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Caltech Researchers Weigh Individual Molecules
karvind writes "PhysOrg reports that physicists at the California Institute of Technology have created the first nanodevices capable of weighing individual biological molecules. This technology may lead to new forms of molecular identification that are cheaper and faster than existing methods, as well as revolutionary new instruments for proteomics. The Caltech devices are 'nanoelectromechanical resonators' -- essentially tiny tuning forks about a micron in length and a hundred or so nanometers wide that have a very specific frequency at which they vibrate when excited. Slashdot covered earlier the effort by Cornell for measuring attogram objects which also employs NEMS cantilevers."
Now we can really measure how many angels can fit together on a pinhead! More seriously, this technology opens up interesting possibilities for high-througput easy mutation screening. Base substitutions (mutations) in a given stretch of DNA will obviously alter its weight. In this way you can easily (well, relatively speaking) detect the presence of a mutation, after which you can select the stretch of DNA that the mutation is in for sequence analysis. It'd be an interesting application for us geneticists.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
I was under the impression that at the atomic and molecular level there were quantum phenomena that caused particles to gain and lose mass depending on how they are arranged within the atom/molecule. For example, (just making something up) a molecular bond would result in the total mass of a molecule being less than the sum of the masses of its atoms.
If working with isotopes, it seems feasible to measure the mass of any particular molecule. What were the issues that were blocking this sort of measurement before?
Call me crazy, but has there been a relatively recent boom in nanotechnology? Seems like there's at least 2-3 new breakthroughs each *day* now!
Digital Sailor
Who will be stuck working the nano-weigh station of the future? Sounds like a crappy job with a Small paycheck.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
In other news, these devices are being utilized in the brand new series of gas pumps designed to pump gas throughout the next century.
"We're very excited about this new technology." says an anonymous CEO of a Fortune 500 oil company.
"No longer can the customer get a free $.009 with every purchase. They'll now be billed down to the exact molecule. Its a tough measure, but those freeloaders were really putting a strain on our budgets."
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
has there been a relatively recent boom in nanotechnology?
They are all really small breakthroughs.
Thats funny... doesnt excitement usually occur because of vibrating, not the other way around? And if this is true, could be devise some sort of perpetual excitement/vibration motion device involving women and 'nanoelectromechanical resonators'? Or perhaps a beowulf cluster of the aforementioned.... *consults the man page for 'woman'* This post a product of SlashPost generator v 0.4.1 alpha build 0138 with SlashClicheMod 2.0
Next time do some research - the PhysOrg news post was made on 29th March...
In their experiments this represents about thirty xenon atoms-- and it is the typical mass of an individual protein molecule
If they can resolve down to one protein mass, then wouldn't that imply that at this point they can not find the difference between molecules?
Slashdot, where the April Fools jokes get posted on the 3rd of April and again on the 4th.
..but it's still April 1st!!! today, ...Sir...
Caltech Researchers Weigh Individual Molecules
Technology
Science
Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday April 01, @01:31AM
from the heavy-lifting dept.
Ha ha ha! I get it, I get it.
"nano" machines, "molecules" "Caltech"
You got me AGAIN! Man, CowboyNeal, you sure pulled the wool over my eyes. Ha ha ha. Whew, that was a good one.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Where is the joke? I don't get it.
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Is that the problem with this picoscillatory nanoids is that their normal modes have a tendency to reverse the polarity of the neutron flux through the quantum mass matrix.
This has the unfortunate effect that at that point, you have little choice when determining the altoid-dense uberstate discrepancy to assume that the entire universe weighs exactly the same as Cheryl Tweedie from Girls Aloud.
Hooray for physics.
This will make it easier for the clerk to know how much to charge me for my nanoparts when I check out.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
You know, I'm not going to believe one darned word posted today on Slashdot. If anybody has any news they want people to believe, post it tomorrow. Imagine what would happen if the BBC or CNN sprinkled six or seven fake stories into their broadcasts like Slashdot do every year....
The defendant stands charged for posession of with intent to supply, 300 zeptograms of 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, a Class A prohibited substance under ...
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
You know, last i checked we allready knew the mass of all the molecules. On top of that, theres what... 1000 of them top (counting ions and the like) doesnt seem all that useful to me.
Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
Doctors and hospitals need this techology right now so they can weigh patients like Calista Flockhart.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4394947.stm
happy now?
An instrument that can now weigh my penis.
Wait. Did I say that outloud? I guess I better turn off my spam-blocker.
Its just amazing how colored our perception can be of a story.
When I first read it I assumed it was an infamous April 1 slashdot story so each comment I read was biased based on that perception.
I either thought you were an idiot for replying intelligently to this story or that you were extremely witty and sly in your reply and that demonstrated that you got the joke.
But I did something we rarely do and went to read the story and found it was written 2 days ago.
I guess the joke is on me....oh well at least I can read all about it again tomorrow. -- Robert
Bet this
+5 suicide-inducing jeux de mots goodness.
This is the next step from a process called mass spectroscopy, where a molecule is given + or - one electron, then fired through a calibrated magnet to hit a target. If the magnet is calibrated so that a single charge on a molecule of weight W deflects by exactly n degrees, then if the molecule weighs W it will hit the target, and you know the mass of your molecule.
It's more trial-and-error than TFA, but with a sweep across the calibration settings you get lovely graphs showing how much of a mixture is which compound. It's fast (seconds for a full-range mass chart), which I somehow doubt TFA is quite up to yet - maybe for a single molecule, but something in the description rankles of a slow process.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
That, my friends who use "irony" when you mean "paradox" or just "contradictory" - that is not only real irony, it's inverted irony. Full marks.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
April 1st should just be renamed "Day of the Troll."
Inquiring minds want to know!
...that they're naming these new units after stars of the past. After zeptograms we'll no doubt be seeing grouchofarads, chicobytes, and harpohertz.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I saw this elsewhere the other day, and the timestamp on the linked story is 29 March. So I think this one's safe.
Nitrogen Triiodide: "Does my bum look big in this?"
If you'd kept your tin hat on the article wouldn't even have bothered you.
The joke is that you THINK it's a joke when in fact it's not. Ha ha.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's an April Fool's Day joke. Don't you get it!
The whole atomic weight thing was just a best guess then? Or have we been able to calcuate atomic weights, but when it comes to molecules, well, thats just too darn complicated?????
I'm familiar with his research, half my group collaborated with him, and I think I met him once. It's real. MEMS-based cantilever technology has been getting progressively better, this isn't particularly surprising.
I don't know why you're surprised that New Scientist is pseudoscience, but you can find similar results with real science in journals. Look up Roukes, M in "web of science" or something.
Nice troll, but I can't have you confusing the n00bs on matters scientific.
It's not like there's any noticeable difference today.
That would be moehertz after curlybytes. :)
v 0.4.2 has support for linebreaks.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
How much the weighing device weighs?
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, The hands acqui
April 1st should just be renamed "Day of the Troll."
Everything 2 is four years ahead of you.
Posted on slashdot April 1st... but the article on PhysOrg is dated March 29th. Unless PhysOrg has managed to warp time, or at least unfairly use a false date on the article, this is quite likely real and not an April Fools joke.
Thanks.
Finally, Really Tiny Bathroom Scales!
But works in a slightly different manner. It's called a Mass Spectrometer
...it has that Magnetic Attraction.
Tag lost or not installed.
Potential energy isn't equivalent to mass. Potential energy is a way of parsing the total system--it's a byproduct of the viewpoint we take in order to have an orderly system. If I take as a system the Earth and a bowling ball, and move the bowling ball from its initial position 10000m further from the center of the Earth, the gain in PE is offset by the work done in moving the ball within the gravitational field. The mass of the system does not vary due to a change in the PE of the system. Work must be done to increase PE--there's no other way. (Otherwise, you could increase the mass of the system to infinity by separating the components to infinite distance. Ipso facto.)
I think it's critical to remind everyone that the mass defect in the nuclear scenario occurs because the force carriers themselves have mass; in molecular binding the force carriers don't--they're photons.
Photons have no invariant mass. Their mass equivalence is purely relativistic, which can't be converted to invariant mass in the same way that angular momentum can't be converted to linear (despite your ability to write equations that say you can). It's critical to note that in most aspects of Einstein's work that he construed E=mc^2 to be valid only within the context of the rest frame of a particle.
Where is the experimental evidence (for example), that heating a mass of iron increases the measured mass of the object? Where is the experimental evidence that electron promotion via photon absorption increases the mass of the atom involved? (Yes, Einstein's box, blah blah, but that's a thought experiment, not empircal evidence. I can write an equation directly linking angular momentum and linear momentum, but you can't convert directly without energy loss; just because you can do something with the math doesn't mean you can do it for real. I can redesign the Einstein's box experiment slightly to show that if one end of the box radiates energy and the other end of the box absorbs energy, that a box on a pivot assembly would eventually tip over in a gravitational field from a certain initial configuration because of mass transfer. I have a six-pack of adult beverage that says it'll never happen.
Don't start with me about French's derivation of the problem because the argument that mass must have transferred location is bogus: relativistic [virtual] mass is not the same as invariant [real] mass. An object cannot be forced to turn into a black hole by accelerating it arbitrarily close to the speed of light; only the invariant mass applies in that calculation, because it's real in a way that relativistic mass isn't. The equations say that given a certain velocity, a mass increase equal to [equation result] will be observed by an external viewer with measurement capabilities. It doesn't assert that the mass increase will be real--only that the external observer will see it because of the peculiar way space-time works. (After all, in the frame of the object itself--equally privileged with that of the external observe--the mass doesn't change.) Substitution of relativistic for invariant mass in a lot of these equation systems leads to incorrect conclusions.)