Slashdot Mirror
The Nanotech Nose: Towards A Smaller Future
Farrax writes "One of the first steps to nanotechnology, either strong or weak, is the ability to even talk about materials on this scale with precision. Thursday, with the successful test of a nano-tech "nose," that step was achieved: weight fluctuations of 5.5 femtograms were detected on a bar of gold. The dream of nano-technology moves forward: maybe we'll see it by 2020 after all."
unless we use a microscope...
i just can't wait till everything is super dense and super fast. One of the things i'd like to see is how they stabalize stuff like that. stuff so small i'd imagine it can get very weak easy to break. then again it can't build up very much momentum to cause breaking away from something that's holding it.
I need to get my hands on one of these sensors...itl finally prove that we can smell CowboyNeal from across the atlantic.
I hope nanotech doesn't eventuate for at least another century. The regulations to ensure it doesn't get out of control aren't in place and I don't see anyone beginning to care much about this for a long time. Read information here When people are injured by normal technology, they are just injured or killed and the rest of the world moves on. When people will be injured by nanotech, the changes will be small perhaps undetectable even, but could involve controlled changes to things as basic to us as humans as our DNA, the food we eat, and our brain systems Government rewiring of our brains some day? Can't be too far in the future.
RST
... last one to turn to grey goo please turn off the lights.
Or green goo.
Too tired to (attempt to) make any more jokes. Check here and I'm sure you can come up with some of your own.
It's difficult te feel excited, or indeed surprised, by announcements such as this thanks to the unending stream of similar stories. How many articles on nanotechnology have you read in the past year, all showing how it was just around the corner? More than you care to remember, no doubt.
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
is Here
magine a world where microscopic biomechanical devices are used to cure diseases, control our computers, and power the vehicles we drive. In this brave new world, minuscule techno-agents would have incredible computational power--power that is completely imperceptible to the human eye. Devices like these could become commonplace over the next fifty years as new innovations in molecular engineering--also known as nanotechnology--may help establish a new molecular age.
I'm not Seth.
I imagined from the moment I heard of nanotech, that we could have devices implanted in ourselves that, when we're in the sun, could bring chlorophyll to the surface of our skins and create food from it. That way we can all use up CO2 from the atmosphere to offset the CO2 emissions of industry, and help industry along all the more!
We get the benefits of industry, with free food, and a way to combat one of the current downfalls of industry!
My other nanotech dream is that nanobots in my body could change me into a lesbian and I could go have hot lesbian sex each night, but I don't mention that one much
Government rewiring of our brains some day? Can't be too far in the future.
It's probably already happened. Best fit your foil helmet V3.1
i wonder if things will eventually reach a point where it's no longer beneficial to get any smaller?
for instance, mobile phones nowadays are a great improvement from a 1-foot long cellphone our grandparents used, but if things get too small for human-beings to use it properly, then we won't use it.
so with all these nano techonologies going on, even if we can build all the components for a mobile phone so small, don't we still need something reasonable sized to use it?
And I'll be a bad slashdotter and not look for them (I'm tired!) but I do believe that a couple years back, a professor in England released a tech timeline that would document the progression of technology for the next century and beyond. He was something like 80% correct in his predictions up till that point, so they sort of carried weight. Anyhow... sure nanotech will be a great thing, but I quiver to think of the applications of this in war... which I believe in that timeline came quickly after the devlopment of the tech. Links, anyone, anyone?
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Can it measure how much I care? Maybe once it can detect one trillionth of a billionth of care..
to a degree i am sure you are right, traditional robotics have put some people out of work in factories. Increased automation for assembly & production lead to a more service based economy which has generally been bad for blue collar labor... lower pay, worse benefits, low job security. Of course nafta has probably done far more to the manufacturing job base than robotics have.
You have to remember that nanotech is hardly what sci-fi books tell you about though. It won't be like you will be buying a big can of nano workers and kick back at the pool while you watch them swarm and build your house. They will be situational just like a lot of regular automation has been... And open up a number of markets where humans cant do the work, creating jobs in the process.
Maybe it's the fact that I am reading this at 0330 (MST). However, I think a lot of the /.ers commenting on this article are reading into the potential just a little bit too far. People are talking about stuff anywhere from losing their jobs to nanotechnology all the way to robots taking over the world. This article is about a nano-scale being able to weigh ~122 atoms of gold. This article is not talking about a nano-scale that was able sense the weight, then reflect about it in its /. journal or develop a mastermind scheme on how it will take over the world.
/.ers, save your conspiracy theories; they have no weight in comments about being able to measure gold.
And unless this ity-bity scale was merely crafted by engineers and never programmed (thus being able to program itself), then I think the human race has nothing to worry about. That's right,
She can detect weight fluctuations of 2.5 femtograms!
A femtogram is a billionth of a billionth of a gram, or roughly the mass of 122 gold atoms.
This is a misunderstanding on the part of the article's author, I am sure. There are 10^15 femtograms to a gram in my book?
I am time and time again confused by the meaning of the word "billion" on either side of the North Atlantic but I take that the Usonian value is 10^9, right?
Sorry, just confused.
Curious term - considering changes of weight in a gold bar was measured using lasers and the changing vibration of silicon (to condense things badly)
I don't know about anyone else, but when weighing, lasering, or vibrating things... using my nose is one of the last options I'd consider
Maybe it's just me.
Ya gotta love nanotech. It's the only competition where the goal is to exclaim "Mine is smaller than yours!"
make world, not war
I attended a lecture the other day by an expert on nanoscience. One interesting thing he noted is that while nanoscience is making rapid progress, real successes in the field we should call nanotechnology are still far away. We can `see' and `feel' atoms now, but it will take a while before mass-production of molecule-sized devices will be feasible.
You got it right. A billion over there is 10^9 (or a Giga). Femto is 10^-15. Which means that the original 'explanation' is off by a factor of one thousand...So, I guess someone has mixed grams and kilograms (which you generally base it on, for whatever reason).