The actual headline reads "Micro-Machines Help Solve Intractable Problem Of Turbulence."... Scientists [Dr. John Kim at U. C. L. A.] have developed tiny microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, to control the drag by canceling the vortices with countervortices. Looks like very primitive nanotech to me...
Thanks, Dave, for bringing this to our attention. *However*, this is not nanotech - not even primitive nanotech.
Molecular nanotechnology (MN) can be confused with the MEMS because both try to build machines so small that their components can be accidentally inhaled. But the two are very different.
First, their components differ in scale by a factor of a *thousand*.
Second, MEMS employs lithographic processes, while MN is envisioned as a wide variety of programmed mechanosynthetic assembly processes.
Third, micromechanical systems are built from the top down (as are all manufactured goods today), nanosystems are built from the bottom-up, as are chemical feed stocks and biological systems.
Finally, self-replication is much more difficult in microtechnology than in molecular nanotechnology, and therefore MEMS cannot have the exponential impact of any self-replicating system.
As a final note, because we can manipulate individual atoms with large tools such as scanning probe microscopes, and because we have some other clumsy bottom-up technologies (chemistry and biology), microtechnology is probably not a prerequisite to molecular nanotechnology.
Tihamer (Tee) Toth-Fejel <ttf@dsg130.nad.ford.com>
Office: 313 594-2165 Home: 313 662-4741Fax: 313 594-7837
[Do note, however, that microtech is quite likely to be helpful, both as an enabling technology, and as an interface technology. --JoSH]