Nanosecrets of Everyday Things

prostoalex writes "A recent issue of Berkeley Lab Research Review discusses the nanosecrets of everyday things. The article talks about common everyday applications of nanotechnology advances, as well as takes a look at tools used to manipulate itty-bitty widgets."

Comments

Firm grasp of the obvious

[Bearpaw]

"If we are going to achieve real nanotechnology, we are going to have to learn how to put atoms together one at a time." (Miquel Salmeron)

Uh, yeah, that's what nanotechnology means. Or what it used to mean anyway, before it started getting watered down by lame science fiction and people using it for buzzword effect.

Re:Firm grasp of the obvious

[iabervon]

That's not entirely true; the ideal way to do nanotechnology might be to probabilistically arrange groups of atoms into a limited set of arrangements and filter out the undesired ones.

For some applications, you probably actually do want to build your structures exactly and atom-by-atom. But other applications are best suited to a set of catalysts that will construct a random variant of the structure, so long as it has the property you want, or which will only sometimes construct the right thing, but everything else will be destroyed by another catalyst. For that matter, the most successful method has been to put together reasonably large molecules which are built separately.

For that matter, depending on what you're making, you may be perfectly happy with a couple of the desired molecules and a lot of innocuous failures. The failures then are basically packing material (you're not going to deliver someone a single molecule; you're going to deliver a manageable volume of uninteresting solution with an interesting molecule in it).

Great, tinier junk!

[decipher_saint]

Here are my questions about nanotech:

Where do all the obsolete nanites go? Will they be biodegradable, if so at what rate?

How tightly would medical nanites be controlled, sold?

How can we detect nanomachines to protect against potential dangers to ourselves or our nations?

If something like the "Andromeda Strain" did occur, how would we combat it?

I realize a lot of these questions are unanswerable, but I'm still curious.