Nanodot: the original nanotechnology weblog

Less than four years ago we asked here whether online gamers playing Foldit could help perfect the de novo design of proteins that do not exist in nature. Four months ago we reported that Foldit players had succeeded where scientists had failed in solving the structure of an important viral enzyme. Now Scientific American reports that Foldit players have topped scientists in redesigning a protein—the challenge we suggested less than four years ago. From “Online gamers achieve first crowd-sourced redesign of protein“:

Obsessive gamers’ hours at the computer have now topped scientists’ efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein.

The online game Foldit, developed by teams led by Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Foresight Institute Co-Founder and Past President Christine Peterson was among four panelists addressing the role of technology in human existence for a Stanford University Continuing Studies series. From a report in The Stanford Daily by Marshall Watkins “Bay Area thinkers ponder ‘life’“:

Christine Peterson, co-founder and president of The Foresight Institute, a public interest group seeking to educate the community on forthcoming technological advances, emphasized the increasingly prominent role that nanotechnology has come to play.

Peterson noted that nanotechnology has the potential to create new materials and make vast advances without the side effects, such as pollution, that would currently ensue. She allowed, however, that the near-invisible and highly sensitive technology might enable intrusions on privacy.

“We need to know what data is collected,” Peterson said, “how it is used and how long it is retained. We have those rights.”

Peterson highlighted the medical benefits of nanotechnology, noting, “The ability to control atoms and molecules would mean that there really isn’t a physical illness [that] we wouldn’t be able to address.”

The report quotes the moderator of the panel, author Piero Scaruffi, as stating that the four panelists were picked because “They discussed life as in the future, rather than life as in the past.” We can certainly expect that life after advanced nanotechnology has been developed will be fundamentally different from life up until that point.

Researchers at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center have used a scanning tunneling microscope to assemble an array of 96 iron atoms into an antiferromagnetic structure that encodes one byte (eight bits) of information. As reported in the NY Times by John Markoff “New storage device is very small, at 12 atoms“:

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible.

The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will consume significantly less power. And they may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing. …

Read the rest of this entry »

The potential of advanced nanotechnology is getting some attention from mainstream media. Late last year The Guardian web site posted a brief article on the prospects for nanofactories and atomically precise manufacturing, featuring quotes from Christine Peterson and Robert Freitas. From “Nanofactories – a future vision” by Penny Sarchet:

Mimicking nature is a recurring theme in nanotechnology and molecular nanotechnology, inspired by the natural nanostructures found in our own bodies, offers many exciting potential outcomes.

“Molecular nanotechnology is the expected ability to build our products with molecular-level precision, as nature can do,” says Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Nanotech Institute in California. “It will bring unprecedented quality, energy efficiency and environmental sustainability”.

The recent development of an electron-powered molecular “nanocar”, by a team led by chemist Ben Feringa at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, hints at the potential. Further indications that molecular nanotechnology is achievable are being found in the quest for ever-smaller computing.

Many of these efforts attempt to use nature’s own method of storing and transferring information – DNA. “DNA computing is the goal of building devices out of DNA that are able to act like computers, initially doing simple calculations but eventually doing everything that a macroscale computer can do,” says Peterson. …

One future prospect for molecular-scale nanotechnology is to build nanofactories. “The nanofactory is a proposed compact molecular manufacturing system that could build a diverse selection of large-scale, atomically precise products,” explains Robert Freitas Jr, senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, also in California. “The products of a nanofactory would be atomically precise, with every atom in exactly the right place, offering the ultimate in quality control. It could make products out of the strongest materials known to man – especially diamond, sapphire, and related ultra-strong ceramics. In manufacturing, it’s hard to do better than that.”

The first two-dimensional structure to be built atom-by-atom was made from silicon in 2003. However, Freitas says nanofactories are still a long way off. “We expect this will require a 20-year research and development effort and on the order of $1bn (£622m) in funding to achieve.” …

If anyone knows someone with a billion dollars they will not need for twenty years, ask them to contact Christine or Robert.

We received this announcement of the new M.S. in Nanomedicine program from Radiological Technologies University – VT:

Radiological Technologies University VT, located in South Bend, Indiana is pleased to announce the approval of the first Master’s of Science in Nanomedicine degree program in the country. The formal approval was granted today through the Indiana Commission for Postsecondary Proprietary Education. Nanomedicine is the medical application of Nanotechnology which focuses its work at the cellular level to do everything from repairing tissue, to cleaning arteries, to attacking cancer cells and viruses like AIDS. The RTU Nanomedicine program is the first of its kind in the country by combining Nanotechnology with an emphasis on Medical Physics. Radiological Technologies University offers degree programs ranging from a Bachelor’s degree in Medical Dosimetry to Master’s of Science degrees in Medical Dosimetry, Medical Physics, Medical Health Physics, and Nanomedicine.

Although Foresight has no information about the details of this nanomedicine program, just one item from the NCI Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer news archive highlights the potential of nanomedicine, specifically the application of nanoparticles to cancer therapy. From “Nanoparticles seek and destroy drug-resistant glioblastoma“:

Read the rest of this entry »

An important milestone in the development of nanotechnology leading to atomically precise manufacturing (molecular manufacturing) is the development of artificial molecular machines that can control molecular transformations. Two scientists from the University of Groningen, Netherlands, published a paper in Science [abstract] earlier this year demonstrating control of a chemical reaction by an artificial molecular machine. They constructed a light-driven molecular motor that catalyses different chemical reactions as the motor is stepped through its rotary cycle. The researchers’ institute has made the full text of “Dynamic Control of Chiral Space in a Catalytic Asymmetric Reaction Using a Molecular Motor” available here.

The authors constructed a rotary motor molecule in which the rotor and stator halves of the molecule rotate about an axle consisting of a carbon-carbon double bond. Rotation occurs in only one direction in a four-stage cycle driven by light absorption and by temperature change. Because the molecule is helical in shape, it is chiral, that is, it exists in two different conformations (shapes) that are mirror images of each other.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago we noted the publication of a tutorial review that asks whether artificial molecular machines can deliver the performance that visionaries expect. Upon learning that the full text is available after a free registration, I downloaded the review to learn what the authors think about the prospects of eventually doing atomically precise manufacturing with artificial molecular machine systems.

The authors begin with the observation that, despite “remarkable progress” in synthesizing molecular switches, there have been only few and very rudimentary examples of harvesting useful work from such molecular switches. They then ask whether only incremental progress will be necessary for artificial molecular machines to achieve the levels of function so elegantly achieved by biological molecular machines, or whether some paradigm shift in thinking will be necessary (they believe the latter).

Read the rest of this entry »

New computer assisted design (CAD) tools for engineering RNA components have been developed for the growing field of synthetic biology. The knowledge of RNA folding and RNA catalytic and binding functions incorporated into these CAD tools may also prove useful for RNA nanotechnology. A hat tip to Science Daily for reprinting this news release from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) “CAD for RNA“:

The computer assisted design (CAD) tools that made it possible to fabricate integrated circuits with millions of transistors may soon be coming to the biological sciences. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have developed CAD-type models and simulations for RNA molecules that make it possible to engineer biological components or “RNA devices” for controlling genetic expression in microbes. This holds enormous potential for microbial-based sustainable production of advanced biofuels, biodegradable plastics, therapeutic drugs and a host of other goods now derived from petrochemicals.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago the use of designed peptides to build supramolecular structures on surfaces was reported. Another group has now reported making two-dimensional atomically precise sheets using peptoids, a class of peptide mimetics in which the side chain is attached to the backbone nitrogen atom instead of to the alpha carbon atom. Such sheets might be useful as templates for assembling other nanostructures. A hat tip to Science Daily for reprinting this news release from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) “Shaken, not stirred: Berkeley Lab scientists spy molecular maneuvers“:

Stir this clear liquid in a glass vial and nothing happens. Shake this liquid, and free-floating sheets of protein-like structures emerge, ready to detect molecules or catalyze a reaction. This isn’t the latest gadget from James Bond’s arsenal—rather, the latest research from the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists unveiling how slim sheets of protein-like structures self-assemble. This “shaken, not stirred” mechanism provides a way to scale up production of these two-dimensional nanosheets for a wide range of applications, such as platforms for sensing, filtration and templating growth of other nanostructures.

Read the rest of this entry »

Foresight Co-Founder and Past President: Christine L. Peterson was interviewed in the magazine “Future by Semcon“, published by Semcon, “a global technology company active in the areas of engineering services and product information.” The four-page article “Infinite nanotech possibilities” begins on page 34 of the current issue, which is available online. (The issue is presented as it appears in print, so in the “Browse the publication” box click on the “Table of contents”, then the article title, and then the “Go to page” button.) The interview presents a very succinct and easy overview of the current state and future potential of nanotechnology. Christine focuses on the potential of advanced nanotechnology to eliminate chemical pollution through complete control of atomic trajectories during the manufacturing process. She summarizes the progress of nanotechnology as near the end of the first stage of development, the use of nanostructured materials in a variety of applications, and the beginning of the second, the construction of nanodevices and more advanced products. The latter include medical applications, like (much) better detection and treatment of cancer. As Foresight members and Nanodot readers are well aware, however, the real excitement will come when these first two evolutionary stages give way to the third, truly revolutionary stage, the development of advanced nanomachinery for atomically precise manufacturing:

I think in the longer term it will be the way we make our products. It will mean that they incorporate computation, they incorporate the ability to change their shape, they are perhaps multipurpose products. At some point it starts to sound like science fiction, and there is a reason for that. When you look ahead two or three decades, if what you see at that stage does not look like science fiction, then you’re not trying, you’re not thinking ambitiously enough. …

The interview ends with two interesting questions. (1) When can we expect advanced nanomachinery to be commercialized? After acknowledging the range from optimistic to pessimistic predictions: “… let’s say that in 25 years maybe we will see some really dramatic stuff happening.” (2) Will any technologies not be affected in some way by advanced nanotechnology? “… I personally don’t see a technology area that will not be impacted by nanotechnology.” Do these two answers seem on target?

The repertoire of potentially useful molecular switches continues to grow as the components that do the switching shrink. A team of German physicists has used a single electron from the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope to transfer a single proton among one of four not quite equivalent positions in the inner cavity of a porphyrin molecule anchored to a silver surface.They have thus demonstrated the smallest conceivable molecular conductance switch. A hat tip to Science Daily for reprinting this press release from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) “Targeted proton transfer within a molecule: The smallest conceivable switch“:

For a long time miniaturization has been the magic word in electronics. Dr. Willi Auwaerter and Professor Johannes Barth, together with their team of physicists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), have now presented a novel molecular switch in the journal “Nature Nanotechnology.” Decisive for the functionality of the switch is the position of a single proton in a porphyrin ring with an inside diameter of less than half a nanometer. The physicists can set four distinct states on demand.

Read the rest of this entry »

DEADLINE DECEMBER 31

Our friends over at the Thiel Foundation asked us to help spread the word about their fellowship program, which offers $100,000 grants to innovators age 19 or younger.

If you know of a very bright, energetic, and visionary young person, please bring this opportunity to his or her attention.

Of course, here at Foresight we hope that your protege will work on nanotechnology, and the Thiel Foundation is very interested in this field, but the fellowships are available in a wide range of areas of endeavor.

Read the rest of this entry »

The application to colloidal nanoparticles of traditional chemical techniques for controlled corrosion and plating has produced complex multicomponent three-dimensional nanostructures that, while not atomically precise, exhibit a wide range of designed porous and multichamber nanostructures. From ScienceDaily “Carving at the Nanoscale“:

Researchers at the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology (ICN) have successfully demonstrated a new method for producing a wide variety of complex hollow nanoparticles. …

After several years of research, scientists of the Catalan Institute of Nanotechnology (ICN) … have refined methods based on traditional corrosion techniques (the Kirkendall effect and galvanic, pitting, etching and de-alloying corrosion processes).

They show that these methods, which are far more aggressive at the nanoscale than in bulk materials due to the higher surface area of nanostructures, provide interesting pathways for the production of new and exotic materials. By making simple changes in the chemical environment it is possible to tightly control the reaction and diffusion processes at room temperatures, allowing for high yields and high consistency in form and structure. This should make the processes particularly attractive for commercial applications as they are easily adapted to industrial scales.

A wide range of structures can be formed, including open boxes, bimetallic and trimetallic double-walled open boxes with pores, multiwalled/multichamber boxes, double-walled, porous and multichamber nanotubes, nanoframes, noble metal fullerenes, and others.

The research was published in Science (abstract). A “Perspectives” article about the research is available “Complex Colloidal Assembly“.

A tutorial review (abstract) whose authors include J. Fraser Stoddart, winner of the 2007 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize in the Experimental category, asks whether artificial molecular machines can deliver the performance that visionaries expect. From Foresight’s perspective, will it be possible to develop systems of molecular machines capable of programmable, atomically precise manufacture of complex systems and macroscale products, as envisioned in the 2007 Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems? The review addresses fundamental problems on the path from the many simple artificial molecular devices that have been demonstrated to the end goal of effective molecular machine systems, such as whether we can build molecular machines that can operate at all scales from the molecular to the macroscopic, and whether molecular machines can be organized spatially and temporally to accomplish complex tasks. It ends with a mention of the Foresight Institute Feynman Grand Prize. From a Northwest University news release “When Will Artificial Molecular Machines Start Working For Us?“:

Physicist Richard Feynman in his famous 1959 talk, “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” described the precise control at the atomic level promised by molecular machines of the future. More than 50 years later, synthetic molecular switches are a dime a dozen, but synthetically designed molecular machines are few and far between.

Northwestern University chemists recently teamed up with a University of Maine physicist to explore the question, “Can artificial molecular machines deliver on their promise?” Their provocative analysis provides a roadmap outlining future challenges that must be met before full realization of the extraordinary promise of synthetic molecular machines can be achieved.

Read the rest of this entry »

This holiday season, you’re invited to join with us in celebrating the following events:

1. Foresight Announces Election of New President Larry Millstein
2. Meet The President: Dinner Reception Monday 12/12, 6:30pm @ Don Giovanni’s in Mountain View, CA
3. Annual Challenge Grant Kickoff: Donate this month for double the value to Foresight!

I. Foresight Announces Election of our New President

Foresight is proud to announce that Larry S. Millstein, Ph.D., J.D. has been elected President of the Institute by the Board of Directors. Larry has been a Foresight member since 1998. He was instrumental in establishing the Foresight Communication Prize in 2000 and in ensuring its funding since then; he has been a member of the Board of Directors since 2009. He has been interested in atomically and molecularly precise technologies for many years – since reading Nanosystems over a decade ago and strengthened by the development of mechanochemistry and the recent commercialization of single molecule DNA sequencing instruments.

“We are thrilled to have persuaded such a technically accomplished and experienced leader to be President of Foresight and to take on the task of accelerating the development of transformative nanotechnologies and their beneficial uses,” said Foresight co-founder and current President Christine Peterson, who will continue to be a member of the Board and active advisor to the Institute and will collaborate closely with senior staff in making the transition.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Drexler presented a lecture at the University of Oxford Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology that addressed two key questions:

• What will be the next great revolution in the material basis of civilization?
• How can we establish reliable knowledge about key aspects of such technologies?

From the news release, aptly titled “The next technological revolution?“:

The key to tackling some of our planet’s greatest challenges may be found in the laws of physics and methods of engineering, as opposed to any specific technological innovation.

Speaking at the inaugural public lecture of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology, Dr Eric Drexler said there is a compelling case for the viability of atomically precise manufacturing. This is the process of building structures, tools and machines starting at the molecular level, with atomic precision, to address challenges such as rising greenhouse gases and energy production for our growing population.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the major challenges in using nanomedicine for drug delivery is how to get the nanoparticles carrying the therapeutic drug to release the drug when they arrive at the proper place. Thanks to Jessica Moore of the Center of Excellence in Nanomedicine, University of California, San Diego for sending news of a new polymer that degrades in response to near infrared light. Because near infrared light penetrates several inches through human tissue, it could be used to control the release of drugs from nanoparticles lodged in specific locations. From the American Chemical Society’s press release “New “smart” material could help tap medical potential of tissue-penetrating light“:

… Scientists are reporting development and successful initial testing of the first practical “smart” material that may supply the missing link in efforts to use in medicine a form of light that can penetrate four inches into the human body. …

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great successes of twentieth century medicine has been the use of antibiotics to treat formerly fatal bacterial infections. This success is now at risk of being reversed by the ability of bacteria to evolve resistance to antibiotics, and by the recently developed ability to engineer particularly lethal new pathogens for military or terrorist purposes. Darpa wants to deploy nanotechnology to maintain the upper hand against both evolving and engineered bacterial threats. Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for passing along this item from Wired written by Katie Drummond “Darpa: Do Away With Antibiotics, Then Destroy All Pathogens“:

…In the military’s latest round of small business solicitations, Darpa is making a long-shot request for an all-out replacement to antibiotics, the decades-old standard for killing or injuring bacteria to demolish a disease. In its place: the emerging field of nanomedicine would be used to fight bacterial threats. The agency’s “Rapidly Adaptable Nanotherapeutics” is after a versatile “platform capable of rapidly synthesizing therapeutic nanoparticles” to target unknown, evolving and even genetically engineered bioweapons.…

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the key technologies in the development of nanotechnology has been scanning probe microscopy, and one of the key technologies that has made scanning probe microscopies possible is piezoelectric materials. Researchers have now integrated a single-crystal material with “giant” piezoelectric properties onto silicon. Improved actuators for nanopositioning devices are listed among the several possible applications of improved piezoelectric materials. Will these actuators be used to integrate scanning probe microscopes on a chip and would such instruments be useful for atomically precise manufacturing? ScienceDaily reprints the University of Wisconsin-Madison news release:

Integrating a complex, single-crystal material with “giant” piezoelectric properties onto silicon, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers and physicists can fabricate low-voltage, near-nanoscale electromechanical devices that could lead to improvements in high-resolution 3-D imaging, signal processing, communications, energy harvesting, sensing, and actuators for nanopositioning devices, among others.

Read the rest of this entry »

The wide assortment of nanostructures and nanomachines made possible by structural DNA nanotechnology are all based upon the molecular recognition code of the familiar DNA double helix. Initially this code was exploited to build atomically precise structures on the order of 20 nmm in size. Since the publication of the DNA origami technique by Paul W. K. Rothemund in 2006 it has been possible to fold a long single strand of DNA with the help of numerous short DNA ‘staples’ into larger and more complex two-dimensional and three-dimensional nanostructures on the order of 100 nm in size. In a recent publication [abstract], Rothemund and Sungwook Woo use a different type of molecular coding derived from DNA—blunt-end stacking interactions at the ends of DNA helices—to create molecular shape complementarity on a larger scale.

Rothemund’s earlier work making rectangular DNA tiles using DNA origami had revealed that the rectangles tended to form chains due to the blunt-end stacking interactions of the helix ends exposed at the edges of the tiles. In their current work Woo and Rothemund tested methods of making these blunt-end interactions specific so that multiple origami tiles could be assembled in a programmed fashion to make well-defined nanostructures. Through matching patterns of projecting and recessed ends at the edges of tiles, discrete segments could be made to assemble in a particular order to form larger structures approaching micrometer scale. The stacking interactions are weaker than base pairing interactions but permit building loser structures on a ten-times-larger scale. The researchers speculate that it might be possible to design larger nanomachines in which parts can be programmed to both self-assemble and slide freely past each other in a programmed way.

The Caltech DNA computation group has made three PDFs available on their web site describing the research in detail: the full text of the Nature Chemistry research paper “Programmable molecular recognition based on the geometry of DNA nanostructures“, a Nature Chemistry commentary by Andrew J. Turberfield, and a report on the work by Michael Eisenstein published in Nature Methods.