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Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures
Roland Piquepaille writes "Chips holding 10 terabits of data? Copper as strong as steel? Ceramics tough enough to be used in car engines? All this will be true in five years, thanks to two new methods to create self-assembling 3D nanostructures. These methods used pulsed laser deposition to create layers of nanodots organized in a matrix. These arrays of nanodots are consistent in shape and size -- 7 nanometers with nickel for example. But the real beauty of these methods is that they can be applied to almost any material, like nickel for data storage or aluminum oxide for ceramics. These methods also reduce drastically imperfections, leading to future superstrong materials. Read more here for other details and an image of a single nickel nanocrystal, or nanodot."
So that's it then - the elves had nanotech. It all makes sense now. Looks like steel, feels like steel, but cuts like sinclair molecule chain
I do remember the UK Science minister at the time (Lord Sainsbury, I think it was) who said "Nanotechnology is going to be really BIG". He didn't quite get it, did he... Oh well, science is anathema to most politicians in the UK
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
last I heard, MIT was working on something like this. Just a rumor - can anyone verify?
--
We are the collective Slashbot HiveMind
Roland Piquepaille is a blogspammer, every day for over a week now, we've had his rehashings of old stories posted on the frontpage. Don't click on the first and the last link in the story.
I haven't RTFA, but ceramics are already used in certain motorcycle engines.
I guess you could make stronger bullets...How else could it be used to kill people? I'd like to see this technology get funded.
I used to have self assembling lego/mechano structures, thanks to my father's need to 'help' me whenever I got a new set.
I post that and read slashdot? Fucking asshat.
"methods also reduce drastically imperfections"
Maybe he should have used those methods on his text!
Just asking a question, thanks for the answer. And yes, I do ask this and read slashdot. I'm still learning my way around though.
Still though, from those links, it does seem that byte is more commonly used for storage than bit, although I see that it can be as well.
Thanks.
Another Slashdot story that is going to change my life. Why is it after 3 years I'm still doing the same stinking job, same stinking money eh?
/. to change your life? The .com boom is over, get over it. Find a job you enjoy, or one you can stand. Then, to enjoy yourself, get a life. It's amazing how unimportant work is once you have a kid.
Maybe because you expect
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Hmmm, isn't this just what we need to make space elevators possible?
Isn't bits generally used for data transfer, rather than storage, which is generally bytes?
/.!
And this gets modded as Insightful???? A thousand monkeys randomly typing on keybord could not possibly write 'Hamlet', but they could well moderate posts on
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
These things are "self-assembling"!! Doesn't this just scare the hell out of you?!?!
How long will it be before these 3D nanostructures figure out they no long need Mankind to survive...and see us as a threat!?!?
I for one will welcome our new Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures Overlords!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Google cache
This sounds like the stuff that the Asimov robot cities are made of that are mentioned in the Robots and Aliens series of books.
No problems, only solutions
Trust me, I was expecting to get modded DOWN! I was just wondering, that's all. I laughed my ass off at it being modded up.
Why is it that every time I read about a scientific breakthrough, journalists always promise that it could lead to... *drumroll*... an improved lightbulb?
I wonder if Einstein had this problem.
E=mc^2... helps us understand the relationship between energy and matter... which could lead to...
It's amazing how unimportant getting married and having kids is when you have a meaningful life purpose.
Please, spare us the "I'm married and in a wonderful relationship isn't my life great" spiel. We all appreciate your ability to procreate, but in all reality, it's nothing special.
Some of us have meaningful lives, and don't need a family to support our egos and make us feel needed. Now I'm sure having dependants makes you feel just dandy, but I'm getting tired of hearing people tell me how wonderful their lives are now that they're married with kids. They see themselves as free, I see them as tied to their homes, under the watchful eyes of three or four people, with no personal freedom at all. Before you go and criticize someone for complaining about his job and expound on the virtues of married life, remember: US divorce rate is .5%, what makes you so sure you won't add to that statistic?
Great... As if contact lenses weren't bad enough, we'll soon be on hands & knees searching the carpet for somebody's Very Compact Disc collection
So.. it has come to this
This isn't redundant man...don't you GET IT?
Listen. And understand. Those Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures are out there. They can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, EVER, until we are dead!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
The space elivator project needs materials strong enough to with stand the tension of its own weight, and we already have carbon nano fibers that provide 60-70% of the strength needed to make it a reality. If this new technique can get us to the magic strength, we are probably in the threashhold of a new era.
~561
... yada yada ya ... overlords. You can fill the rest in yourselves.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
At the moment, "self assembling" means that we don't have to push the nanodots together after we make them. That's all. You still need to ablate a carefully prepared target with a laser to etch the structures we want.
Personally, I'm excited about their solid state lighting idea.
from the article The most interesting application may be the development of energy-efficient, low-cost, solid-state lighting. By creating a matrix of layers of varying sizes of nanodots embedded in a transparent medium such as aluminum oxide, Narayan can create a chip that glows with white light. Solid-state lighting would use about one-fifth the energy of standard fluorescent lighting and last for approximately 50 years.
Looks like my LCD monitor is about to become obsolete: there's no reason why these solid state can't be made the size of a pixel and tied to active matrix display electronics. Maybe the us military might be able to replace their $30,000+ individual soldier helmet monocles which are currently using 5000 hour MTBF organic led technology with durable, bright and efficient nano-leds and save taxpayer money while we're at it.
A terabit is a thousand bits I'm sorry.. but how/why is one terabit (1 000 000 000 000) equal to one thousand bits (1 000), again? Or is that Wikipedia Article != Authoritative?
Please read the previous sentence for as many thousand times as needed for you to fully understand it.
Don't sweat it, he's cursing at himself for being a fair few orders of magnitude out when he said that a terrabit was 1000 bits.
Could this technique be what brings us one step closer to the material needed for developing the space elevator?
------- "One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people." -- G. KHAN
> 'chip-light using' one-fifth the energy of standard fluorescent lighting and last for approximately 50 years
Well that puts LCD back in the race against the upcoming OLED technology. If they can further reduce bad pixels and failure it may be more environmentally friendly than OLED which may have a shorter life span. The energy used by the backlight was LCDs culprit, with that solved LCD may become our long lasting friend.
OLED pushers better speed their cheap display printing tech to market before we expect displays to last 40 years.
--
Dennis SCP
of course when your fake hand is strong enough to crush steel it gets classified as a weapon and you have to check it with your luggage...
Isn't bits generally used for data transfer, rather than storage, which is generally bytes?
Not quite so simple.
Bits is generally used for the raw basic capability. No provisions for framing, error detection or correction.
Bytes are generally used for 8 bits of usable information. This is measured after the framing, error detection/correction etc.
Bandwidth caps are related to data transfer, but probably expressed in bytes instead of bits.
Memory chip capacity probably expressed in bits. Memory stick capacity probably expressed in bytes, and usually be less than the corresponding number of bits in the chips.
Disk capacity probably expressed in bytes, but there is a significant difference between raw unformatted capacity and the formatted capacity. The difference is furthered by reserving alternate sectors so the disk behaves as if it were error free.
Wait, are you saying that monkeys didn't write hamlet?
Fuck.
Okay, so this has been really bugging me, ever since I first read it. In "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, he talks about making tiny little diamonds that are lighter than air. They have vaccuum inside, and they're diamond, so they're strong enough to handle the pressure. So, they end up being diamonds that float in our atmosphere.
Is that possible, or is there something fundamentally flawed about it?
Education is the silver bullet.
"Mega-Damage" is already trademarked.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
Too lazy to create a sig...
I had known this for months.
If you really want to be up to date in nano, check out news.nanoapex.com.
Every day there's a new discovery.
well the idea does seem interesting but the article does lack any details like did they actually try depositing other materials and what was the success rate. Also they are able to deposit Ni uniformly, but have they actually tried depositing it in different size layers to see if their method works. there are a bunch of ideas in the nanoworld which work specifically for a set of materials, so i wonder if this would be as general as claimed, and laser ablation has been around for quite a while now. well if anyone elas has any details it will be cool to know.
Sounds extremely over-optimistic to me.
Executive summary: Bits and bytes are like centimeters and meters. They're different scales of the same thing, and whether you use one or the other is dictated partly by which is appropriate to the magnitude of the value being expressed and partly by tradition.
These "All this will be true in five years," stories are so 1950... It used to look good in Popular Mechanics covers, but the public has got so used to vaporware in press releases that we expect some more solid evidence before getting excited about what's supposed to become true in a five years future.
If you post another story submitted by roland, i will stop reading this site.. I promise.
Hey slashdot: if someone puts the word nano in front of a sentence it does not mean the material is instantly going to build your nerdy wet dream of a space elevator, coming to take you away from your sad little cubicle/hand jobs.
More nano hype. It's published in a crappy journal, and he's got nanoparticles to assemble into a lattice, which they've been doing now for, ooh >5 years? Suitably stabilized Nanoparticles do this anyway, it's called CLOSE PACKING and should be familiar to anyone with a modicum of HS chem.
I have to say, it's a nice trick with the laser ablation though - it generalises exisitng nanoparticle positioning/assembly to a few new materials.
Revolutionary it ain't.
See
http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/~pagrp/
and
http://www.ncsu.edu/chemistry/dlf.html
amongst many many others for better science.
'Nonymous nanotechnologist.
I'd like to place my order for a Number 3 hull, please...
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
... transparent aluminum? :-P
We're still out on the debate as to if a thousand monkeys at a thousand keyboards could write enough Cease and Desist letters for the RIAA/MPAA
Can someone explain to me how the space elevator is going to make up for changes in rotational momemntum as the elevator moves up and down? Are they going to have rockets on it to counter-act coreolis forces?
Play Command HQ online
In principle you could make a more-or-less general purpose machine that could replicate itself and other machines, given enough raw material. If the software driving it was open source, in principle anybody could become their own manufacturing plant. Have the machine produce other machines that mine raw materials, and you could set it loose in a mineral-rich area and it would replicate enough of itself to start producing whatever you want.
Want to go to Mars? Send a small manufacturing/mining combination machine with instructions to replicate itself and then build a habitable environment. Then we don't need to take the environment with us - we get a lower mission payload.
Hell, with technology that can assemble stuff atom by atom you could produce food.
The implications for society of having what amounts to Star Trek's replicators are massive. You could quite literally eliminate poverty and hunger.
"Why is it after 3 years I'm still doing the same stinking job, same stinking money eh? "
Okay, since you rely on external forces to guide your life:
Watch Star Trek Nemesis, pay real careful attention to what Data says about B-4. The key word is 'ambition'.
"Derp de derp."
Is Roland actually submitting this stuff to Slashdot? Or are the illustrious Slashdot editors merely mining Roland's excellent site for material to fill whatever story quotas they have?
Either way, I make a point of checking Roland's site regularly because he manages to have a posting every day that's usually interesting.
They might not be able to moderate posts, but they could certainly generate the posts themselves...
In fact, they do...
Never give a Transhumanist a monkey straight line...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
What would I be best off majoring in if I wanted to get involved in nanotechnology? Material engineering?
It's a joke!
Read the post again.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I laugh that you suggest my life changing experiences come from a TV show!
I laugh that you're in denial!
"Derp de derp."
Any reasonably techy person reading Tolkien will realize mithril is nothing but aluminum. It occurs in nature EXTREMELY rarely, but has shown up in the Alps, which are the Misty Mountains. He describes it as being similar in color to silver and can be alloyed with other metals to make amazingly light sturdy armor. Nowhere (to my knowledge) does Tolkien say mithril was ever used in swords. The great weapons of the dwarves and the Eldar were always steel whenever materials were mentioned.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon