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Nanotechnology Enables Real Atomic Precision is the title of a piece by Susan Smith in Desktop Engineering, which includes comments by longtime Foresight Senior Associates Steve Vetter and Tihamer Toth-Fejel: If you were an alien from an advanced civilization who had been stranded on Earth, but had all your people’s knowledge on a thumb drive, how would you go about creating nanotech and building up Earth’s technology to the level you could rejoin your galactic civilization? Last week I posted a story of strange behavior in the simulation of molecular machines. One of the constraints laid down by DARPA at the recent Physical Some interesting developments in memories: This Nanowerk story reports results out of Alex Zettl’s group at Berkeley on a memory cell that consists of an iron nanoparticle which can be moved back and forth in a nanotube. More information on this can be found at Zettl’s site here. Evolution has adapted what were the bones of the fingers of the bat’s ancestors to form the skeleton of its wing. Similarly, in technology, when one element of a system is capable of expanding to take up new functions, it can substitute for what might have been expected to be different ways to achieve [...] Two papers in a recent issue of Science suggest that graphene is rapidly moving from being “just” a nanotech wonder material to becoming relevant to atomically precise nanotechnologies. This the sixth essay in a series exploring if, when, and how the Singularity will happen, why (or why not) we should care, and what, if anything, we should do about it. Part VI: The heavily-loaded takeoff The fastest software I ever used ran on some of the slowest computers I ever had. Circa 1980, right around [...] New computational results reveal how the proper hierarchical assembly of smaller protein domains optimizes mechanical properties. Computer simulations have shown that graphene deposited on a silicon dioxide surface will be either a semiconductor or a metal depending on whether the underlying layer is terminated with oxygen atoms or passivated with hydrogen atoms. Computational nanotech studies have shown that deliberate introduction of structural defects at specific sites in carbon nanotubes can guide electrons along specific paths, providing a way to fabricate complex electronic circuits from nanotubes. Molecular dynamics simulations show that electron tunneling through nanoscale rotary motors based on carbon nanotube shafts may enable nanotech motors to rotate more than a million times faster than their biological counterparts. Dr. David Baker, who with Dr. Brian Kuhlman was awarded the 2004 Foresight Nanotech Institute Feynman Prize for Theory, will be one of three winners of the 2008 Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics. Dr. Baker has been featured on Nanodot posts this year for inviting online gamers to aid in protein design [...] Robert A. Freitas Jr. brings to our attention a major step on the road to advanced nanotech, published a couple weeks ago in Science (abstract). He writes: This paper reports purely mechanical-based covalent bond-making and bond-breaking (true mechanosynthesis) involving atom by atom substitution of silicon (Si) atoms for tin (Sn) atoms in an Sn monolayer surface [...] Combining electrically conductive polymers, transition metal atoms, and spin-coating to form thin films could lead to solar cells with two major advantages that would make them more efficient at converting light to electricity. Swedish scientists have developed a computer program to calculate Casimir forces between various types of nanostructured materials, which may help to determine whether significant friction problems exist in specific designs. On the Editor’s Page at Medical DeviceLinkCom, Shana Leonard writes about the crucial need for design and modeling techniques to guide nanosystems development toward fabrication, and cites the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems. From “A Different Kind of Intelligent Design” Drawing from numerous workshops held from 2005 to 2007, Battelle (Columbus, OH) and the Foresight [...] A recent review describes the advantages to nanotech of advances in electron microscopy that allow mapping electron states localized at or between atoms. The emerging ability to control the sizes of these clusters to atomic precision affords new opportunities for designing novel catalysts. Atoms or molecules could be pumped through the spinning inner CNT to form patterns of atoms or molecules—a nanotech inkjet printer. |
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