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Bacteria Used to Create Nanowires
FnH writes "Derek Lovley and his colleagues of the University of Massachusetts discovered that the Geobacter bacteria is capable of producing nanowires. The bacteria is normally used to clean up toxic waste. Geobacter does not use oxygen, but metal as its source for power. This probably explains the 3nm to 5nm nanowires it excretes while working. What metal the nanowires are made of is not yet known, but the genetic code responsible for their creation is. This opens up the possibility of modifying the bacteria to create nanowires on chips."
Dupe.
According to the article, the bacteria seem to produce these tiny wires which then carry electrical signals across large meshes of bacteria-produced wires. It would be interesting to see what sort of emergent behavior, if any, would arise from very large meshes of these wires and bacteria.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Derek Lovley and his colleagues of the University of Massachusetts discovered that the Geobacter bacteria is capable of producing nanowires. The bacteria is normally used to clean up toxic waste. Geobacter does not use oxigen, but metal as it's source for power. This probably explains the 3nm to 5nm nanowires it excretes while working. What metal the nanowires are made of is not yet known, but the genetic code responsible for their creation is. This opens up the possibility of modifying the bacteria to create nanowires on chips.
/. tradition. Never use spellcheck, to the extreme!
Ah, carrying on the great
This opens up the possibility of modifying the bacteria to create nanowires on chips.
In the same was as it opens up the possibility of modifying the bacteria to code Linux kernel patches.
This certainly is cool biotech, but slapping this wild prediction on to the end of the article doesn't make it more so.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
Interesting read...the first thing that came to my mind when I read this is that these organic wires may be just the thing for the interface between electronics and organic tisue. One of the major problems in cybernetics is that the chemistry of the implants tends to be poisonous to the surrounding tissue, while the chemistry of the surrounding tisue tends to be corrosive to the implant. Over time, the interface degrades and must eventually be replaced. Utilizing the genetic code from these microbes to express nanowires within some of our cells may eliminate this problem and pave the way for permanent interfaces sooner than we thought.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
people would be quite correct in saying that the wiring inside their device was crap!
This probably explains the 3nm to 5nm nanowires it excretes while working.
So... the next generation of electronics is going to be made of shit?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It's probably one of those British spellings. Like 'spelt', 'whilst', 'kerb', and a bunch of other meaningless words.
Does this mean we're closer to produce a green CPU? If you think so, can we really call it green if its full of bacterias?
The microscopic world's answer to Superfish - eating metal and crapping it out in long strings.
were crap...
Reminds me of the scene from "Little Nicky" where the dog pisses off an arrow (??)
ooooooooh.........that was a painful thought !!
Anyone else think of roten metals ?
;)
Geobacter does not use oxigen, but metal as it's source for power
Now, our cars will not only rust in winter because of salted snow, but they may rot eaten by Geobacter.
More seriously:
Could this bacteria be genetically engineered to eat common metals like steel, or more uncommon ones targeted at destroying military or sabotage foundrys?
Is another bio weapon on the way?
Léa Gris
I bet this "shit" idea was funded by n+HP-invent ( n is for nanotechnology )
Wake me up when they finally find bacteria that use Bluetooth.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.
- George Orwell
"oxygen" "its source" not "it's source" Logical leap: Chip wires, to be economically feasible are needed to be placed at a rate of many meters per second. Nanowires probably grow many powers of ten times slower than this. And one might surmise that iron interfaces very poorly to silicon.
After all the time I spend in trying to get the damn bugs OUT of my computer, now the manufacturer it factoring them right in at the start of building my computer :(
Eww, my chip has some greenish fungus on it.
Grep microscope (really strong one)
O no, no worry, it is some nanowiring expension set.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
..welcome our nano-wire excreting bacteria overlords.
This brings new meaning to the term S.O.S.
Ho Hum, I just know this is all going to go terribly wrong and the bugs will end up eating everything made of metal and we'll be cast back into the dark ages. Spielburgh or Lucas have probably already bought the rights to the motion picture.
I decided to give it a try and, my CPU started to sweat!!! What should I do? Give water to my bacterias?
Great, now they're building the bugs into the chips on purpose? What next?
My Tech Posts on Twitter
How badass do you have to be to breath metal?
"Man, this CPU runs like CRAP!"
I always wanted a pet goose that lays golden eggs, but I'm willing to settle for pet bacteria that shit gold wires.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Gremlin?!
My understanding (and I'm certainly no expert) is that it follows a set path laid out by the materials it's meant to 'eat' so as long as there is a pattern that is clearly defined and seperate from the other parts of the pattern (which at nano sizes could be a struggle on it's own)it simply connects the dots.
>
>nanowires it excretes while working.
and Microsoft will vigorously defend its patented ability to turn your PC into excrement.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
"It would be just like that one Star Trek Episode where Wesley was doing this experiment with Nanobots that networked together and formed a rudimentary, then more evolved Artificial Intelligence. They like took over Lt. Cmdr. Data and then took over the ship and all they wanted was a chance to have a place of their own, that they could turn into grey ooze."
"It could be just like that one Star Trek Episode where there was this terraforming project going on at this lifeless rock and the Enterprise was sent to investigate some terrible disasters that were happening there. It turns out that there were this mircoscopic silicone based lifeforms living in the sands on this planet and they were like, getting killed by the terraforming process. Anyway, the leader of the terraforming colony knew what was going on, he just didn't want to admit that he was killing little silicone sand creatures. The silicone sand creatures networked together and started being all bad-ass as they increased in capability and inteligent as they joined together, kinda like the Constructicons from The Transformers television series, that was cool, you know? So, anyway, these bacteria might be doing the same thing!"
Anyway, I have to blame Star Trek. While the series has been known to inspire tons of people to do great things, it's pseudo-science has done some harm as people assume that what happens in a Science Fantasy show can happen in real life.
No hatin' to the original poster, btw. I am just saying.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Now all we need is a bacterium that can produce useful things made of carbon, such as nanotubes, consuming methane and releasing hydrogen in the process. Then we can all switch to fuel-cell based cars without all this perpetual kvetching over how to get the hydrogen.
I think we've all seen this epsiode of STNG. Remember when the nano-bots keep eating parts of the enterprise, and then become sentient? The only way to appease the macro-nano-bots was to send them off the ship somewhere/somehow.
Unfortunately for us, we have no way to offload them from our homeworld. Because of this, if we unleash this technology it can only be to our own undoing!
That is the only conceivable future of this technology!
Kent Brockman: "Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?"
Professor: "Yes I would, Kent."
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
For bringing penicillin to work! I had strep! WHERE IS THE JUSTICE IN THIS WORLD???
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
Here's an interesting note: The RSS feed has oxygen spelled oxigen.
Any ideas why?
Do the articles have to be manually entered to the RSS feed? The the editors actually (GASP!) edit something??
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
he said excrement, he he
The 986 will be a piece of shit. Literraly.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Yet despite the five hundred other posts, the editors still fuck up, time and time again. Maybe it needs to be a couple of thousand before they finally pull their heads out of their asses and start using a spellcheck. Alternatively, go to a bookstore and buy a dictionary if slashcode is too crappy to extend.
That bathroom breaks mean exactly the opposite for these bacteria?
Artifical Intelligience is no match for natural stupidity.
intelligently designed evolution.
Bacteria and plants produced the oxygen we breath, so we're actually breathing their shit.
:)
Their shit gives us life; and our shit gives them life.
You might have suspected that this is a crappy world. Now you see it in perspective.
No, we would probably spell it oxygin - and serve it with tonic so you would carry bottles of the stuff on a spaceship rather than tanks. Trouble is, you had better not get pulled over after landing, you would probably fail the breath test.
I might not be a wit, but at least I am more than half way there.
Does anyone have a link to the paper in question?
But if I reading it correctly, it sounds like these nanowires are basically bacterial poop?
How fast does the bateria work? Could you drop a couple barrels of it on enemy hardware (tanks, planes, buildings, refineries, etc) and have it eat the metal away, or would sun/rain/snow/heat wash them away?
And they said zombies weren't real!
Yeah.. I envision the following future.. Bacteria that live on my chip and are capable of fixing bugs on the chip and have their DNA as open source. This way we could hack them to create real open source chip architecures....
We can now make the world's smallest violin... even smaller!
- PubMed's list of Derek Lovley's papers (pops).
- Geobacter Project Page at UMass (pops).
- The paper in question (pops -- warning, PDF).
Enjoy!Now the archaeobacteria living below us for the first mile or two down in the rocks will be upgrading, able to grow fast interconnections instead of relying on slow chemical signaling.
I for one welcome our new archaeobacterial underlords.
Maybe they'll be able to make oil faster out of subducted organic material that comes their way, the next time life on the surface of the planet almost dies off.
How do you get all of the bacteria to crap in a straight line?
:)
I mean, all it takes is one of the little buggers to go off in a random direction and it'll short the whole damned circuit.
Unless, of course, we can engineer another strain of bacteria that eat the metal wire and excrete insulated wire.
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...causing ice ages, creating nanowires... ...doh...
I really would like to find out more about this gene.CTAG and all that.Electrons move in a spiral motion simular to the shape of the alpha helix.
I think there gene discovery is bull .
Well, according to my stats and review page, most people think I do. Sorry if I diverge occasionally. That's a beautiful bit of prose that you've constructed, by the way, Mister A.C.
Better lay off booze then - all that alcohol happens to be yeast pee. And bread? Yeast fart.