Nanoengineering is learning how to make devices as small as 10 to 100 atoms in width. Much of the work is going on in the electronics industry, where there is great demand to pack more components onto computer chips.

Capitalism is a wonderful economic engine, but it assigns little value to long-term projects or societal problems.

We academics - I am an academic - we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes.

Chemists have always been in the business of taking atoms and putting them together with other atoms with precisely defined connections.

Bosses are no more inevitable in state and local governments than dictators are in national governments. They will arise and prosper, nevertheless, if true believers of democracy - citizens devoted to the democratic ideals - do not constantly oppose them.

I regret that I had to leave my country. But I had to do it in order to achieve and decide my own fate. I was forced into it. Democracy came about 15 years too late for me. But I have to say that it's there now, and Czech Republic is a fantastic country; it always was but just had the wrong regime at the top.

Science fiction is the field that explores how change can affect us, for well or ill.

Politics abhors a vacuum, and Asian countries will gravitate towards China if U.S. influence is perceived as declining.