Forget nanotech, think claytronics
Videoconferencing is like visiting someone in prison. You talk through a glass wall, but you can't deal with each other in a meaningful way. With claytronics you could fax over an exact copy of your body, which will sit in that conference room thousands of miles away, mimicking your moves in real time and speaking with your voice. Clayronics experts are designing a kind of programmable clay that can morph into a working 3-D replica of any person or object, based on information transmitted from anywhere in the world. The clay would be made out of millions of tiny microprocessors called catoms (for "claytronic atoms"), each less than a millimeter wide. The catoms would bond electro-statically and be molded into different shapes when instructed by software. Think of claytronics as a more workable version of nanotechnology, which in its most advanced form promises to do the same thing but requires billions of self-assembling robots. Proc