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7:48 minute video on current reserach in nanotechnology. Good graphics.

A TedTalk by Peter Janse van Rensburg about the use of nanotechnology in our everyday lives and to make the world better. It is very short and rather interesting.

Renowned\ninventor Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) may be technology's most credibly\nhyperbolic optimist. Elsewhere he has argued that eliminating fat intake can prevent\ncancer; here, his quarry is the future of consciousness and intelligence. Humankind, it\nruns, is at the threshold of an epoch ("the singularity," a reference to the theoretical\nlimitlessness of exponential expansion) that will see the merging of our biology with the\nstaggering achievements of "GNR" (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a\nspecies of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so\non. The word "unrecognizable" is not chosen lightly: wherever this is heading, it won't look like us. Kurzweil's argument is necessarily twofold: it's not enough to argue that\nthere are virtually no constraints on our capacity; he must also convince readers that\nsuch developments are desirable. In essence, he conflates the wholesale transformation\nof the species with "immortality," for which read a repeal of human limit. In less capable\nhands, this phantasmagoria of speculative extrapolation, which incorporates a\nbewildering variety of charts, quotations, playful Socratic dialogues and sidebars, would\nbe easier to dismiss. But Kurzweil is a true scientist-a large-minded one at that-and\ngives due space both to "the panoply of existential risks" as he sees them and the many\npresumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. What's arresting isn't the degree to\nwhich Kurzweil's heady and bracing vision fails to convince-given the scope of his\nprojections, that's inevitable-but the degree to which it seems downright plausible.\n(Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights\nreserved.)