Science teachers, here's an intriguing homework assignment for students with Internet access. The nanofactory movie, “Productive Nanosystems: From molecules to superproducts”, is available on YouTube.

Starting at the human scale, viewers zooms in through a scale factor of a billion to follow molecules as they are sorted, bound, transformed, and joined to form larger and larger parts of a billion-processor laptop computer.

The production and much of the design were done by John Burch of LizardFire Studios. K. Eric Drexler advised, and Damian Allis and Drexler did the density-functional quantum chemistry in the analysis of the carbon-transfer tooltip. (Note: there are no dancing “nanobots” — the factory contains only factory-style machinery.)

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