• DigitalTraveler42@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      MElon probably means that “nanotechnology is bs”, and no it’s not, it’s just a science that is in it’s infancy, and one that may become extremely useful in the future.

      Also Elon says that while pushing NFTs and crypto constantly.🤦‍♂️

      • htrayl@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And we definitely are already making great strides in commercializing it, depending on how you define the set of nano-tech.

      • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        I mean like everything is nanotechnology, you can mayyybbe argue against quantum if youre really stupid, but like even smoke alarms use some nanotech.

        Its mostly a buzzword tbh, and that’s from someone getting a degree in the field (we learn a shitload but its not much different from advanced chemical engineering)

        • DigitalTraveler42@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          All of tech is full of buzzwords, buzzwords are easy for the layman to understand and conceptualize, buzzwordy-ness doesn’t make something more or less of a reality, it just helps people who don’t fully understand the concepts digest the reality.

          • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            For sure yeah, like I said im in the field so I better believe in it a little lmao.

            But it just always gets me when its used in media cause its just used as a deus ex machina type trope, which isnt too based in reality, and is what most people think of when they think nanotech

            • DigitalTraveler42@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              But it just always gets me when its used in media cause its just used as a deus ex machina type trope, which isnt too based in reality, and is what most people think of when they think nanotech

              I would probably blame the God father of Cyberpunk for this one as well, William Gibson’s works gave birth to so many of the tech buzzwords we hear, then we have Neal Stephenson who invented the Metaverse concept which is now unfortunately the name for Facebook and associated products. Those guys brought the premise to the fore, and later authors turned those premises into tropes. Then there’s all the work that James Cameron did with the Terminator franchise too.

              Again, this goes back to layman, because the media is made up of laymen, and the media is supposed to essentially parrot what the goings on’s of the days are, unbiased reporting is supposed to just be regurgitation of the facts, a perfect example of this is the Associated Press, their articles are usually short and to the point, minimum editorializing, like Joe Friday from the old Dragnet TV show used to say “just the facts ma’am”.

              So laymen writing tech articles for laymen is essentially similar to the whole “copy of a copy” degradation, or the old game of “telephone” as the story gets passed from layperson to layperson it’s going to change and lose accuracy, because the experts are no longer looped in maintaining the veracity and accuracy.

              So yeah there’s real danger for fear mongering in tech, but there’s also a positive aspect of tropes and buzzwords, and that’s inspiration, young tech kids taking this stuff in and becoming those people changing the tech industry, I’d hate to include Zuckerberg here but Snowcrash was absolutely an inspiration to him enough to change his company’s name to Meta, and there are many other similar examples of this both good and bad.

    • cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      It’s a prefix and it depends on the suffix it’s attached to. If you are talking about a nanometer it’s 10^-9 meters. If you are talking about nanotechnology, that’s a buzzward. In between that though there is plenty of meaning. If you are talking about graphene nanosheets, that means they are nanometers thick, i.e. roughly between 10^-9 m and 10^-7 m. In the material science context nano means the size of an object. Nanobeads would be nanometers in diameter. as opposed to microbeads which would be micron sized. A nanomachine would be a machine that is nanometers in size, etc.

    • SomeoneElse@lemmy.caM
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      1 year ago

      I assumed the scientist was doing something with nanotechnology, which according to the CDC is “the manipulation of matter on a near-atomic scale to produce new structures, materials and devices. The technology promises scientific advancement in many sectors such as medicine, consumer products, energy, materials, and manufacturing.”

    • emptyother@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Usually it stands for nanometer. It can also mean very small. Its a prefix which means a billionth of something, like centi means a hundreth.