I'm on the board of the Foresight Institute, which at over 25 years old has been promoting nanotech since long before people knew the word. This January, we will be holding our technical conference on nanotechnology and related fields. Foresight's focus is on the potential for molecular manufacturing -- doing things at the atomic level -- and not simply on fine structure materials.

It may surprise you just how much research is going on in the field of atomically precise manufacturing, and the positive results that are coming from it. Today people (including me) are excited by 3-D printers that can reproduce macroscopic shapes with good precision, but the holy grail is to build structures at the atomic level, as it has the potential to produce anything that can be formed, cheaply and in small volumes.

Foresight hosts two conferences -- the other is a more general futurist conference on the implications of these technologies, while this one offers the results of in-depth research. Check out the program page for a list of speakers including Fraser Stoddart, George Church, John Randall, William Goddard and many others.

Update: Blog readers can get a $100 discount on registration with this code: 2013QDFP