Tour and his team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers not only built a car, but also constructed a nanotruck capable of carrying a payload. Asked why he did it, Tour's answer was simple: so that we can someday construct buildings and other large objects with molecular-size vehicles.

It took Tour and his team eight years to build the car. One of the significant challenges was attaching the wheels because the buckyballs had the adverse affect of shutting down the binding property -- the palladium reaction -- used to form the rest of the vehicle.

Over the next 30 years, Tour's nanotechnology could produce quantum-dot memory, which involves stringing together metal atoms in patterns that could then store data. Each quantum dot would consist of 50 metal atoms, he said.

Of course, that's a long way off, Tour acknowledged. He hasn't even patented the technology because by the time it could be used to make money, the patents would be expired. And we're not talking about a few nanotrucks carrying metal atoms to construct skyscrapers but 10 23 or more vehicles, all carrying nanoparticles in orchestration, he said.

Until now, engineers have built things by taking larger objects and cutting them down to make smaller ones, Tour said. For example, trees are cut down to make tables, and as such, large silicon wafers are cut away to make transistors. But in the future, things will be built not from the top down, but the bottom up -- as in nature.