Concrete progress toward that goal came in July from the branch of nanotech called molecular electronics. A team from the University of California at Los Angeles and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories unveiled a so-called logic gate made by molecular self-assembly. Next, the team will shrink the wires on chips, aiming to produce chips ''in the region of 100 nanometers on a side,'' says Philip J. Kuekes, a researcher at HP Labs. ''What makes chipmaking so expensive now,'' he adds, ''is the extreme mechanical precision required. But with chemistry, we can turn out chips like Kodak does film--in long rolls, and you'll just cut out little squares.''

Such notions have grabbed Washington's attention. Seven months ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a Molecular Electronics Program. And Congress seems eager to spend a lot more on nanotech research. One plan would double the current budget of $232 million over the next three years. The White House may go along, because it has already tagged nanotech as one of 11 critical research areas.

Back at Mitre, the latest feat of Ellenbogen's crew, unveiled in mid-August, is a design for a minuscule robot to help assemble nanofabrication systems. Currently, it measures almost five millimeters along one side, or one-sixth of an inch. But suppose such robots were to use nanofab techniques to produce progressively smaller versions of themselves. Eventually, they might end up smaller than specks of dust.

Robots that tiny could fulfill K. Eric Drexler's vision of nanobots capable of manipulating individual atoms. In his trailblazing 1986 book, Engines of Creation, the founder of the Foresight Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., painted a riveting picture of nanotech's potential. Drexler essentially launched the nanotech era and inspired such fancies as armies of invisible nanobots roaming carpets and shelves, dismantling dust into atoms that get reconstituted as napkins, soap, or anything else--including nanocomputers.

Building computers atom by atom remains a distant dream, though, and Ellenbogen wants quick results. ''So I'm betting on molecular electronics for the near term,'' he says. That looks like a good nanogamble.

Soon, technology may have the power to track every waking moment of your life--and preserve it in a form that will allow your great-great-great grandchildren to quiz a virtual you

Einstein's brain? Not exactly, but software allows Carnegie Mellon University professor Raj Reddy to "converse" with a simulated version of the great scientist.

So you'd like to live forever? By the year 2050, you might actually get your wish--providing you are willing to evacuate your biological body and take up residence in silicon circuits. But long before then, perhaps as early as 2005, less radical measures will begin offering a semblance of immortality.

Researchers are confident that technology will soon be able to track every waking moment of your life. Whatever you see and hear, plus all that you say and write, can be recorded, analyzed and automatically indexed, and added to your personal chronicles. By the 2030s, it may be possible to capture your nervous system's electrical activity, which would also preserve your thoughts and emotions. Researchers at the BT Laboratories of British Telecommunications PLC have dubbed this concept the Soul Catcher.

In a preview of what the near term holds, Carnegie Mellon University two years ago unveiled a system called Synthetic Interviews, with Albert Einstein as its first subject. To learn about the theory of relativity or the physicist's private life, you engage in what almost seems to be a live videoconference with an ersatz Einstein. The system quickly parses each question and selects the best-match response from a bank of 500 video recordings. So it's easy to forget what's going on under the hood--speech recognition to digitize your words, natural-language processing to understand the question, and a rating scheme similar to that used by Lycos Inc. to rank the results of Web searches.

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