Nanostructures and nanotechnology: Perspectives and new trends

Nanotechnology is widely agreed to be the research focus that will lead the next generation to breakthroughs in science and engineering. Nanotechnology will yield revolutionary advances in understanding and application at three cornerstones of expectation: Breakthroughs in properties that arise from materials fabricated from the nanoscale. Synergistic behaviour that arise from the combination of disparate types of materials (soft vs. hard, organic vs. inorganic, chemical vs. biological vs. solid state) at the nanoscale. Exploitation of natural (e.g. chemical and biological) assembly mechanisms that can accomplish structural control, at the nanoscale, are expected to lead to paradigms for assembling bio-inspired functional systems that accomplish desirable properties, either unavailable or prohibitively expensive, using top-down approaches.