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Moving Water Molecules By Light
Roland Piquepaille writes "An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) has discovered a new nanotechnology effect, the ability of moving water molecules by light. This is a far better way than current methods such as damaging electric fields and opens the way to a new class of microfluidic devices used in analytical chemistry and for pharmaceutical research. For example, this makes possible to design a device that can move drugs dissolved in water, or droplets of water and samples that need to be tested for environmental or biochemical analyses. Please read this overview for more details and references, plus an image of two water drops illuminated with a fluorescent dye and sitting respectively on a nanowire surface and on a flat surface."
If you add a bunch of nanofibers to a wax coated surface, the water will "ball up" and move around more easily. If you make the nanofibers sensitive to light, you can control the speed with which the water moves over the surface by changing the light level.
... you assume a "horse" is a "sphere" to make the math easier.
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I am so frightened (and by frightened I mean extremely excited) at how fast we are evolving technologically, I can't even get a vague picture of where we'll be 5 years from now let alone 50.
I'd really like to hear some practical non-research based applications for this technology if any knowledgeable person might be able to help out. One of the first things I thought of was that this might be useful for creating cybernetics, since light is a lot less harmful than electricity, and I'm guessing that cybernetics of the future will involve some sort of liquid transfer on a nano scale.
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The problem of this is that;
1. It will eventually get discovered. Could we have ignored radar/gunpowder/pointy sticks inventions for this long?
2. No matter how long you think of something or plan something out, there will be someone who comes up with a flaw in your plans. Think bugs in software or man tampering with nature.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
This effect itself isn't all that new... it's in all those stain-repellent pants that are being sold now. Being able to control the effect with light is.
-Rob
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Looks like you didn't RTFA.
It's about changing the hydrophobic/hydrophilic (water repellent/attractive) properties of a _special_ surface using light. This doesn't work on just any surface.
I dare say the military would prefer to dehydrate parts of your body by vapourizing bits of it e.g. zap you directly with a powerful beam of light. Or ionizing air between a thundercloud and you so that a lightning bolt zaps you ( that's to make it look like an "Act of God").
They just moved a few molecules of water with light? My girlfriend's dad once got me moving a lot faster and further by turning on the lights.
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Hemos seems to usually be the culprit posting the Piquepaille stories. I don't mind if Hemos wants to post stories submitted by this guy (though often even the submissions are inaccurate summaries of the original articles), but it would be appropriate to edit out his links to poorly written, uninformative summaries that he posts on his blog before posting the story. I don't mind somebody occasionally using a Slashdot submission to let the community know about some new product they or their company has developed or interesting article or book they've written, but this blatant traffic farming is way over the top.
Please elaborate on the 'goo problem'. Ie, with explicit details on how it would work, not just some qualitative description, which is all that anybody seems to have at the moment.
So somebody said that maybe all life COULD be devoured by a properly-designed nanotech robot that would reproduce quickly and break up organic matter into component monomers, etc etc etc.
I'll say a self-aware self-replicating AI program COULD be created that would spread through the net independent of host operating system, and crash all airplanes, screw up everybody's bank accounts, erase all data, etc etc etc.
Similarly, a 'battlebot' with enough memory COULD somehow be programmed properly that it also attains self-awareness intelligence, reproduces and builds an army of subservient battlebots, and wreaks havoc across the planet.
So, if you are trying to claim we should stop research into nanotechnology, then we should also stop research into computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc.
There is NO field where there isn't any risk that something bad could happen. Nanotech is the 'new' field, so this is where the fear-mongering comes in. You're not alone, look at comics, for instance. Most old-school Marvel superheroes got their superpowers, for better or worse, through radioactive effects, back in the fearful decades after the atom bomb. Nowadays the current fear is nanotech, and even the first Spiderman movie changed the story from a radioactive spider to a genetically-modified spider. You're doing the same thing, really.
I work with nanotech. Just 30 minutes ago I was putting carbon nanotubes onto a substrate, and I'll eventually do some electronic transport measurements. Currently I'm scanning the substrate with an atomic-force microscope. There are TONS of amazing uses that nanotubes might have, so we're studying many of their properties. Why is my study of carbon nanotubes different from somebody determining which binary tree search algorithms are most efficient, or what shape sawblade cuts through plastic the best?
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>However, your first point sounds eerily fallacious to me. "It will eventually get discovered"
The atomic race was based entirely on this. Who will get the bomb first? Those in charge on either side did not have the luxury of sitting back and saying "Maybe we shouldn't" because the other side might succeed before them.
Look at today and how many countries can produce the bomb. Most of them got the know-how independently from each other. And the US is running around trying to control it from getting out of hand.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Light is not an electric field, it is a propagating electromagnetic wave particle duality.
To address your other point, electric fields can be very damaging when they are sufficiently high intensity. Also, electromagnetic fields can be damaging too.
Not damaging to the water molecules, which are robust, but damaging to the materials disolved or suspended in the water, which may be delicate bio-active organic molecules. For example, there are various cell sorting systems that currently use electric fields. They might better use a system like this.
However, light can be damaging in its own right. Red and infrared light can be heating. Violet and UV light can be energetic and penetrating (think sunburn radiation damage).
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By damaging electric fields, I'd guess they mean what is used in capillary electrophoresis (Several kV are used to generate a 'zeta potential' which consists of the counterions on a glass surface moving in the electric field, and dragging water along with them). Such high voltages can have bad effects on large proteins and other things (like living cells) that you might want to move, but not electrocute (let alone boil, which happens if you crank up the voltage to make things move faster).
IAAC (I am an analytical chemist), and in my humble opinion this is interesting, but not immediately practical, not as expansive as the article suggests (surprise!).
Kudos to the researchers, and I want to get 10 yards of light-actuated water droplet moving wire once they have it :)
FrancisSo somebody said that maybe all life COULD be devoured by a properly-designed nanotech robot that would reproduce quickly and break up organic matter into component monomers, etc etc etc.
I keep reading about the grey goo, and I've yet to see an argument that it is possible from someone who demonstrates an understanding of the complex tradeoffs that limit our currently existing biological self-replicating machines. Problems like:
1: Oxygen is both a nutrient, and a poison.
2: The lack of a universal catalyst. A machine that catalyzes the transformation of one amino acid will be less than optimal for catalyzing a different amino acid.
3: Energy and trace elements severely limit growth at a microscopic level.
That does seem to be the more pressing problem.
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