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Individual Chemical Bond Formed With STM
WillWare writes: "Using a scanning tunneling microscope at the Free University of
Berlin, scientists have for the first time manipulated single
molecules to perform a complete
chemical reaction. (Here are
STM pictures of the reaction happening.) ...the making of C12H10
molecules from C6H5I molecules, normally carried out on a copper
catalyst and using thermal activation, has here been forced to proceed by employing one
molecule at a time at a cryogenic temperature of 20 K. The researchers
believe that new manmade molecules, never before seen in nature, can
be engineered in this way, including the selective detachment or
replacement of parts of larger molecules for individual assembling of
molecular based nano-devices. The official article appears in Physical
Review Letters, 25 Sept." Nanites. That's all I have to say.
And just what does STM stand for?
Yummy! I want one of those in my house! :)
Nanites are just like AI.
1) Wait ten years
2) See how far off their predictions are
3) Go to step #1
"Now the tip pulls one phenyl close to another; they are not yet chemically bonded, though: pulling on one phenyl does not bring the other one along. Finally, another splash of electrons from the tip effectively welds the two phenyls together; proof that binding occurs is that when one phenyl is pulled with the tip, the other comes along for the ride..."
Oh, my. Look at those little electrons go!
Seems this process might be able to make a couple thousand synthetic molecules, but how useful will it be at creating bulk quantities?
I wonder if these methods could be scaled up and automated?
-josh
With the ability to custom create molecules, perhaps we could created a petrified Natalie Portman on the microscopic scale.
-josh
I don't know about the rest of you but I think nano technology is terrifying. We are getting very close to the point where there will be lots of people creating things that have never existed before in nature and for which there is no natural protection. The potential for accidental or intentional mass distruction is enormous. Think about the paranioa of genetically modified food, which is at least very close to something that exists in nature. Who knows what will happen to Molecule X when you weld a new Oxegen atom to it!
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
But a step closer to nanites? Come on!!!
Nobody seems to have a clear idea of what a nanite is, yet there are always claims after a discovery like this - "Nanites tomorrow!!!"
I would define a nanite as:
Having some sort of applicable intelligence, either as a function of what it is made of, or an AI in the truest sense of the meaning
Capable of acting individually or collectively.
Very, very small
Capable of receiving instructions, or acting autonomously.
I don't see how duplicating an existing chemical reaction in an organic compound could possibly bring us anywhere nearer to "nanites".
And yes, I know that being able to modify individual molecules is handy when creating tiny, tiny things, but you must remember carbon has some special properties which may be assisting here (c.f. electron clouds on benzene rings), and those properties may not be found in compounds suitable for nanites. This is just an organic compound, ferchrissakes!!!
A closer take on this would be "it's a step closer to being able to make the materials for nanites", and that, IMHO, is an important distinction. It's a bit like saying the discovery of silicon is a major step to making a Cray...
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
yay, nanotechnology is going to work!
i'm looking forward to self-replicating nano-virii that feed off dna and human tissue. wont that be fun. how do we defend ourselves against that? self-replicating nano-virii that feed off self-replicating virii that feed off dna and human tissue?
scientific developments are a way of intelligent people placing power into the hands of the stupid (generally governments).... uhmmm... Guns, Atomic bombs, DNA - Genetic engineering.... i'm sure there's many more examples.
tahpot
information is power.
power corrupts.
It could definately lead to the creation of new nanite structures, but it wouldn't give us any realistic method of mass production.
UBU
Tunneling microscope looks like finest tool for making chips that would ever be available. However, creating one CPU with tunneling microscope would take ~10 years (assuming several minutes per transistor). But I'm sure it would be used for electron beam lythography finally. Unless we would manage to breed chips in cattle-pen before.
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Every secretary using MSWord wastes enough resources
Transparent Aluminum
"A Keyboard...how quaint."
Blech. Signatures.
Every time there is a new milestone covered in science I wish I were born a few centuries later, so that I would be in an age where alot more things would have been made possible . Anyways since I can't exactly do anything about it anymore ,might as well wish some smart guy not only makes the time machine but also lands up on me so that I can travel to the future.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Nanites are still a pipe dream if you have to move minute chemical bonds with the precision of a swiss watch just to get it to work. Also that could take a *long* while to get just *one* machine that may eventually break down.
Respond to s
The fear of mass destruction does not lie in the creation of these molecules, but in the creation of a self-replicating molecule that causes great harm (kida like RNA with a chainsaw). As to whether this "grey goo" death is even resonable is anyones guess. Terminator-phobia seems to run rampent in todays society. This is simply genetic engineering taken to another level... and will we die because of it? Maybe, however there is huge vaule for helping to curing many diseases that plague society. Don't let total world annihilation stop scientist from ridding the world of athletes foot : p
"Madness and Genius are separated solely by Degrees of Success." -Unknown
Sluggy Freelance!
Nanites are biologicaly nanomachines that can make you stronger, more flexible, report data on your body, or kill you. They can be "killed off" from a master switch or by watching to much Golden Girls
- Sig
battery charger that is only good for charging it's own batteries right?
Respond to s
Now, the truly cool thing to build would be a self-assembler; an assembler that can build copies of itself. That's a toy for which people have yet to draw up a design.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
It would build the others. :)
Well, that's the plan anyway, from what I've picked up from reading discussions on the future of nanites.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
With a STM I can finally read the fine print on the bottom molecules of my cell phone agreement!
Ok, they manipulated molecules, proved it could be done, but this isn't very cost effective for the guy who wants to build a meth lab in the garage, is it?
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
with the Universal Constructor? That machine synthesized any material, any object [even food] out of any other material you fed into it. Sounds like I'll own one in ten years when GE figures out how to use all this....
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
Imagine building a microprocessor molecule by molecule, transistor by transistor. It would be possible to have complete control over the process. I see a big application for this in the semiconductor industry.
Could you please explain this?
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Every secretary using MSWord wastes enough resources
with getting a universal assembler released to the public even after it is perfected. Such a device would cause the collapse of nearly every industry on the planet (the main exception being the design industry). There are a LOT of powerful people how would stop at nothing to keep that from happening.
Technoli
The same applies to designer molecules, you would practically be able to build enough of them in a short enough space of time. In my (un)proffesional opinion, your best bet would be to build smaller molecules/nanites that will help you build bigger ones and get a sort of production line going. With molecules you would be looking at making new catalysts. I think he even mentions this in the article.
IMHO, what this new development will be used for will be making prototype molecules, discovering what they do and how they work before investing shed loads of cash figuring out how to build them only to find that it doesn't work and all that effort wasn't worth it.
dnnrly
This does demonstrate some of the capabilities of STM, but the greater benefit will be for "pure science" -- at least for the time being.
Right now, we can theorize about the relative stability and geometry of exotic molecules. These calculations are usually done on isolated molecules and are based on scientific assumptions about the nature of chemical bonds, combined with the limitations of numerical methods and computing power.
This technique has the potential of allowing us to verify geometries and relative stabilities of molecules predicted by these calculations. Using macro- or even micro- techniques, there's no way to get experimental confirmation of the validity of our assumptions and models.
The benefit for nanotechnology will come from the refinement of these models and methods.
-dwd-
Have you ever read the moderation guide?
:) HTH
The idea of posting a comment is to generate 'useful' discussion pertaining to the stories topic.
If asking a question spawns a very useful thread, then that entire thread should be modded up so that others with higher moderation thresholds get to see that information
That is why you will see people mod up seemingly useless parent posts which simply 'ask' a question
Jeremy
all they did was observe what happens when they wiggled around a small thing. Wiggling a large thing wiggles a small thing. We have always had that. Observing small things we have had for a very long time also.
More uninformed Hemo blather.
Take this personaility test.
It stands for Super Terminating Machine. It's everything the T-1000 wanted to be, but wasn't. The T-1000 could have taken the tunneling method to kill John Connor. Instead of hunting John down, like a prototypical mimetic polyalloy, he simply shoots a sliver of himself into his mark. Then while John is running around the country with Linda and Uncle Bob, the T-1000 is tunneling his way through John's internal orgrans. Cyberdyne stock goes way up and ushers in the birth of The Matrix.
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But the signal to noise ratio is depressingly high here.
I know little about how best to implement a kernel (or whatever); accordingly, I try to say little about it other than asking non-leading questions of those who know.
Just my $0.02. By the way, I know just enough about STM to know that the best answers (on the web) can be found by visiting physics department sites at universities.
One of these days/I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
My question is this.. if somebody made a razor out of synthetic diamond, with a single row of carbon atoms at its edge, how sharp would that be? Would you be able to shave your face with it, or would the blade just sink right into your skin and cause you to become the faceless man?
Will that help?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now one of the remaining subjects was pulled toward the other (by factors such as the overall movement of the crowd), but since they were not yet alcoholically bonded the movement of one had no effect on the position of the other. Finally, another splash of alcohol effectively welded the two subjects together, proof being that when one went home and to bed, the other came along for the ride.
I am very impressed by the number of possible applications this study could have, and commend Saw-Wai Hla et al on their fine work.
LAI
:eof
All I can say is that I hope I'm dead before wars are fought with flesh-eating nanites and my living room furnature has to be fed twice a day...
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Does this mean we can expect (eventually) to see some radical advances in the state of the art of metallurgy.
I'd be interested in seeing what kind of patterns of molecules can be hand woven to create stronger materials than we currently have. I'd also think this would go a long way in helping advance materials science by giving them a new method to custom tailor materials at the molecular level.
Does anybody who work in this field have any insight they can lend me...this looks like a promising step into allowing us to advance many fields through the creation of new materials.
Regards...
Hi Guys!!!
Can we exept replicators in the futur now?
I would love to say :
"Computer, Earl Grey... Hot"
;)
Till then says
Markus "DocDooM" Stehr
Socialism Rulez - www.worldsocialism.org
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
Oops, no, wait
I can imagine one morning in the not-too distant (but still not foreseeable) future, waking up in my nano-bed to the sounds of my nano-disc playing in my nano-alarm clock. So I take a nano-shower, eat some nano-toast, and catch the 7:00 nano-bus just in time to get to the nano-university for my class in macrotechnology.
> Where did you go to school, Bob Jones University?
He, he, yeah, they probably offered their famous Creationist Quantum Mechanics course that summer. The lab was conducted by Charlton Heston, demonstrating moving molecules with the tip of a bullet.
UBU
I'm going to watch Buckaroo Banzai for more tips on the future.
What is that watermelon doing there, anyway?
NecroPuppy
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Godot called. He said he'd be late.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
So how long until we can use this to replicate organic compounds such as food, ala Star Trek??? The end of world hunger??? I doubt it. We're not that generous. More chemical weapons and virii. More like it, baby.
See: www.nanodot.org.
I wonder if this could be applied to dna strands on a molecular level. With the advent of genetic modification and genetic medicine, i would think the vendors of those type of products would want to brand their treatments in some way. It would ensure authenticity, and could potentially be used to watch the propogation of these gene therapies and their effects on procreated animals. I'd hate to see some genetic cure for cancer from vendor A show up as some heinous disease in the 5th generation of the treated individual's offspring.
The Hong and Mirkin reference is:
S. Hong and C. A. Mirkin, "A Nanoplotter with Both Parallel and Serial Writing Capabilities", Science 288(5472):1808-11 (9 Jun 2000).
Take element U232 and U234 and weld them together?
Twice the power, twice the BANG?
If you think nature is "static", you should look at how many people it kills every year due to various new creations. Nature itself is filled with self-replicating, mutating, DNA sharing organisms. And in case you haven't noticed it, most of them view you as LUNCH. Yes, you do have defenses, but those defenses fail every year for millions of people.
For more info, see my post regarding "Ye Are Gods", from the Sept. 24, 2000 Extropy Institute archives.
Nanobots, have been fairly well defined and well described. See for example, the respirocytes paper from the Nanomedicine page at the Foresight Institute. The operating parameters for diamondoid nanobots are described in depth in Nanomedicine, Volume I . A dozen or more types of nanobots are described in the current and future volumes of Nanomedicine.
Biobots, is a term that I personally have used at several conferences to describe what chainsaw1 refers to as "nanites". However they do not have many of the qualities he attributes to them. They might make you somewhat stronger, but your ultimate strength is limited by your bone strength . People who abuse steroids can become so strong they snap their bones. It will be difficult to construct biobots/nanites that create stronger bones because you need a stronger structural material. The only possible material that currently exists, for which we have manufacturing systems in nature, would be very strong sea shells (e.g. abalone shells). But your body would probably have an immune reaction if you loaded them up with biobots that augmented your natural bone with the proteins that are used to strengthen the shells. Biobots, could perhaps do things like influence whether your muscle fibers are fast twitch or slow twitch, which would change you from a sprinter into a marathoner and back. Biobots could also produce erythropoetin, causing you to make more red blood cells, increasing your oxygen capacity, and perhaps at the same time your risk for forming blood clots or overloading your heart due to increased blood viscosity. Biobots could also give you the skin of a cameleon or octopus (color changing). Biobots will not have significant communications capabilities because it would have to be encoded chemically and there is no system in nature for "writing" new information into DNA (all it does is erroneously copy old information) or writing a variety of chemical molecules that would be required for communicating any volume of information.
Biobots do have uses however. I came to the conclusion in watching the movie X-men, that about 1/3 of the capabilities in the movie, you could do with biobots, 1/3 the capabilities would require diamondoid nanobots and the final 1/3 would probably require changing the laws of physics or "tricks" using microelectronics.
It is worth noting, that the term biobots is overloaded, because it is used in some contexts to describe small insect-like robots that have neural-net control systems.
Does this mean I can make THC molecules at my kitchen table now? No more meeting dudes in parking lots after midnight?
Or, better still, if I really set my mind to it, can I build my very own Natalie Portman?
I am not usually a troll, but this chilly weather in Toronto is affecting my brain.
on topic....I work for a an Incredibly Big Machine (nudge nudge, wink wink), aren't they they folks that came up with STM? A few years ago I found a webpage or two with some neat pictures they took of individual atoms all lined up to spell...well, you can guess.
Going on means going far
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
There is a theoretical superconductor that is a long n-alkane-like hydrocarbon chain with regularly spaced halogen molecules outboard to the backbone. The theoretical stats were impressive, something like superconductivity to 200 degrees C. The problem was forming the molecules long enough to be useful and then orienting them. The way the article makes this sound the STM should be able to do a "knit-one-perl-two" with chlorinated waxes in no time...
With this type of STM approach it may be possible to "crochet" superchips. It would be nice to have chips rated in de Broglie wavelengths as opposed to something as paltry as GHz.
There is a theoretical superconductor that is a long n-alkane-like hydrocarbon chain with regularly spaced halogen molecules outboard to the backbone. The theoretical stats were impressive, something like superconductivity to 200 degrees C. The problem was forming the molecules long enough to be useful and then orienting them.
There are hydrocarbons that can perform this type of function and they are called Buckminsterfullerines. They come in two main varieties: Buckyballs (soccer-ball type molecules - C60 and C90) and Buckytubes (long Carbon nanotubes). Buckytubes are nanometres wide but can be made to incredible lengths (theoretically they can bypass the typical 70-mile length limit of regular cables). These tubes can be made to such incredible lengths by chemically bonded the ends of each piece of tubing together. Does this STM process have anything to do with that? Because to construct long Buckytubes, you would need to manipulate molecules at the atomic level which this STM process can provide.
Apparently these Buckytubes can be used to make ultra-small circuits. Which should bring computers up to enough speed to complete one of those bloody SETI@home packets in less than a day!
Self Bias Resistor
"You gotta save yourselves, from yourselves." - Rennes, Cube
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When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
Avogadro's number - 6.022E23 IIRC.
It is the number of entities in a mole of anything - defined such that 1 mole of a substance has a mass equivalent to the relative atomic/molecular mass of the substence therein.
Elgon
This actually might be a big step towards the eventual construction of a nano-assembler. [Making anything else with it would be a huge waste of time, as even a 'simple' nano-device would probably take weeks to construct.] Which would change the world so very much.
I can't wait. Just think, practical imortality [or at least un-mortality], living as sentient software modelled in a nano-computer that is programmed from an accurate map of your neural activity derived by nanites building scaffolding aroung all of the cells in your brain. [Your soon to be discarded brain]]...
What a beutifull vision.
By the way, you might want to read "Diaspora", by Greg Egan, a wonderfull book about future socieities of sentient software. Some of the best contemporary hard sci-fi I've ever come across. [Except for the ending, which is annoyingly fancifull, but still somewhat interesting].
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man sig
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
That was the single, most informative article I believe I have ever read
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303infinity Rocks, buy their CD's.