On March 10, an unusual product inventory went live on the Web. The items, which include wrinkle-banishing creams and reinforced tennis rackets and hockey sticks, don’t look out of the ordinary. The shared feature of these 200-or-so seemingly disparate products hides within them. The products represent the initial attempts to take advantage of the special properties ascribed to nanotechnology. For instance, carbon nanotubes purported to be up to 100 times as strong as steel are being used to toughen sports equipment.
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The inventory’s items are only “the first wave of a product tsunami,” says David Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies in Washington, D.C., which compiled the inventory. The National Science Foundation has predicted that a decade from now, nanotechnology will have a $1 trillion impact on the world’s economy.