In a few decades human and machine will merge, illness will be eradicated, and human beings will live to 150. Take a journey into the imaginations of scientists and futurists pondering ways to use nanotechnologies, and discussions about how society should or could use them.

It may not be the nano-sized autonomous bots roaming your body fixing dodgy parts and eliminating disease, but this article in New Scientist reveals what nanotechnologies are or soon will be helping achieve in the field of robotic medicine.

Your pocket guide to the emerging industry of nanotechnology: Contains Australian research and overseas research, covering nanotech in consumer products, health and food, water and the environment, energy development and nanosafety and regulation.

A US research engineer says nanotechnology can place us on the path to freedom and happiness for all – or mostly all. Will society choose to take this path, however?

“It is only a matter of time before enterprising attorneys find a way to bring litigation that directly targets the nanotechnology industry.” Opinion piece by lawyer in US-based magazine, Industry Week.

Getting the non-scientist public involved in less chatting and more real deliberation on how to apply scientific knowledge is the call from a recent report. My dilemma is how to make it happen.

Yeh right

The futurist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil, is claiming (again) that by 2020 nanobots and other nanotechnologies will be allowing us to live forever.

Nanotechnologies are being used to reduce food particles to smaller sizes to improve food characteristics, and to make plastic food packaging stronger, lighter or perform better. Are there any risks? The behaviour of manufactured nano-particles in foods and food packaging, as well as in our bodies is currently an area of active research.

We don’t have Star Trek replicators yet, but a 198 page nanotechnology roadmap funded by Sun Microsystems lists some surprising recent nano developments such as artificial tissue and ultrathin diamond nanorods. And the roadmap’s scientists are speculating targeted cancer therapies, super-efficient solar cells and high-density computer memory chips to be hot on their heels. Then there is the cool stuff.

Finding reliable information about products on the European market which currently contain nanomaterials is becoming increasingly difficult, according to high-level experts addressing a meeting of consumer groups from the EU and US.