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."

Comments

Cool!

[kyle90]

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)

Re:A classic in the making.

[B'Trey]

Speaking of classics, did anyone else think of Heinlein's waldos when they read this?

Re:Not so

[G4from128k]

I wasn't doable on high end equipment then, it still isn't doable today.

Thanks for the insight. I'd always suspected that they were using gross approximations for the field force calculations. Its one thing to compute the forces on a point charge in a uniform field. Its another thing to compute all the quantum mechanical effects of interacting electron shells in a real molecule.

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.

You are preaching to the choir on that one. I have first hand experience with deluding oneself through the power of simulations. It is too easy for an incorrect assumption or approximation to corrupt the results. And when the complexity of models or the beauty of the output are taken as indicators of truth, we are all in trouble.

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

I've not looked into this in a while, but I know that early simulations failed to predict the current weather situation, leading me to question whether they will be any good with the future. And even if the new generation of simulations can predict recent weather trends, I have to wonder about the potential for excessive post hoc curve-fitting. The Earth is one big sample-size-of-one experiment and that makes doing true science nearly impossible.