Still battering on about nanotech? Man, you’re soooo noughties, get with the program. The new small-scale frontier is femtotech – we’re talking customised atomic nuclei strings here. Says Professor Alexander Bolonkin:

The form of matter containing and subsuming all the atom’s particles [from nucleons (neutrons, protons), electrons and other nuclear particles] into the nucleus is named degenerate matter. Degenerate matter found in white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. Conventionally this matter in such large astronomical objects has a high temperature (as independent particles!) and a high gravity adding a forcing, confining pressure in a very massive celestial objects. In nature, degenerate matter exists stably (as a big lump) to our knowledge only in large astronomical masses (include their surface where gravitation pressure is zero) and into big nuclei of conventional matter. Our purpose is to design artificial small masses of synthetic degenerate matter in form of an extremely thin strong thread (fiber, filament, string), round bar (rod), tube, net (dense or non dense weave and mesh size) which can exist at Earth-normal temperatures and pressures. Note that such stabilized degenerate matter in small amounts does not exist in Nature as far as we know.

All strictly theoretical at the moment, it seems. But hey – if you were worried that putting nanotech into a science fiction story sounds a bit passée nowadays, at least now you can make the jump to the next level without worrying that you’re just making it up out of whole cloth.

Beyond Molecular Nanotechnology is Femtotech : Proposal for Synthesizing Degenerate Matter