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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 assume you could expand on the principal and have an entire galaxy at your fingertips.
Sure would be cool to have hanging around.
liqbase
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.
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.)
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.
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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.
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.
Seeing these posts makes me wonder what kind of molecules are neccessary to construct a sense of humor.
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.
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.
I was about 25 when Rubik's cube came out and was facinated as to why the corners didn't fall off. A couple of days after buying a cube I was a my parents house and dear old dad was fiddling with a cube. He had been a mechanical engineer most of his life so I asked him "why don't the corners fall off" - "Oh it's just got keys that fit into channels on a ball". I still had to pull the cube to bits before I could "visualise" how it worked.
To be able to do the same sort of thing with molecules to explore self-assembly seems (to me anyway) a fantastic development. I wonder if furniture places like "Ikea" have heard of this. They could pour the tiny pieces in a box and let the vibration of home delivery assemble the furnitue.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.