Special issue featuring papers from ICN&T 2006

This special issue of Nanotechnology reflects upon the state of the art in nanoscience as disseminated at the International Conference on Nanoscience and Technology (ICN&T) in Basel, Switzerland, 30 July–4 August 2006. At the meeting more than 1600 researchers gathered both to mark the anniversaries of STM and AFM and to celebrate the expansion and substantiation of nanoscience in general. The breadth of modern nanoscience and its application was underlined by 40 different topics with more than 500 presentations and 900 posters. The work from some of the invited speakers published in this special issue gives the reader a real flavour of where nanoscience is evolving in its quest to amalgamate the still somewhat dominant mechanistic top-down approach with that of the bottom-up approach of self-assembly and self organization as so successfully implemented in the natural world. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the authors for their valuable contribution to make this special issue of Nanotechnology a comprehensive reflection of the scientific excitement of the ICN&T conference.