Building a Laptop One Molecule at a Time

There's a lot of talk about nanotechnology these days, but I know that some of you are still confused about what the heck it is. This field of research has lots of potential applications. But one of them is molecular self-assembly. Think of a computer factory that has an assembly line. Components such as the processing chip, the electronics, the hard drive, the display, etc., are assembled and eventually arranged inside a plastic casing. Now shrink that whole process down to the size of molecules. Instead of a semiconductor chip, for example, being built by etching and placing tiny wires on a silicon surface, molecules that make up that chip would be arranged one-by-one until they'd accumulate into a chip. The same would happen with molecules that would ultimately make up a hard drive, or a display, or even the plastic casing. This video animation shows such a factory in action.