Nanowerk, an agency which provides nanotechnology information and more, has commissioned a series of AI-designed non-fungible tokens representing two of the ‘Giants of Nanotechnology’, Richard Feynman and Sir Harold Kroto.

It’s a fundraising effort as noted here in an April 10, 2022 Nanowerk Spotlight article by website owner, Michael Berger,

We’ve spent a lot of time recently researching and writing the articles for our Smartworlder section here on Nanowerk – about cryptocurrencies, explaining blockchain, and many other aspects of smart technologies – for instance non-fungible tokens (NFTs). So, we thought: Why not go all the way and try this out ourselves?

As many organizations continue to push the boundaries as to what is possible within the web3 ecosystem, producing our first-ever collection of nanotechnology-themed digital art on the blockchain seemed like a natural extension for our brand and we hope that these NFT collectibles will be cherished by our reader community.

To start with, we created two inaugural Nanowerk NFT collections in a series we are calling Giants of Nanotech in order to honor the great minds of science in this field.

The digital artwork has been created using the artificial intelligence (AI) image creation algorithm Neural Style Transfer. This technique takes two images – a content image and a style reference image (such as an artwork by a famous painter) – and blends them together so the output image looks like the content image, but ‘painted’ in the style of the reference image.

For example, here is a video clip that shows how the AI transforms the Feynman content image into a painting inspired by Victor Nunnally’s Journey Man:

If you want to jump right into it, here are the Harry Kroto collection and the Richard Feynman collection on the OpenSea marketplace.

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Have fun with our NFTs and please remember, your purchase helps fund Nanowerk and we are very grateful to you!

Also note: NFTs are an extremely volatile market. This article is not financial advice. Invest in the crypto and NFT market at your own risk. Only invest if you fully understand the potential risks.

I have a couple of comments. First, there’s Feynman’s status as a ‘Giant of Nanotechnology’. He is credited in the US as providing a foundational text (a 1959 lecture titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”) for the field of nanotechnology. There has been some controversy over the lecture’s influence some of which has been covered in the Wikipedia entry titled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.”

Second, Sir Harold Kroto won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, along with two colleagues (all three were at Rice University in Texas), for the discovery of the buckminsterfullerene. Here’s more about that from the Richard E. Smalley, Robert F. Curl, and Harold W. Kroto essay on the Science History Institute website,

In 1996 three scientists, two American and one British, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of buckminsterfullerene (the “buckyball”) and other fullerenes. These “carbon cages” resembling soccer balls opened up a whole new field of chemical study with practical applications in materials science, electronics, and nanotechnology that researchers are only beginning to uncover.

With their discovery of buckminsterfullerene in 1985, Richard E. Smalley (1943–2005), Robert F. Curl (b. 1933), and Harold W. Kroto (1939–2016) furthered progress to the long-held objective of molecular-scale electronics and other nanotechnologies. …

Finally, good luck to Nanowerk and Michael Berger.