This paper is dedicated to Marc Drillon, on the occasion of his 60th birthday.The much-talked-about "nanotechnology revolution" shall probably not occur without the prior emergence of reliable self-assembling techniques. It is quite clear today that in spite of incredible progress, top-down technologies and lithographic techniques are getting close to the end of their evolutionary course. With the promise of lower cost and high throughput, self-assembling techniques stand unrivaled, the mere existence of Nature's billions of self-assembled living creatures being an obvious proof of their ultimate efficiency. Moreover, as space is no longer a problem in nanoscale devices, such systems can have an inherent potentially high redundancy making them much less sensitive to damage or fabrication errors than the present ones.In the current literature on nanodevices, the term nanoparticles (NPs) can actually convey many different meanings. In terms of size, first, since the "nanoworld" spans several orders of magnitude, and in terms of functionality, second, as the function may be that of a single particle (e.g., quantum dots) or one brought about by the periodic structuring of space via the self-organization of hundreds of particles (e.g