Slashdot Mirror
Nanotech Advances Forward
dar writes "Scientists have built a transistor a single molecule wide that works at room temperature. " Nanotech continues to move forward - while each step is interesting in itself, we've still got a long ways to go before I can have my can of nanobots.
A transistor can also be used as on/off switch and that actually is its primary function in digital circuits.
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"Man in the Moon and other weird things" - wfmh.org.pl/thorgal/Moon/
The buzzword now is MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems), and there are a few real applications, like optical switching, TI's display technology, and some sensor technology.
In large part, though, MEMS is still a solution in search of a problem.
Also, "micro" is a rather different scale than "nano".
foog
Or like suggesting that one bacterium could build another bacterium. Ridiculous! That could never happen.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
"... at the very moment that Arthur said, "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle," a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.
The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.
A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jeweled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweat-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.
The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapor, and at that very moment the words "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style" drifted across the table.
Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.
Eventually, of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.
For thousands more years, the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
The end. Courtesy of the late Douglas Adams. Keep small dogs out of the nanobot lab.
First the quantum dots now this.
Ok! We got it already! It's possible to make computational devises very small! Considering that how small the traces are on new chips, this doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
Back in 1990 I did a paper on micro machines for college. I was excited. Pictures of gears made with a tunneling microscope, engines being made in labs. Really, really, small screws.
What happened to those? Are they being made but covered up by NDAs? Did they jump ahead too far, then had to go back to do more basic research on the properties of materials at that scale? Surely SOMEONE on Slashdot works at a materials lab and can clue me in.
Please?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Someone contact the makers of all these nanobots, as well as "The Learning Channel" staff and create "Nanobot Wars"
Want Root?
From the article - " built a transistor from only a single molecule one nanometer wide ...The tiny device can be toggled on and off using a single electron... "
..?
It's been some time since I did any real electronics but I thought I remembered that a transistors' function is to amplify signal. And I also thought that the whole basis for the binary machine (aka computer)was that logic gate on/off process, hence the "digital" concept. Does this mean that nanotech actually allows us to reduce complexity at the same time as we increase the capability of this "circuit"
Not that we really need to have it legalized, since obviously the people who need it can get access to it, as evidenced by the fact that we have ice cream cookie sandwhiches, and transisters one molecule wide, dude .
I can only imagine the brainstorming sessions.
Dude, what if we had a transister so small, you could fit a million of them into, like, a screen, and they would know how to let only the primo molecules through?
No way, man... I got even better idea. How 'bout we make a single molecule into a transister, and it would be all bio-enhanced to go right to the pre-frontal stonal gyrus?
dude, that is an awesome idea...and we could run the whole thing off a nine volt...er, 9 millivolt, er...pico, er...
Man, we could run it off of the breath of a spirit butterfly!
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Search back in Slashdot for AIDS and Nanotech and you'll find a story that will destroy your entire argument.
While I doubt we'll have nanobots flying around and patroling the world in the next decade, your view is quite short-sighted. No shit Bio-tech seems wonderful to you - it already has major results... DNA recombination in bacteria as one huge example. Somehow I doubt nanotech will stagnate at its current state of buckyballs/tubes with theoretical applications. Biotech certainly went beyond Watson/Crick theorizing the structure of DNA. Sure, people are going a bit crazy with nanotech prophecies (thanks in no small part to The Diamond Age), but to flat out deny any possible impact of nanotechnology is insanity. I can guarantee you we'll be able to make a microrobot that can do a complex job before we can engineer a microbe to do the same thing (unless that job is intrinsically biological like most other biotech applications). Biotech is undoubtedly impressive, but it, like nanotech, has limits.
This is great news indeed, but I wouldn't call it a breakthrough. We still need to figure out a way to print the chip designs using transistors this size, and THAT's gonna be pretty hard.
Best way to go, I would think, is to build microbots that build nanobots, that build nanochips. We won't be able to halndle nano-manufacturing directly I think.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I mean. . . Building a car out of a pile of rocks? Don't think so. Cars are made from certain elements which a pile of rocks just can't provide no matter how smart your nanotech is. Plus. . . I haven't read, 'Diamond Age', (Snow Crash was more than enough lousy, nihilistic story telling B.S. for me.), but I understand one of the main principles Neal was pushing was that things in the future would be built primarily out of diamond.
Please. Nanites will be able to stuff on the molecular level? I mean, stacking all those carbon atoms one at a time just so. . . Give me a break. That would require robot pincers FAR smaller than the scale nanites are projected to be constructed at. Think about it! If the smallest transistor you can get is one molecule big, and you need several thousand just to make a nanite brain, then the nanite itself is going to be a behemoth by comparison to a single carbon atom.
Plus, nanites will still have to navigate around the treacherous micro terrain. We can barely build robots today that can handle a stupid backyard 'Mars Terrain' without some serious human assistance. And our backyards aren't filled with antibodies and other same-sized life forms looking to kill stuff.
Argh! And another thing. . ! One nanite Will Not be able to build another nanite. -That's like suggesting that a backhoe can build another backhoe. Retarded. Maybe a bunch of different nanites all working together, being fed all the right elements and micro lego bricks, will be able build a machine which can build nanites. Maybe. But that's a whole other proposition.
The basis of most Nanotech dreams/nightmares is that the technology will prove to be self-sustaining and unstoppable. Nonsense! (See above.) Sure, nanotech will probably work, but I doubt it will instantly transform humanity into something utterly unrecognizable. Nanites are just going to be another dumb technology which costs too much and won't work reliably without a ton of tech support. --Like every other stupid high-tech product or service in the world. (Cars. Phones. Airplanes. You name it. Pull people out of the equation, and everything grinds to a halt.)
Nanotech is not a panacea. Plus, if it works right, guaranteed, it won't work in the favor of the public.
Fantastic Lad
--Stephenson started out as a bloody Mac-user. Think about it! Mac-users are the least creative & intuitive people on the planet. --I mean, they drive the new Volkswagon Bugs and think they're being cool. Yeesh!
Will Foresight succeed in educating people, or will the public inflate nanotech companies with their hopes and dreams, in the same way as biotech/internet companies, expecting another [stock appreciation] revolution in a "new-new economy?" Of course, we'll get the revolution [of abundance], but I wonder how long it will take people to figure out that there will be even more FuckedCompany's when it finally sinks in what it means to be able to manipulate matter with the same ease as bits of data.
Give me some molecules, some sunlight, a molecular blueprint, the magic nano bootstrap process, and I'm in business!.........unless someone claims a monopoly on atoms or sunlight that is. :)
Power to the Peaceful
That was a particilurly uninformative article, so heres a little more:
The system involves cabon nanotubes (hence why it got into Science [0]). These devices, sometimes called buckytubes, are semiconductors. Production of a Y junction, which was seen as a prerequisite to transistor like behaviour, was achived about 6 months to a year ago, in various groups (exact time depends on pwhich group and precise nature of the tube).
It's nice to see the somone's made a transistor from this stuff, but it won't replace silicon in the near future.
These are independant devices, and do not lend themselves to lithographic techniques. At least, not by any method thus far discovered.
To make a circuit from these would be like assembuiling it from discrete transistors, but at a near molecular level.
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They turned out to be far more problematic than anticipated, like most new technologies. Gears stick together, levers bend, everything wears out. It turns out that microsurfaces are different enough from macrosurfaces that the basic mechanisms that work on the macroscale fail on the microscale.
Unfortunately, it's not online except for subscribers, but the always interesting Science News did an article on the problem last year:
There are micromachines that work, as other posters have noted, but the idea that larger-scale mechanical engineering could be easily projected into the microworld has now been discredited. Nanotechnology will present even greater challenges.
Tim Maroney
I don't see why these scientists insist on making everything function at room temperature. At this rate liquid nitrogen will never gain household acceptance. Potentially very useful; you can use it to inflate tires, turn bananas into hammers, and cryogenically store your goldfish when you go on vacation. If this is the future, I'm not sure I want to be here.