A birdʹs-eye view of nanotechnology in 2003

A noncomprehensive, birdʹs-eye flight, given the approximately 6,000 publications in technology over the last two years, was taken over the currently exciting area of nanotechnology research, exploring the area from different perspectives to provide a sense of the state of the art, trends, open problems, and strategic research directions such as the list of enabling technologies needed to be developed to advance nanotechnologyʹs bottom-up approach to material synthesis. One notices from the research surveyed that, apart from carbon nanotubes, fullerenes, fibres, and coatings, nanomaterials are still in their infancy or research stage, which opens up a lot of potential work yet to be done and things to be discovered.