Slashdot Mirror
Creating Nanotech Of The Nearly-Now
Believe writes: "CNN has this article about how recent advances in nano technology could be used in consumer appliances (CRTs, Hard drives, etc) as soon as next year. It's nice to see some nanotech applications that could be seen in the real world sooner than the '5-10' year range." What's most intriguing here to me (besides Weija Wen's "white powder of tiny particles") is the establishment of an Institute of Nanoscience and Technology at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. One million dollars though, seems like, well -- like nanofunding.
So its appropriate to start worrying about the 'grey ooze' now, correct??
Only if you're playing Dungeons and Dragons.
-
For perspective, CD-R in the early 90s cost about $1500 for a drive and $20 for media. CD-R didn't see consumer acceptance until these numbers fell about 4x, to ~$400 for the drives and $5 for media. Widespread use required a 10x drop in prices. And this is a technology whose competitors (floppies, Zip disks) had serious flaws. ATA Flash, on the other hand, needs prices to drop by a factor of about 400, just to be on par with a mature, reliable, accepted technology. And, even if those prices were achieved tomorrow (via some miracle) there are still a lot of cons:
- it's slow -- under 4MB/sec versus 20+ MB/sec for a typical hard drive .
- it's not especially dense: it appears you can get 1GB on a PC card, which works out to maybe 20GB in a 3.5" IDE enclosure. New magnetic disks fit 20GB on a single 3.5" platter; you can put five such platters in one enclosure.
- it has a finite life, typically <500000 rewrites per sector. This is fine for digital cameras, but it's no good for a busy database or swap partition.
So when will ATA Flash replace Winchester drives? Considering it took CD-R 10 years to overcome one obstacle against weak competition, and flash has many obstacles and strong competition, I'd say never.That doesn't, of course, preclude the invention of some new solid-state product. A cheap, dense, low-power, reliably non-volatile SS technology would be truly great. But these innovations aren't falling out of the sky (new memory-related inventions are few and far between) and it has a lot of catching up to do before it bests the phenomenal attributes of a $200 hard drive. I didn't sell my Quantum stock today, and I probably won't tomorrow.
cheers,
mike
From the CNN article:
In a car, such a clutch might last longer than a mechanical one, Wen said. In a small hard-disk drive, such as for a handheld device, it could remove the need to make tiny, expensive gears and clutches. If used to replace existing parts, the technology could be commercialized in just two or
three years, he estimated.
First of all, the strategy to slowly replace existing parts with nano-parts is a difficult one. in the laboratory, the electrical responses can be very well regulated. In a car, a downed power line, a bolt of lightning, immersion, and many accident situations that will flip the car off its rubber tires that ground it could expose the parts to electricity, making them solid/liquid when they should not be.
Furthermore, what is to prevent the problems that could come with inconsistent or degraded functioning in nano-parts as the parts age? I don't want something that will only change phase in bits and pieces when I need a fast, rapid-reaction, total phase change. The current non-nanotech parts are cheaper and more reliable.
The application for this stuff is currently in the lab and high level industrial applications- places that have got the money and the people to use these tools in a consistent, well supervised environment.
Geeks, geeks, geeks.. technology is not ALWAYS for the masses. Or lets put it this way; the masses will benefit more by the useful application of new tech by a few, instead of the gimmicky application of new tech to mass consumer goods.
Goat sex free since 2001
99.99% of inventions never see the light of day. Of the remaining 0.01% few are ever applied in the timeframe their inventor first imagines.
Go through the back issues of any periodical and you'll find predictions of all sorts of things; few pan out.
The most useful skills one can develop are the most timeless: The ability to learn. The ability to communicate. The ability to reason. The ability to empathize.
These are the skills that will serve you well in any future scenario be it post-holocaust desert or a nano/quantum paradise.
In the meantime just focus on the mid-term and let the blue-sky folks keep plugging away.
-- Michael
I want my silver body-suit! I want my personal jet-pack! I don't care that they make me look like a flying baked-potato!"
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
..that a 'consortium' of software and hardware manufacturers are working on 'copy protected' hard-drives that send burrowing nanomites into your brain if you try to make illegall copies of the latest Nsync MP3.. of course if you are collecting Nsync MP3's the nanomites may not be able to get much of a foot-hold in your grey matter..
air and light and time and space
Dude, electrons ARE quantum particles, and ALWAYS behave as them. Namely, they're 1/2-spin fermions, are indistinguishable from each other, obey Pauli Exclusion Principle, and under the central-force potential of nucleons (ie, protons and neutrons), make atomic orbitals possible, which account for most chemical interactions we witness everyday.
losing none energy, emitting no interference, and theoretically display superpositioning and entanglement
Man, don't bogart the buzzwords. :-)
Entanglement is interference of the individual spin (or angular momentum) of several particles, giving an apparent total spin (angular momentum) of the system of particles. Ie, it's not possible to measure the spin of the total state of particles while simultaneously measuring the spins of the individual particles. This is how you can have an even number of fermions (half-integral spin) behave as a boson (integral spin), etc.
So there IS interference, which is how the entanglement is realized.
Also, they supposedly can be used to make a capacitor that holds up to a billion amps.
Dude, get your terminology straight. A capacitor stores charge (manifested as an electric field between the two terminals). It does NOT store current!!! Maybe you meant to say is that nanotubes can function as superconductors, passing a current of 10^9 amps. However, I don't know if this is true or not. (hopefully I'll have a better understanding of condensed matter physics in a few years). .V / _` (_-<_-<
.\_/\_/\__,_/__/__/
__ __ ____ _ ______
\ V
make world, not war
All they have to do is purchase one robot with the million, then that robot builds ten smaller robots, then those robots build ten smaller robots, which then assemble piles and piles of crisp, 100-dollar bills out of component molecules.
This is true weirdness from the article (link added):
Over the past year, Assistant Professor Weija Wen has created a white powder of tiny particles that, when combined with oil, can be either a fluid or a solid. It changes its state when an electrical charge is applied or removed, a property known as electrorheology". Wen's is not the first substance that can do this, but the molecular properties of Wen's particles make this fluid much more rigid than those that have gone before, he said. For instance, it exceeds the rigidity standard set by General Motors Corp. for use in a clutch, which the auto maker has been researching for more than ten years.
In a car, such a clutch might last longer than a mechanical one, Wen said. In a small hard-disk drive, such as for a handheld device, it could remove the need to make tiny, expensive gears and clutches. If used to replace existing parts, the technology could be commercialized in just two or three years, he estimated.
I don't know, I have visions of someone zapping the car, and watching it melt around me as I fly down the pavement at unhealthy speeds.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That's "grey goo", and it describes a scenario where replicating nanobots start replicating out of control. More general ones that can use materials found in the environment to replicate could theoretically turn the planet into a literal "goo" of assemblers after disassembling everything else on the planet, and the planet itself.
Of course, simple engineering choices can eliminate this possibility from ever occuring. The "black goo" scenario, where it is intentional, is probably more likely than grey goo.
Regardless, it's not really relevant at this time, they're far far away from reaching that point yet. They don't mean "molecular nanotechnology" here, they just mean working at the nanoscale level. "Nanotechnology" has become a buzzword.
It's not molecular nanotechnolgoy until they're creating machines at that level.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."