“It’s definitely more flexible and more comfortable,” says Frank Allen, operations director for FSU’s High Performance Materials Institute.

And they’re developing a super-strong, extra-light “unmanned aerial vehicle” that could be carried into battle, unfolded and launched over the horizon to spy on the enemy.

“A soldier could carry it in his backpack,” Allen says.

The two devices will be made from “buckypaper” made from thin sheets of carbon nanotubes — carbon that has been vaporized and reformed into particles only a few atoms in size, becoming many times lighter and stronger than steel.

They’re using nanotechnology — the creation and manipulation of materials down to the atomic level.

Nanotechnology, born in scientists’ minds in the 1950s, fodder for science fiction novels and movies since the 1980s, under practical development since the 1990s, is finally coming into its own in science, technology and medicine.

It’s bringing great promise in materials from suntan cream to computers to space travel. But it’s also posing potential dangers and ethical questions.

“Nanotechnology has the potential to change the character of human life itself, in ways that even the atomic bomb couldn’t,” says Professor Charles Rubin, a political scientist who teaches ethics at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.

If nanotechnology someday can restore sight to the blind through devices implanted in the brain, he says, it just as easily can create mind-controlled weapons.

As far back as 1995, science fiction author Neal Stephenson, in his novel Diamond Age, suggested a “skull gun” carried by punks — a greatly improved Saturday night special implanted in the skull, aimed by the eyes, fired by the mind.

“In medicine too, the notion of greatly extending human life is extremely problematic,” Rubin says. “Many people think it’s not necessarily a good thing. You’d be extending human evil as well.”

He argues that even federal laws might not be enough to control such power unless scientists and the public are fully on-board with the need for restraint.

Nanotechnology has always stirred controversy because predictions of its practical uses have always been mixed with nightmarish scenarios of how it might harm mankind.

In 1986 came the book Engines of Creation, by MIT-trained engineer Eric Drexler. He predicted nanotechnology would create medical robots that could travel through human capillaries, clearing them of plaque — an idea actively being developed today. But he also suggested a doomsday world in which nano-robots assigned to clean up an oil spill run amok, start replicating themselves and end up consuming all biological matter, turning earth into “gray goo.”

In 2002 that idea was pushed further in the novel Prey, by Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park. In it a cloud of nanoparticles escapes from the lab as self-reproducing micro-robots who see humans as their prey.

More recently, as nanotechnology has come into wider use, more mundane dangers have surfaced. Now scientists worry that that tiny, fiberlike nanomaterials used to fight disease inside the body might cause the same kinds of lung inflammations, even cancers, as the fibers in asbestos.

Jane’s, the London-based research group that publishes the industry standard Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, warns that nanotechnology can be used to create entirely new hazards such as miniaturized nuclear weapons that are smaller, lighter, easier to transport and hide and smuggle into unsuspecting countries. It says nano techniques designed to deliver medicines in a more-targeted way also can deliver toxic substances in a form of bioterrorism.

Says Rubin: “With all the marvelous things coming down the pike, I wish there were louder voices talking about the need for restraint.”

 Via Miami Herald