, some may cause troubles over a long time period.

When I think of the size effects of nanotubes, I'm reminded of asbestos. Breathing the shit for years is very bad. Government and lawyers try to act like the stuff is cyanide.

About Asians vs Americans in science- I just got back from a big materials science conference in Boston last week. Student presenters were overwhelmingly Asian. My friends in academia say that they get something like 20:1 applications from Asia for graduate student positions vs domestic students.

I like being a scientist and all, but you aren't going to get smart American kids, who have all manner of career choices, to pick science when the education to pay ratio is so bad. Every time the pay creeps up, the govt and business howls that we have a scientist 'shortage' and increases the number of visas for foreign scientists and science students. So wages stagnate, and kids who got degrees in science see the kind of dough they can make as intellectual property attorneys or after a B-school degree, and poof. The trends are not good at all.

As long as the Asians (who might be American themselves) are working for Americans, does it really matter?

DeeDaGo (can I call you Dee for short?),

There's a huge difference between the small-scale devices they talk about in this article, and actual machines or electronics that people worry about, such as in the Grey-goo scenario or from crazy paranoid folk at the crnano website.

I'm a grad student at Northwestern University, so I'm always hearing about the latest innovations in nanotech. The thing is, actual machines, and not just pieces of machines or techniques that utilize nanoscale detection, are still so far away. The basics of actually designing electronics and such on that level is just too complicated still.

Sounds a lot like that dihydrogen monoxide stuff that big industry uses all the time. It can impair your breathing too I've heard.

Other cool names (or just names that would be cool to have):

Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat.
Brick Cobalt
Horst Deadlift
Dick Trickle (Oh, wait. That's a real guy.)
Magnus ver Magnusen ("World's Strongest Man")
Cole Younger
Jack Buck (or any name with "Buck"in it, really...like "Buck Turgidson")
Billy "Crash" Craddok
Pepper Johnson ("New York Football Giants")
Major Applewhite (only Southern guys can have those names like "Carroll" or "Major" "Gayle"...hey, there's one, "Gayle Sayers".)
Micky Mantle (you couldn't make that one up.)