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DNA Assembled Nano-Transistors
Bob Vila's Hammer writes "In an article at New Scientist, researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have harnessed DNA to mold a nano-transister constructed of graphite nanotubes coated in silver and gold. The carbon nanotube assembly when completed is a fully working transistor when voltage is applied. The process is ingenious, using proteins from E. Coli bacterium to bind carbon nanotubes to certain sites on strands of DNA. Then graphite nanotubes coated with antibodies connect to the proteins. Finally, silver ions are added to the solution which chemically bond with the DNA site where the protein is attached. Further refinement of the technique is required before full scale production would be efficient, but this could allow the creation of elaborate self-assembling DNA sculptures and circuitry."
I, for one, welcome our new nano-sized overlords.
hrrm.
since i didnt get first post ::shakes fist::, i have decided to comment.
So, where do these "scientists" get this "dna" stuff they speak of?
This process was first performed at MIT by Angela Belcher. She was using engineered viruses that coated themselves with semiconductor materiel to produce nanoscale FET trasnsitors a billionth of a meter in size. You can read more in the November issue of IEEE Spectrum.
Great reading. Now, fiction becomes reality.
We're all going to die.
machinator omnis sine licentia
[heston] Microchips are made of people! They're peeeooople!!! [/heston]
So what's next DNA assembled WiFi device inside of our brain effectively using it as a "mobile" storage medium? Probably not only that, but also for doing true multi-task administration in the real world scope.
:)
Just think how quickly one could hack wireless access points around them or a beowolf cluster of brain activity via peer-to-peer. That should rack up some SETI@Home work units completed in no time!
This space is not for rent.
Great... Now when the compter blows up, I'll get dysentery.
Will the new computers built of this material be more suceptable to virus attack!
For problems, seek only the simplest solution, complexity brings with it more problems.
Michael Faraday did this years ago (use google). The only thing these guys brought to the table is the capacitance reactivity factor is about 43% of the original magnitude of Faraday's experiments.
As a scientist in this field, I can say that this technology is still pretty wild and untested. You won't see anything come out of this for at least a decade, and even then, it probably won't get any further than Faraday's original result (he was eaten by a bio-thermo-electrolitic legume, aka a synthetic bean).
.... for my computer runs Linux.
I wonder if they'll make DDR RAM that's got Mad Cow Disease now.
this will put phrase 'my computer has died' into a completely new light ;-)
I can just the future.
"Humanity wiped out by terrible strain of life threatenning virus -- but it makes great video cards."
Finally a use for the moon. A clean room.
Could you imagine getting sick and having to sign an NDA and non contagion agreement?
What is the life expectancy of the components? From the article it seems to me (disclaimer: IANAMolecularBiologistOrNanoEngineer) that the organic component is not required after the "wires" are in place but will the DNA auto-repair any damage to the wire?
Couldn't a virus (biological, not computer) be used to re-write the DNA strand that is used to construct the devices, to make different components for sinister purposes?
Is it paranoia if they really are out to get you?
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
One poster above mentions grafting computer chips onto your brain. But these guys may be grafting brains onto computer chips.
how the Borg got there start...
Further refinement of the technique is required before full scale production would be efficient
/. include some sentence like this. I'm sortof patting myself on the back here when I say this, but hats off to the chemical engineers who actually do the work here. Chemical engineers are an important stepping stone between "oh, cool" and full-scale production, but hardly ever get a mention. In fact, most people have no idea what chemical engineers do, even though you probably scarcely have an item around you that doesn't owe its existence in part to chemical engineering.
It seems like a lot of the "science with potentially awesome applications" posts that get made to
The idea: you creat a structure, throw a bunch of nanites onto it, they then lathe the structure with nanites which will, on command, chemically bond with eachother creating your scructure.
If you've played total annihilation, you know what I'm talking about. Nanolathing was the primary process of building an army. Within an hour a commander could easily take over a planet and begin converting it into a metal world.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
A better process would be to adapt the proteosynthesis process for creating micro-polypeptide clusters that are circuit elements with highly specific binding sites for self assembly. A DNA sequence would encode an mRNA sequence that is passed to a ribsome-like micro-factory. An alphabet of tRNA units would carry heavily modified amino-acids and provide both the electrical and structural of properties of the polypeptide. Different polypetides might make transistors, autonomous clock circuits, chemical-to-electrical battery subunits, wires, tees, etc.
Part of the DNA sequence would encode binding sites that are highly specific. Each electrical component would have a unique code on each terminal that only binds with the component that it connects to in the circuit. By labelling all the terminii of the components with these specific binging patterns, you the potential for self-assembly. To make a complex circuit, you make separate batches of each component, then mix the batches together and they self-assemble into the circuits. Thus, a soup of appropriately labeled transistors and wires would self-assemble into a soup of full-adder circuits.
The use of larger-scale binding sites would enable hierarchical self-assembly of self-assembled micro-components (e.g., a soup of 1-bit full-adder circuits might self-assemble into a 8-bit full-adders, or 8-bit full-adders might bind to a gated accumulator registers, etc.)
I doubt this technology would let you create a 64-bit processor - the binding-site combinatorics get too ugly. But it might let you create RAM, RFID circuits, or small CPUs (e.g., the Intel 8080 only needs 6000 transistors)
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
don't you know that half of science is presentation? it does not matter so much how good you are (there are many smart scientists), it matters how well you are perceived by others.
of course, in the process, many promises are made. and they are not neccesarily lies: of course many techniques have large potential. this doesn't mean that they will fulfill this potential -> that is not decided merely on technical grounds, but more on financial/political grounds.
just my 2c
Forget batteries. The machines need humans as bacteria fabrication facilities! Poop out IC like chickens laying eggs.
And right after AMD makes that new chip fab too...
I'm not looking at the pic, but if it's the goatse.cx guy, yes, it looks very much like a wedding ring. Ick.
...all that time, money, and effort to protect against viruses... and I get infected by bacteria. Funny thing though, boiling my CPU didn't fix it...hmmm.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is not suficiently advanced.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
How long will it be before someone injects a bit of this stuff into humans and suddenly someone is transformed into a Borg using their own DNA?
I'm impressed by the ability to make components, but I think that creating structures of many components may prove to be the more difficult problem.
As an example, it might not be difficult to design a 1-bit memory cell that can be assembled this way, but how do you make an array of them that is exactly some number of cells on a side, and then attach the interface circuitry to the edges? This would seem to require giving the little buggers the ability to count (or measure), and then change their beheviour when a desired state had been attained.
The last time I checked, we know a fair amount about how living cells build proteins, but the problem of how the cells know when to build them and how to stick them together has barely been scratched.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking ...?
... protein-based processors ... edible computers!
Self-replicating transistors
-kgj
-kgj
Imagine what the possibilities are here. I have heard but no one really knows when AI can be completed but if the process of self building nano-circuits is available when AI is around, then you could make a computer that could not only fix it self it could do self upgrades, and then eventually take over the world. Which is why as technology progresses further and further scientists need to ask themselves not only can it be done, but should it be done.
Does that count as life if the DNA is doing that?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
If you got sick, you could be sued for patent infringement.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
I was ok with this train of thought until I thought about running a copy of Windows inside my head (BSOD).
If computers were to be built using this technique, there would need to be a complete re-working of all the components, as there would probably be new and more efficient methods of hooking all the hardware together, than the current methods. One thing that it might be able to create, is a dynamic self growing array of memory, knowing when a bigger array is needed, it could create more. Just another thought on my part
this post makes me think of the virus in revalation space by Alastair Reynolds
Imagine what the possibilities are here.
Were I in control of this style of circuit manufacture, I would look into creating artifical neurons -- a small CPU core would provide the basic multiply-accumulate-threshold logic on the neuron. Other multiply-accumulate circuits at the synapses or dendrites would provide long-term adaptation functionality needed for learning.
The advantage of a neural net appraoch is that it can work with an inexact network. Standard digital electronics are logically fragile for the most part (i.e., they break if you replace an OR gate with an AND or swap two data lines). Digital electronics depends on highly repeatable manufacturing processes that create exact interconnect topologies. In contrast, neural nets are robust to any-to-any connection topologies and use various long-term adaptation schemes to reinforce or attenuate the connections that are needed.
Thus, you could create a soup of neural node cores, dendrite fragments, axon fragments and synapse units that would self-assemble into a gelatinous brain-mass. Plop the mass on top of a set of electrical interconnects and then train the blob to do what ever you want it to do. Moreover, these nano-fragment brains would be about roughly 10-100 times smaller in each dimension (about a thousand to a million times smaller in volume) than their cellular equivalents.
It could get interesting if we can create human-brain level neural net blobs that fit in a 1 cubic centimeter volume. Neural gel-packs, here we come.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I agree that a new method would be needed, but the new method doesn't have to be more efficient at the individual circuit level. It just has to be more efficient at the top level. IE, it might be prefectly OK if a "bio-cpu" was only one thousandth as fast as a typical silicon microprocessor if you could build a billion-cpu system just by throwing a "supercompter seed" into a nutrient broth.
I think the area where real advancement is needed is in reducing our dependacy on making components that are all exactly alike. I have a big oak tree in my yard that makes a lot of leaves, no two of which are identical. Despite the low-level variation between individual leaves, the tree has been "running" quite nicely for over 100 years. I think we need to invent computer architectures having the same property is we want to use bio-assembly to build computers.
They already have joined component built with this method.. but not on the megascale we're used to in modern procesors.
I think circuitry built using this approach would have to be thought about in a fundementally different way.
Fairly obviously (I think) large scale structures like the processors we know and love today would be very dificult to create using this organic approach. A better approach might be to just go for creating very dense, very connected but essentially amorphous 'mats' of computing resource (neuron like units perhaps ??) and treating the whole thing as more like an FPGA than a traditional structured computing device. So the problem becomes not how to grow these things in a particular shape.. but how to persuade the shapeless mass to do something useful.
Would it possible to have these things assembled by protein structures that deliberately mutate at each assembly to provide binding sites that uniquely identify each processing element. That might be a start.
I thought It was a little far-fetched, but the Nanomachine Swarms in Michael Crichtons "Prey" were manufactured in a similar process. Its a good read, and now it just got a little closer to reality for comfort.
...
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I agree with you completely the processor would not have to be faster at all, unfortunately I posted first thing in the morning as I was getting ready for school, and hadn't finished my pot of coffee yet. Having a bunch of smaller slower processors, that possibly generated a lot less heat, and then connecting them together in some sort of cluster would be much more efficient than having one processor.
Silver Goo.
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
I for one welcome our new nanotube overlords.
Chemical engineers, in my experience, are the worst of a bad lot of pocket-protector clad high-caste geeks.
Some sort of cluster... perhaps the romantic notion of a loosely couple cluster? Just like the loosely coupled network of Linux hackers that make Linux possible, by slaying dragons, laying princesses, and displaying their superior coding skill? Don't tell me you weren't thinking of exactly that.
That's the sort of obvious BS you guys mod up when it comes to molecular biology. I'm a bit discouraged by how misinformed the slashdot crowd seems to be.
your local molecular biologist.
No, no. You for one welcome our new Nanocyborg Overlords.
Mind, researchers are hardly likely to report their results _in_ New Scientist. They wouldn't get very much credit it if they did! The paper describing the results is in this week's Science. See below.
from http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/564 9/1310
News Story:
-----------
MOLECULAR ELECTRONICS:
Nanodevices Make Fresh Strides Toward Reality
Robert F. Service
Nanoscientists have proven adept at turning tiny specks of semiconductors and metals into devices such as diodes and transistors and have even wired them into working circuits. But researchers must still vault several other daunting hurdles to compete with today's highly complex computer chips. Among them: finding ways to construct complex circuits without the aid of photolithography, the standard chip-patterning technology that doesn't work at the scale of individual molecules, and steering electronic impulses from large-scale wires down to particular nanoscale devices. Now teams report progress on both fronts.
On page 1380, biophysicist Erez Braun and colleagues at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa report using a combination of proteins and DNA to direct the synthesis of a carbon nanotube-based transistor, a success that could pave the way for complex circuitry to essentially build itself. Meanwhile, in another paper on page 1377, a team led by Harvard University chemist Charles Lieber reports creating a scheme for feeding electrical impulses to specific locations in a nanocircuit, an essential step for carrying out complex computation.
Although critics have questioned the field's near-term potential to turn out products (Science, 24 October, p. 556), Cees Dekker, a biophysicist and molecular electronics expert at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, says the new studies underscore that basic research in molecular electronics remains vibrant. "Both papers together show the field is progressing. There are strategies to move towards connected networks [of devices]. That's the direction the field should take."
Braun, together with physics colleague Uri Sivan, students Kinneret Keren and Rotem Berman, and technician Evgeny Buchstab, wanted to employ biomolecules to assemble a working transistor. Their goal was to use a straw-shaped molecule called a carbon nanotube to carry an electric current between two metal electrodes. They coated nanotubes with streptavidin, a protein that forms a lock-and-key bond with another molecule called biotin. They then used an intricate series of reactions to create a chain of other proteins--capped with biotins--and a short piece of DNA to lasso and lash the nanotubes along the central region of a long DNA strand glued atop a silicon surface. Then, through another pair of reactions, the Technion researchers capped the ends of the long DNA molecules with tiny gold metal pads, which served as electrodes to carry electrical current into and out of the carbon nanotube. Finally, the team used electron beam lithography to pattern wires atop the silicon to connect to the metal pads.
The result was more than a dozen working nanotransistors, each just a few hundred nanometers in length and a fraction of the size of conventional transistors. "It's a fantastic demonstration," Dekker says. Braun says the devices are still works in progress: The connections need improvement, and the e-beam technique used to pattern the wires is too slow to be a viable manufacturing technology. But he says his team is already tackling the problems and is trying to scale up the self-assembly technique to make more-complex circuits.
Lieber's team, meanwhile, set out to address a very different issue: ensuring that information in the form of electrical impulses can be fed into specific transistors in a nanocircuit, an essential step for carrying out computation. The experiment builds on years of work at Lieber's lab to construct circuits from an array of nanowires patterned in a "crossbar" array resembling the lines of a ticktackt
f ableh d ardrd h bhd aj jajaj boo!!!
imagine a beowolf cluster of these,
now all we need is a simpsons quote
This sounds a lot like the way that nanobots are assembled in the recent novel Prey.
Anyone interested in nano technology will find this a fascinating novel. A lot of the novel describes some of the science behind nano, and as well as a gripping story, you can actually learn a thing or two.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
The red or white chowder?
Sig it.
Sheesh...
** Warning, these comments contain no pro-Linux content and so should viewed with skepticism.**
Surely, we don't need instructions on shampoo bottles, do we?.
now we can code a human being from DNA that will have code for nanites in their DNA....superhuman beings...here we come!
(the implications can mean no more need for those herbal pills for lowering cholestoral, acne, etc.)
hmmmm....resistance is futile....eh?
This process was first performed at MIT by Angela Belcher. She was using engineered viruses that coated themselves with semiconductor materiel to produce nanoscale FET trasnsitors a billionth of a meter in size. You can read more in the November issue of IEEE Spectrum.
In that case, allow my to construct and then play the world's smallest violin.
Just kinda reminded me of the whole xml WSDL future vision. Discovery
Would you or anyone pay to have a computer installed in me for the purposes of information referencing. I can't spell worth a crap unless I'm online using,
if($internet->life($me->life) && $life->internet($me->life))
{
$me->aughment($internet);
}
return 'Now, Please!?!?!?!?!?!';
BTW, when are we getting our god damn chips??? Do
you have any idea what it's like to lose your wallet ever month???
Oh,then there are the keys. FORGET IT.
-sb0
It's insecure enough as it is.