astro picture for the day/ Major Breaking News; Industrial Revolution will go down as lasting only 300 years.

Image Credit & Copyright: Martin Pugh

I generaly prefer to have some new thought for the day and then give some great new astronomy picture and some new great science/technology advance(there's never a shortage of something new happening in today's science/technology era); but, I thought the above picture was sufficiently exciting and some major technological breakthrough is sufficiently exciting to go ahead and post them

Liquid crystal nanomanufacturing established

I suppose in keeping with my recent space age/apollo program/saturn v themes . . . one could say the nanomanufacturing sputnik has gone up; and, it's a little bit of a surprise.  Most observers would have cheered on the recent protein engineering or the peptoids, or dna-nanomanufacturing, or Zyvex's Stm approach.  There's no doubt that more work needs to be done; but, make no mistake about it; this will snowball into a nanorevolution; the question is how soon can this nanoera sweep(or in the words of Eric Drexler, "recycle the industrial revolution") away the industrial world?

I don't know when the nanoera will have completely swept away the industrial era; but, I'd argue that liquid crystal technology above is a nanomanufacturing system and it will grow and eventualy do so.  What's more, the Newcomen engine that started the industrial revolution was made in 1712.  One could say the beginning of the end of the industrial era marks the industrial era not lasting much more than three hundred years.  The agricultural era before then lasted almost ten thousand years.  Before then, the hunter gatherors laster perhaps hundreds of thousands to a few million years(depending on your definitions of human intelligence; the first stone tools goes back four million years; fire goes back a few hundred thousand years).