I’ve been annoyed with myself for some time because I still haven’t bothered to read Drexler, let alone do anything to figure out how close we really are to being able to dissolve the world into grey goo.

While trying to find this Economist piece on “Quasam” (an apparently miraculous new material apparently made from unrolled carbon nanotubes and predicted, at least by the people who hold the patents, to be bigger than plastics), I instead ran across this: Trends in Nanotechnology Weekly. A sample:

Climbing the walls again

Yes, it’s the return of the gecko story. We can happily report that a UK-based team at Manchester University has demonstrated a material where each square centimetre contains 100 million hairs. The combined effect of the weak van der Waals forces exerted by each square centimetre is sufficient to support a kilogram. For a slightly more in-depth look and a picture of Spiderman hanging from the ceiling, see here.

TNTW looks like a nice roundup, and hopefully will get me some ways toward catching up with the state of the art myself, instead of making Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson and Linda Nagata and Walter Jon Williams do all my research for me.

Plus, it’s British.