Duckboy in Nanoland

It’s worth taking a look at the website that goes with the new exhibition on nanotechnology at the Science Museum in London – Nanotechnology: small science, big deal – it’s an interesting, though necessarily brief and superficial, trip through the subject, with a good overview of the incremental end of the technology.

The highlight has to be the splendid video game, Duckboy in Nanoland, which has clearly already diverted the finest minds in the nanobusiness world for far too long. I too was captivated by its cheesily retro graphics. I’m relieved, though, that the introduction to the first game “Strange attractions” has been changed. In the early version of the game, which I road-tested on my postdocs, you were asked to “steer duckboy through a sticky patch in the tunnel of love“. For some reason they all thought this was terribly funny. If only for suggesting this change, I think I deserve my name on the acknowledgements list.