The only "nanotech" that the engineers around me were excited about (before they got laid off) was the carbon nanotube. As far as I could tell, the carbon nanotube was little more than a glorified graphite fiber. The talk about using carbon tubes for sky hooks was cute but difficult to believe. They can only make the carbon tubes a few meters long. To make a 10,000 mile long rope, the tubes have to be bound together in some sort of matrix, e.g. epoxy. The rope's yield strength would be the shear strength of epoxy and not the tension strength of the carbon tube. There are other applications for carbon nanotubes that are interesting, e.g. electrical transmission, DNA sensors, etc. However all of that is still conversation. Carbon nanotubes have the same pie-in-the-sky air about them that Josephson junction and magnetic bubble memory technologies had before they got canned.

Gary