Nanotechnology

The book I read to research this post was Nanotechnology for Dummies by Earl Boysen et al which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Nanotechnology is the study of man made products between 1 nanometre & 100 nanometres in size. In the near future almost every industry will be affected by this technology. Scientists have even developed the technology to move individual atoms which it wasn't all that long ago scientists were saying would be impossible. The reason they can move individual atoms is because they are held in place be relatively weak van der waal forces. Somebody who worked for IBM was able to spell the logo with atoms. Within 20 years they will have replicators like on star trek where you will be able to program a machine to manufacture something atomically. This will also enable things to be manufactured cheaply. There's talk of them building a space elevator which will be a special cord attached at one end to an asteroid as a counterweight & at the other to a station on earth, this then would allow things to be put into space cheaply & could be solar powered. One thing stopping people settling on mars & the moon is the cost of sending supplies to them, this would go a long way in acheiving that. There's development of both biological & mechanical nanorobots but the biological field has advanced more.  Nanotechnology has been applied to things like tennis racquets making them stronger & tennis balls making them stay bouncy longer. In the near future they will be able to use bionanotechnology to kill cancer cells. Also nanotechnology is being used to improve the way doctors see what is going on in the human body improving diagnoses of illnesses.