Question: You've written that you researched nano-technology, the only knowledge I have of this is watching hours of Red Dwarf and the nanogenes at the end of series 7 going into series 8 in which they rebuild the ship and crew on a molecular level. Is the real nanotech as clever and awesome as the SciFi stories or is it infact quite simple and boring?

Andrew Maynard answered on 17 Jun 2010:

Hi 50033glorious,

Haha – I remember those nanobots. The program was way ahead of its time 🙂

The bad news is that a lot of nanotechnology is more boring than the SciFi stuff – it’s really just about engineering at an incredibly small scale – and sometimes that just means making very, very small particles of stuff.

The good news though is that, working at this incredibly small scale, some scientists are doing some incredibly interesting stuff – like making new materials that bend light in very odd ways, or drugs that can penetrate cancer cells and destroy them on demand, or materials that are as strong as steel and as light as plastic.

I don’t think we’ll ever produce stuff as cool as you see in films and read about in sci fi books. But I bet you that, in ten years time, you’ll be surprised at how many things around you wok because they have been designed and engineered at the nano-scale.