Further, the pressure of the challenges we face, and the rewards for successful exploitation of scientific and technical advances, often combine to encourage research in areas where the outputs are particularly likely to have special value. This is as true for transportation as for any other human endeavor. For that reason, this section of the National Strategic Transportation Research Plan identifies three of the numerous areas of important basic research now being pursued which have especially clear and substantial potential benefits for the designers, builders, operators and users of future elements of the national and global transportation system. All three areas are addressed in the specific enabling research discussion in Section 4 of this plan, but their importance warrants the more focused discussion that follows. The novel properties are due to the different behavior of things at this scale as compared with either isolated molecules or larger structures.
Nanotechnology implies the direct control of atoms and molecules.
There are two overall approaches to building things at the nanoscale. Yet, although researchers can now make single molecular structures in the laboratory, they have yet to find a cheap and commercially feasible way of mass-producing them. This relies on chemistry to position atoms and molecules, taking advantage of certain molecules' abilities to arrange themselves in complex structures. It is revolutionizing virtually every area of technology and will have a direct and dramatic impact on transportation. With molecular electronics, a single computer chip could hold billions of miniscule transistors, making computers orders of magnitude more powerful than they are today.