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Nanotech Motors, Biotransistors, DNA Fractals

Posted by Zonk on from the body-wars dept.

FleaPlus writes "The American Institute of Physics has a news bulletin describing a couple of interesting nanotech advances. The first is the smallest electric motor in the world, made by Alex Zettl's group at UC Berkeley. The second is a single-protein wet biotransistor. Additionally, Technology Research News reports on algorithmic self-assembly of DNA Sierpinski triangles, by Erik Winfree's group at Caltech."

9 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Miniature motors by karn096 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Wasn't there an article about mini-turbines also, that researchers were planning on using to power small devices, I'm wondering if these nano-motors could be used in the same regard.
    Maybe I should go RTFA now.

  2. How does it work ? by karvind · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The peak pulsed power is 20 microwatts. Considering that the device is less than 200 nm on a side, the power density works out to about 100 million times that of the 225 hp V6 engine in a Toyota Camry.

    I am not sure if I understand the power density claims. Here is a simple calculation. 20 microwatts in cube of 200nm x 200nm x 200nm will be 20 microwatts in 8 x 10^(-15) cm^3 volume. That will be a power density of 2.5 x 10^9 Watts/cm^3.

    Sun's fusion power density is only ~ 2.5x10^(-4) Watts/cm^3 with core temperature around 15.7 x 10^6 K. I can understand that we wouldn't be generating the heat at peak density, but if we generate that high power desnity in nanomechanical system for even any reasonable time - wouldn't it just evaporate unless we find a very fast way of removing the power efficiently ?

  3. Re:Eventually... by karvind · · Score: 5, Interesting

    At Cornell we already made the Nanoguitar and Nano saxophone. Yes we were working on the nanodrums these days. No applications for auditions, we use very fast pulse lasers only :)

  4. The DNA trick is particularly disappointing by Artifakt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At first, I thought the DNA assembly-Sierpinski Triangle story was particularly interesting, as a link between real world information storage and the usually unworldly area of fractal geometry. On following the story, it turns out that the error rate is simply enormous (1 to 10%). DNA, in normal use, works about a billion times more reliably than it does here.
    You could probably coax DNA to assemble into face centered cubic crystals with a much lower error rate than that. Hell, you might be able to get little figures of Snoopy and Garfield more reliably than these Sierpinski Triangles. This is like proving you could workably rebuild the Golden Gate bridge from Mayonaise and save the tax-payers a fortune, for sufficiently low values of "workable","fortune", and probably "Mayo".

    --
    Who is John Cabal?
    1. Re:The DNA trick is particularly disappointing by xEndymionx · · Score: 5, Interesting

      the error rate is actually rather low, the high number reported comes from error propagation. if you get a single site error, the next generation of cells below it will be computed using that error, and will thus also be erroneous. the actual number of genuine errors is rather small. winfree also has done work in error-correcting self assembly of wang tiles (which is what this really is). the key point to his generating the sierpinski gasket is that it proves that one can computer elemetary cellular automata with this dna blocks, and that includes eca rule 110, which has been proven to be universal by matthew cook. dr. winfree gave a talk about all these findings early last semester at my university.

  5. Technology makes life easier not harder by Staplerh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The question is will we get to the point where our brains just can't take it? Will we have to pass such things onto computers, or find a way to enhance our brains to cope with it?

    See, I take the opposite view on this. I feel that technology is actually making life a lot easier for our brains. Perhaps not for all of us, but take an average person. You can effectively run much of your life on autopilot. Driving a car, following mindless rules, technology providing cues and such. Really, many of the things that used to occupy time can now be done through automation - or at least are 'outsourced'. I'm of course looking at the middle-class of North America, but still. I think its hard to make a case that the average citizen is overworked and having trouble coping with technology.

    Certainly there are cases of people feeling overwhelmed, but I think they are a minority - vocal, perhaps - but still a minority.

    --
    "There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
    - Bob Dylan
    1. Re:Technology makes life easier not harder by mrRay720 · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I agree that technology is in many ways making it easier for our brains, but IMO that's completely overwhelmed by the sheer rate that knowledge is accumulating.

      Certainly even an average science student today has a wider knowledge of things than a well respected scientist a few generations ago. Go back a few more generations and that student would be on par with the greatest scientific minds in the world as far as knowledge goes.

      A mere few hundred years ago it was possible for one person to hold the complete human knowledge of science in his head. Nowadays that's obviously completely impossible, and I don't consider it at all unlikely that even the most knowledgable person will even know WHAT we know in outline, never mind detail.

      Of course I was talking more about advancement in general and you are talking about the avergage joe's day to day life, so that's probably where the difference lies. Even then, though, we have to do much much more now than we ever did before. The days of the caveman were much simpler - he never had to battle with voicemail, tax returns, choosing from a thousand mortgage deals, finances, computers, programming the VCR, and who knows what else. We're only just starting to see the real improvements in simplicity to help us with the complexities with modern life, so I think it will get better.

      On the frontier of human knowledge though, I think we're going to get out of our depth very soon.

  6. Prior Nanoart by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ned Seeman's NYU lab produced algorithmic self-assembling Wang tiles for cumulative XOR computation a couple of years ago. The application was inspired by suggestions by Winfree that their then-current system, could accomplish the computation. And it has. Glad to see Winfree continuing to explore this cutting edge.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  7. Very cool by RacerZero · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Guess I should have staid in microbiology instead of going to Art School. I did these Sierpinski sieve based pieces way back then.

    Glad to see someone doing something a little more significant with the idea.