Nanotech Pinball and Miniature Engines

glenmark writes "Researchers at the Solid State Electronics Laboratory at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed the world's smallest pinball game. The video is fascinating. The flippers are electrostatically-actuated monocrystalline silicon cantilevers. I hope Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie see this. I have a feeling they would get a kick out of it." And in another nanotech story, psmears writes "Three hundred times more powerful than ordinary batteries, but much lighter and smaller? Researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a micro-engine that will allow people to charge mobile phones using lighter fluid. Further information at Research-TV including photos and a film."

Comments

Re:Side discussion:

[Shadow Wrought]

I'll take up part of that discussion.

While nanotechnology has many great potentials, they are still in a hazy future. Lasers were once seen as the technology that would transform the world. Same with Computers. Yet the bulk of the world is still relatively unchanged by either of these. Certainly the developed nations have changed substantially, but in many respects they have not changed much if at all.

I get up in the morning, go to work from 8-5 every weekday morning for 40 hrs a week. Same as my dad did, and same as my kids will. How we do our work has changed, but the simple pattern of society in which we work to earn money to pay for housing, food, et al. has remained unchanged.

In the bulk of the world, life is much closer akin to my grandfolks time. People work from sunrise to sunset to scratch out a living, and their sustenance, from the land. Nano technology is not going to dramatically change their lives. Drought or other climatic changes will be the key variable to their lives.

We do indeed live in interesting times, but I do not think that our time is any more interesting on an individual level than any other time. We live in a time that has seen the average american progress steadily further from the basic compnents of survival. How many average americans would be able to fend for themselves in the "wild?" The "interesting" past of our American lives is when all the artificial walls separating us from basic needs come crashing down.

Nanotechnology then does but attempt to fortify those walls and afford us protection from our fear of being without. Earlier times had the same fear, the difference being that they lived closer to their fear than we do.