Betterhumans has a story about a new technology for “printing” 3-D devices as small as one that could fit inside a human hair. The abstract for the paper in the journal Nature is available online as is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report.
Talk about foundation building.the article mentions such technologies could eventually benefit tissue engineering, nanotechnology, microfluidics, and photonics efforts, all of which are likely to be the foundation for unprecedented change in the coming decades.
Nature has already, through evolution, come up with some incredibly powerful technologies inside of organisms. Researchers continue to learn valuable lessons from biology and these insights are helping us to build new tools. The melding of the biological with the technological, I think, is the single most important driver of change in our time.