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

Eh? This is something new?

[rice_burners_suck]

Touching Molecules With Your Bare Hands

Newsflash!! Anytime you touch anything, you're touching molecules with your bare hands! In fact, your hands are made of molecules, too!

Saw this already

[Mr. Arbusto]

In the first Jurrassic Park between the advertisments for Thinking Machines(TM) Supercomputers and Silicon Graphics(TM).

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)

QUICK

[Xeo 024]

everyone get out your gloves! You wouldn't want molecules on your hands, would you?

Haptic interfaces

[G4from128k]

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.

TFA is a lie

[mrRay720]

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.)

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Science Fiction

[Qwerpafw]

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.

Re:Indeed

[tukkayoot]

Seeing these posts makes me wonder what kind of molecules are neccessary to construct a sense of humor.

Not so

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Computing the forces required high-end equipment at the time, but should be very doable today

I wasn't doable on high end equipment then, it still isn't doable today. I spent 2 years working in computational chemistry and I've never seen such voodoo in my life. Yes - there are formulae for computing forces. But no, they don't bear much relation to reality Any simulation running anywhere near realtime is likely to be a purely classical simulation - balls and springs. This bears no relation to reality. Someone will run a simulation a few hundred times and after much tweaking of spring stiffnesses and so on they'll get results that vaguely approximate something measured in a lab. In the next simulation they'll need different parameters with no way of predicting what that change should be. Basically people in computational chemistry are doing post hoc fitting of models with close to zero predictive power. I've seen it happen over and over again and from time to time other people will also confess this is what they are doing. Occasionally someone will even run a quantum simulation - often a single electron model that is about as representative of a full quantum model as an elephant's dung is about its trunk.

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.

Re:Augmented reality...

[NSObject]

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.

The company is Total Immersion. The video you're talking about can be seen here.