One of my favorite magazines is National Geographic, but the "Nano's Big Future" article in the venerable publication's June 2006 edition leaves something to be desired.
Although the NGM site doesn't have the entire text (you'll have to read the print version for that), there are some nice photos and illustrations, but the "Learn More" page has only a few hotlinks and a woefully inadequate and outdated bibliography. You'd think they would at least include the recently published (and highly recommended) Nanotechnology for Dummies book!
Like many nanotech stories in the mainstream media, there are the usual "gee-whiz" stats about how small nanoscale structures really are and how crazy matter starts to act when it gets really small. "One nanometer is to an inch what one inch is to 400 miles." "Tear a piece of aluminumn foil into tiny strips, and it will still behave like aluminum....but keep chopping them smaller, and at some point--20 to 30 nm, in this case--the pieces can explode." Also present is the usual hype (albeit some of it warranted) about the promise of nanotech and the amount of money that nanotech will infuse into the global economy (although more on the nanotech venture-capital boomlet would have been a plus).
But my biggest beef with the article is the short shrift it gives nanoelectronics. Too much of the content focuses on biomed, materials, and energy applications, with only a few mentions of chips, MEMS, and other semiconductor-related devices. I just got off the phone with a high-level tech guy at one of the big chipmakers, talking about 45 nm process development, and he mentioned gate-oxide thicknesses in the single-nanometer range. Isn't that nanotechnology?
Nary a mention was made in the article about extended or souped-up CMOS, let alone spintronics, MRAM or other emerging memory approaches, quantum chips, molecular electronics, NEMS, etc. Nor was a mention made of how many of the tools that make chips today will likely be modified for other nanoindustrial applications in the coming decades.
The author had spent time with carbon nanotube progenitor Richard Smalley before he died, so there is alot of space devoted to CNTs. Yet little or no mention was made about how CNTs might be used in the future in nanoelectronics or how they are already being used by the likes of LSI Logic and Samsung.
In sum, although the article was well written and interesting in some respects, the author (and editors) left out as much as was actually included.
But don't miss the cover story in the same issue on why the world loves "soccer"!
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