This extensive 2010 report, released by international environmentalist organization Friends of the Earth, surveys many nanotechnology products being researched, developed, or already on the market related to energy production and storage. The authors of the report note that nanotechnology advocates have been promising huge gains in energy generation and storage efficiency and flexibility for many years; for the most part, these gains haven’t been realized. More troubling, according to the authors of the report, are the lack of life cycle analysis of various nanotech products, and “greenwashing” that take the form of claiming great gains in energy conversion in the field while completely ignoring the energy costs that have gone into the making of the products themselves, as well as the environmental risks associated with releasing nanoparticles into the environment.

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Bradford argues in “Solar Revolution” that a transition to a worldwide energy economy based primarily upon solar collection is not only inevitable but in fact imminent. This is a surprising stance given that solar energy accounts for less than 1% of today’s electricity generation, is critically underfunded with regard to its competitors, and is generally considered to be economically uncompetitive. Bradford’s argument, however, is predictive rather than prescriptive...

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Drexler's now-classic text, which Ray Kurzweil claims (on the back “cover” of etext-only Version 2.0) “established the revolutionary new field of nanotechnology,” presented, upon its first publication in 1986, an astonishingly comprehensive vision of a nanofuture that he claimed would be ushered in by a “replication breakthrough,” forever changing how humans interact with each other and the world at large. Drexler's book is written for a popular audience, and its clear intent is to help bring about the transformations he envisions. That is, by envisioning them he provides a roadmap, a dream, a nano-imagining that can be transmitted to others, taken up as a cause, worked toward as an enabling (science) fiction.

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Wil McCarthy's 1999 science fiction novel explores nanotechnology that has escaped humanity's control, become its greatest enemy, or rather competitor, for in the future vision nanotech is very much alive, and taking over the solar system. As the novel opens, the humans have already been defeated: decades earlier nano-replicators ran amok on Earth, leading to an emergent living system known as “Mycora,” a substance that—at least in the presence of heat—consumes most forms of matter it comes in contact with, transforming it into more of itself. The emergency evacuation of Earth to escape the spreading Mycosystem has left the remnants of humanity...

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Heinlein's 1942 novella prefigures (and according to Colin Milburn, partially determines) the scientific field of nanotechnology. It chronicles a series of strange happenings that seem to defy scientific understanding, and the attempts by the titular character to account for, and control, them. Set in the future, the text posits a time ruled by absolute scientific rationality. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has been explained away; physics is back on course as an exact science, able to explain physical phenomena at all scales without encountering any indeterminability. This thematic move on Heinlein's part is interesting, for it is precisely at the subatomic level—the level that nanotechnology is concerned with—that we currently understand matter to behave in indeterminable ways...

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Nanovision, Part I: Science and Fiction Colin Milburn tackles nanotechnology from a cultural/science studies perspective in his whirlwind 2007 book, “Nanovision.” He is particularly interested in nanotech discourse; that is, how and why nanotech narratives are produced by scientists, popular news media, and science fiction writers. His basic thesis is that when we trace these narratives out, we find them inextricably linked to one another as mutually constitutive. While certainly not claiming that nanotech research is unscientific, he does claim that such research is prescribed by the nanotech discourse—that the form it takes arises from discourse that is as much fiction as science. The two cannot be separated.

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Nanovision, Part III: Gray Goo In charting out the various futurist strands in nanotechnology discourse in his book “Nanovision,” Colin Milburn devotes a great deal of space to the “gray goo scenario.” This is the inevitable corollary to the dream of complete control of all matter: namely, that self-organizing nanobots, drawing no distinction between different sorts of matter (organic vs. nonorganic, for instance), could devour the entire world, turning it into amorphous, non-differentiated soup. This homogeneity and indiscrimination is meant to be captured by the term “gray goo,” and it figures prominently in nanodiscourse, both in scientific literature and science fiction novels. Milburn asks, “what kind of cultural work [this] fantasy [is] performing?” (119)

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Christopher Newfield reports his thoughts on the Tomorrow's People Conference at Oxford in March 2006, focusing on “enhancement of the human” through future technological advances, particularly in the field of nanotechnology. Newfield notes that while many scholars presented well-developed scientific narratives of transhumanism, they largely failed to provide sufficiently robust social narratives to complement them. Other presenters and audience members spoke of the socio-political side of transhumanism but focused primarily on dystopian narratives.

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This article presents and interprets the findings of a 2007 survey of 1,939 individuals involved in nanotechnology-related research at a large university in the Western United States. Nanotechnology had long been described by policymakers and researchers themselves as a particularly interdisciplinary field. The survey sought to discover how widely this perspective is held by rank-and-file researchers, and to characterize the nature of the collaboration. The project's three hypotheses, all of which were confirmed by the survey results, were...

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McCray traces the history of “giant magnetoresistance” (GMR)—a phenomenon resulting from the nature of electron spin—from its simultaneous discovery in 1988 by Peter Grünberg and Albert Fert (2007 Nobel Prize winners) through its commercial development and application within the electronics industry. Early on, engineers at IBM harnessed the basic science of GMR to develop a “spin valve” that dramatically improved the performance and size of their hard drives, a technology they licensed to all leading hard drive manufacturers, leading to a revolution in that particular industry. This early success lead to the perception within the broader electronics industry that GMR could be exploited in a wide array of portable electronics, dubbed “spintronics”.

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