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Touching Molecules With Your Bare Hands
FiReaNGeL writes "Researchers at the Scripps Institute just devised an incredibly interactive way to manipulate complex molecules, such as proteins and DNA, with your bare hands. Combining 3D printed hand-held objects with sophisticated computer displays & cameras, this technology allow more natural and intuitive interactions with biological molecules - you can manipulate them with your hands and visualize the results on the computer in real time. Don't miss the incredibly cool movies and images illustrating the 3D printing process and augmented reality interaction with diverse proteins, viral self-assembly simulation and HIV-1 protease folding. A detailed press release is available."
Newsflash!! Anytime you touch anything, you're touching molecules with your bare hands! In fact, your hands are made of molecules, too!
In the first Jurrassic Park between the advertisments for Thinking Machines(TM) Supercomputers and Silicon Graphics(TM).
I, for one, welcome out new self-assembled virus overlords.
Water is wet!
...Molecules touch you!
I assume you could expand on the principal and have an entire galaxy at your fingertips.
Sure would be cool to have hanging around.
liqbase
Sugar molecule - $5.99 $4.99 when you buy with paypal!
Mens et Manus
*waves hands in air in disbelief*!
Let me guess, next you're going to tell me, by waving my hands I'm touching air molecules? Ha! Nice try.
I tried this out, specifically touching the HIV molecules. Now I'm infected. This technology really works!
Tactile interaction with molecules is the first step towards understanding them well enough to create working nanotech. Right now all we have are descriptions and equations, and it's a lot harder to work from a statement like "the force between these two atoms is such-and-such Newtons" than it is to actually feel the force (appropriately scaled up, of course)
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
everyone get out your gloves! You wouldn't want molecules on your hands, would you?
In preslashdot days, there was a segment of the VR community working on force-feedback (haptic) interfaces. In one application, a 6-DOF, 3-D mouse let a researcher "hold" a simulated molecule and "feel" how that molecule fit into a receptor site of an enzyme. Computing the forces required high-end equipment at the time, but should be very doable today if one had the specialized interface hardware.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's no more "touching molecules" than owning a copy of playboy is having a girlfriend. It's touching a solid immitation of one.
(Ignoring the obvious complaint that most stuff is made of molecules.)
FTA: "Video might requires..."
:(
Man, these guy [sic] can find funding for a 3D Printer...I can't even afford a dot-matrix...
I skimmed the article, and apparently, what happens is that they have a machine that will manufacture molecules out of plaster and such. That model can then be manipulated, and the manipulations will occur on the computer. A camcorder feed records your hands and the molecule, and will display it, along with the computer's own overlay. Thus, the pictures are all CG, and the weird effect is simply an overlay of a normal molecule model.
IMO, not as impressive as a video I saw, where there was a desk that had virtual (i.e. you could put your hand through them) objects moving around and interacting with some real objects (a plug outlet). Also had a guy turning his mic into a rose. I forget the link.
Bespoke, here we come.
/obvious
//too much fark, picking up the slashes
No, it's not!
p ph ire.html
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/news/04132004_bb_sa
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I am not sure if I understand this completely (I read the Press Release).Blue gene does protein folding computations which requires hours of CPU time. How can you understand these molecular interactions in real-time ? Article doesn't give detail about how they implemented the time-consuming computation.
I dont need no special gloves to manipulate DNA. I manipulate DNA with my bare hands several times a day!
Lemme hear your molecules talk. Yeah, lemme hear your molecules talk...
Damn, rapid prototyping is the shiznite, We use the starch based stuff here in the vehicle dynamics lab at the U of A, but the video says they can rapid prototype stuff out of steel?!? Crazy
good book, but not as good as Snow Crash
-------
Incite and flee.
The tighter you clench your fist, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
It's the Nintendo Revolution!!!
I cannot wait to see them to announce at E3 the soon to be bestselling game "Super Proteinase Brothers"
IT WILL CHANGE VIDEO GAMES AS WE KNOW IT
Once again, we see a real advancement predicted by a science fiction author.
In his work The Diamond Age (which was published, I believe, in 1995), Neal Stephenson predicted that nanotech engineers would manipulate molecules by hand, maneuvering them into position to create microscopic engines, rod-based logic elements, and other devices. John Percival Hackworth, one of the semi-protagonists of the novel (Stephenson has a nasty tendency to complicate his writing with multiple protagonists who follow divergent paths), is such an engineer, an individual who creates 'bespoke' nanotech designs.
The central conceit of the novel is that Nanotechnology has entirely replaced conventional manufacturing through the use of a "feed"--a dedicated line of raw materials which couples with computers to create almost any object desired. How long until such things become reality? Only time will tell. Obviously though, we're on our way.
Excuse my ignorance, but has anyone actually ever seen an atom or a molecule? Is there a microscope picture or anything? Or is this whole theory just a theory?
Don't miss the incredibly cool movies and images
:-/
And that's exactly how you shall write in a Slashdot article to be sure people will miss them.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I am sure the Rubic cube came about due to Mr. Rubic making/inventing a 'moving model' to show his students how atoms moved around in a bound molecule.
I always knew Diamond Age had it right.
Chorus:
I believe in molecules
Where you from
You sexy thing
I believe in molecules
Since you came along
You sexy thing
Oh yaa.. dj spin that record
Slashdotted? http://mirrordot.org/stories/6af30f0d4dd54940d355e d147842bf40/index.html
Seeing these posts makes me wonder what kind of molecules are neccessary to construct a sense of humor.
... but don't you touch molecules everytime you wave your hand in the air or in the water? The next thing these eggheads will be saying is that the Earth is round instead of flat. :P
But nothing more. I agree with other posters. Now, if you could get some kind of force feedback that would tell you if one molecule can dock to the other in a particular orientation, or whether a, say, DNA molecule will accept a transcription factor and bend in the right direction, or.... - that would make a really useful tool for research. As it is now, this is a nice way of helping students to visualize the spatial properties of complex molecules. Useful, but hardly revolutionary in any sense.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
This is a visualization technology, and not actually connected to the idea of moving around literal molecules. That is to say, the technology on display here allows you to move around molecules in a computer model, but those molecules are computer constructs and don't actually exist.
If someday we find a way to manipulate single molecules with such precision that we can mechanically and specifically control their movement freely, then we could of course use a technology such as this one to specify those movements. However such manipulation of molecules is the "hard part" of nanotechnology and not likely to happen any time soon. When nanotechnology becomes feasible it seems most likely that for a very long time we will be stuck with using assembly methods which are much more indirect.
The technology is however it seems immensely useful to people, such as biologists, who wish to understand and visualize how molecules, once constructed by whatever means, will interact with each other in a theoretical model.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Why waste all that money when you can touch some molecules of your own! Your hand!
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
Seeing these posts makes me wonder what kind of molecules are neccessary to construct a sense of humor.
Amen!
Mostly the OP was simply making fun of the headline. My first thought when I saw it before I RTFA was "I'm doing that right now!" Then I took my hand off the mouse and thought for a moment that I wasn't Touching Molecules With My Bare Hands(tm), but then I remembered the O2, CO2, et al that I was still touching. I just started laughing at the really bad choice of headline made by Zonk, but was really curious what the article was about.
After I RTFA, I tried to think of a better headline. At first I thought it should be, "Manipulating Molecular Models with your bare hands," but that just reminded me of all the painted styrofoam balls I'd stuck onto straws. I got pretty close by adding "computer-generated", but even that seems inadequate. The process described is really quite cool. I guess the bottom-line is "Ignore this headline, RTFA"
Unfortunately, with the advent of fancy graphics workstations came the belief that these methods worked - after all, people could see pictures, on a computer at that. These new methods make things even worse, people will feel forces generated by a fictional simulation and be even more convinced that what they are experiencing really does reflect reality. If you care to check you'll find very few cases of a drug discovery, say, resulting from a theoretical prediction about receptor binding. And when you do, you'll find plenty of people questioning that interpretation. After all, drug discovery is largely about dumb luck, and every so often the next randomly suggested compound for testing comes from a computational chemistry lab, even if a bunch of fortune tellers using the I Ching to predict drug designs might score just as well.
Sometimes I worry if atmospheric sims used to predict global warming are just as bad - not not having worked in atmospheric science I've no evidence to back it up. The tricky thing is that anyone who works with sims is likely to have a vested interest in maintaining their use.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
...molecules, film at eleven?
Hey! I touched molecules with my bare hands while I was typing this. Am I gunna get arrested too?
Erk! Oh, no... I've just noticed these air molecule thingies that I'm constantly touching... they're everywhere! How can I escape?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
god damn it, i'm such a slashdot geek, i need to fucking get laid! damn you slashdot! damn you all to hell!
look, i'm touching molecules with my bare hands!
My new blog
The word you apparently were struggling to come up with when composing the article's title, but failed, was "individual". Better luck next time.
From the article: http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/news/04132004_bb_sapph ire.html
Charles Gibson/Good Morning America: "It looks like water, but it's not."
Well, Gasoline is a clear liquid, so it looks like water, I guess it must put out a fire!
Also, can I get modded up cause I made a link?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It's clear? Last time I swam in it I couldn't see through it very well...but maybe...
The Xeeenon atom is the deadliet of the noble gasses. Watch as I grab this sucker by its p-orbital. It hates that!
You REALLY have to give a tip of the hat to the folks at UNC who've been doing this sort of work for YEARS.
Their GRASP system was a force-feedback molecule-docking simulation driven by a motorized WALDO arm. Very impressive. Nice to see that others are following in their footsteps.
http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/nano/cismm/
Not without yesterday's disco music... I LOVED those bits...
... if you pantomime a jerking-off motion, you can recombine DNA into Jimmy Kimmel.
The hard part about protein and molecule manipulation is getting in a pure form and obtaining the data about the molecule. For a single protein, it might not only take years to get the protein pure enough to work with, but once it is crystallized, you may get different versions of the data depending on crystallization conditions. For a given protein, you get at least two pieces of angle information for the phi and psi angles of the amide bond, plus any degree of rotation for the side chain. DNA can have any number of modifications detectable only by a good crystal, not to mention any proteins still attached to it.
Granted, this technology is nice if it gives researchers a tactile response to protein shapes. But I really can't see how it does more than some of the sophisticated graphical programs available now, especially considering molecules do not "fit" together in a simple jigsaw fashion in 3-D space (air) when you must consider that cellular water creates a shield of hydration that greatly influences molecular collisions, plus any electrostatic potentials not apparent in a handheld structure.
The ability to interact on a molecular level using something as relatively clumsy as macro-scale touching is pretty impressive.
"Hello, Macro, meet Micro, Micro, Macro."
"Seen ya from a distance, good to finally have teh chance to interact."
"Charmed, I'm sure."
"devised an incredibly interactive way to manipulate complex"
.
I ask, can something be "incredibly" interactive? Isn't interactive a binary state? An entity is either interactive or not so how can there be degrees of interactive? Just my thoughts for today . .
Just dont mistake them for jaffas and break them between your teeth...listerine would have nothing on the freshing action of an atomic exlosion in your oral cavity.
HUMoR obviously has to be a compound of Hydrogen, Uranium, Molybdenum and a yet unknown element which has the R as it's symbol. It might be easier to use HUMoRh, althoughRhodium isn't a good substitute for "R".
Replacing our mysterious "R" element with Rhodium might result in a damaged sense of HUMoR (a "sense of HUMoRh"), the most common symptom of which is the tendency to moderate HUMoRous posts down using "Overrated".
Perhaps including more Rhodium in the jokes might make them appeal to people with a sense of HUMoRh.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Are you a moron? Have you looked at gasoline? It's colorless, i.e. clear.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
A few hits songs have been made by U2. I think O2 stands a chance
If you are wondering, how fingers positions tracked by camera, pay attention to small black and white squares on the end of the fingers. Those are square-shaped markers used in the ARToolkit - Open sourced, multiplatform Augmented reality library. ARToolkit is esy to use and with camera connected to PC and having camera SDK you can esily write your own augmented reality application. There are augmented relity libraries for cellular phones and pocket pc in development.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
In any case, I can't browse to those links you provided. "Connection was refused" by www.scripps.edu ....
Well, there's a big difference between "useful for limited sets of problems" and useful to biology in general. I'll point out you don't even NEED molecular dynamics if all you wanted was a static h-bonding pattern, steric clashes, and distance contraints. Rasmol and a structure file will do fine. The force fields are getting better but with the current machinery in place, we can never even hope in our wildest dreams that MD is going to tell us the mechanistic details of catalysis or protein-protein recognition if you just load a structure and hit "go". We still have to do a boatload of biochemistry, alot of mutational analysis (with hypothesis as deep as "this part looks important so lets kill it"). The "promise" of accurate simulations on the same timescale as the actual biochemical and (gasp) biological events the macromolecules perform is still a pipe dream.