Nanotechnology- How the hey am I supposed to talk for 40 min?

[Xath]

So I'm in a new class called Nanotechnology, and one of the largest requirements is the final project; a 20 page paper and 40 minute presentation. My paper is going to be something to the extent of:

Nanotechnology: Seperating the fact from the science fiction.

...which is essentially going to cover how various forms of media have slanted pubic opinion of nanotechnology. How much of what the media presents is true? possible to develop? or just plain poppycock?

So anyway, for my presentation, I'd like to take clips of various movies, TV shows, comic books, sci-fi books, etc. and arrange them into an interesting presentation. But what I need to find are instances of nanotechnology in the media. I have a few, but I'd like some suggestions from you guys.

Futurama - (there was an episode where they make nanorobots of themselves and enter Fry's body. anyone know the season or episode title?)
Cowboy Bebop The Movie
Agent Cody Banks
I, Robot


I think there were episodes of the Justice League and Static Shock with nanotechnology, but I can't remember the specifics. I know there are tons of references out there. Any ideas?

 

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

My company is putting on a nanotech conference in early november - if you still need research material at that point, I'd be glad to share some of the slides that are presented there. We are still lining up speakers at this point, but the plan is to have tech and semiconductor indistry leaders talk about how they see the future of nanotech and the migration path to reaching that future.

http://www.semico.com/nanotech/

send me an email at joes(AT)semico(DOT)com after Nov 4 if you are interested in the material

 

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

I think there was an episode of Outer Limits where an incarcerated scientist invented some nano robots that he wanted to utilize to pay his debt to society. A classic good vs evil look at technology plotline...

 

[Pierce]

Start off with a joke. A long one.

 

[BrooklynKnight]

Futurama

They werent Nanobots, they were worms. The Doctor then created mini robots of the crew to enter Fry's body and kill the worms.

Some really great examples of Nanotechnolgy in scifi shows.

Startrek - The Borg (Specifically Voyager Episodes which concentrate more on the tech aspect of the borg)
Jake 2.0
Andromeda - Nano bots are used to store info and do many things. In one episode Beka can change her hair color at will and says its due to nanobots in her scalp.

 

[tarchon]

Star Trek: the Next Generation regularly squeezed nanotechnology for juice. "Nanites" came up a lot, and the Borg used "nanoprobes" pretty extensively in all the later series.
A lot of what makes it into the popular media about nanotechnology is either complete sci fi or is fairly conventional microtechnology that replaces "micro" with "nano" in order to get media attention (and funding). I did my PhD in nanoparticle detection, and I saw that quite a bit. Our usual criterion for nanotech was to have design dimensions (CDs, for the semi folks) less than about 30 nm to seriously qualify as "nanoscale" (32 is roughly the square root of 1000, halfway between a micrometer and nanometer on a log scale - basically that's the decimal logarithmic rounding rule), though you can get by with 100 nm with a lot of hemming and hawing. If you can demonstrate unusual scale-related quantum effects in the system, like with surface plasmon resonance, or reduced dimensionality, you get some nanocredibility, since that's really one of the key physical differences.

More amusingly, in aerospace circles, it's common to refer to objects the size of a soda can as "nanosatellites."
Just get the latest issues of Analog or Isaac Asimov's Sci Fi and see what they're doing with it.

One common misconception I've noticed is that people (at least Trek writers) tend to think of nanotechnology as being the same thing as self-replicating technology, which it isn't. I really have a pretty hard time conceiving of independent self-replicating systems much smaller than 100 nm, and even nature hasn't been able to get below about 50 nm, if you exclude viruses, which need to use other organisms to reproduce. I guess if you have carefully controlled environments, you can definitely get nanoscale self-organization (like micelles, for example) but little critters that go out and take over the Enterprise are probably at least in the micron range, even if a lot of their guts are nanoscale.

 

[Mark]

How the hey am I supposed to talk for 40 min?

Don't think of it as 40 minutes. Think of it as 2,400,000,000,000 nanoseconds...

 

[The_Universe]

I believe that the Micheal Crichton Book Prey is also based on nanotechnology, somehow, although it may actually be the aforementioned self-replicating tech that's often confused with actual nanotech.

As for talking for 40 minutes, remember that a double-spaced written page takes (depending on the presenter) between a minute and thirty seconds and two minutes to read, unless you're racing through it like the micromachines guy, or the guys that read disclaimers at the end of radio ads - presenting the paper alone would take almost 40 minutes.

I'll post more as I think of it.

 

[The_Universe]

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/3/26/145440.shtml

The above article seems to slide towards crackpottery about half way through, but it gives you a good view of how the public sees nanotechnology....

 

[Richards]

I'll confirm that Michael Crichton's novel, Prey, is about nanotechnology. Other examples:

Dean Koontz's novel, By the Light of the Moon, features nanobots injected into three human test subjects (against their will), which starts to give them strange powers and abilities when their brains are rewired due to random nanotech "upgrades."

Ben Bova has a short story (later, I believe, expanded into a novel of the same name) called Blood Music, featuring experimental nanobots injected into a human test subject.

Several episodes of the British science fiction comedy TV show, Red Dwarf feature nanotechnology. Kryton the mechanoid has nanobots in his repair system, and they end up rebuilding Dave Lister's body (into that of a weightlifter) after the crew injects nanobots into Dave's body to rebuild an arm that was cut off. Eventually, the nanobots rebuild the entire Red Dwarf ship from scratch, including its entire human crew!

That's all I can think of off the top of my head that hasn't already been mentioned earlier in the thread.

Johnathan