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The World's Smallest Car
starexplorer writes "Start your Nano-engines? LiveScience.com is reporting that researchers at Rice University have designed the world's smallest car that is no more than 4 nanometers across. It has a chassis, axles and a pivoting suspension. The wheels are buckyballs. Why do it? The team wants to build a fleet of nanotrucks to carry atoms and molecules around minature factories." So it's not exactly self-powered, but it rolls. It's a start!
Can anyone else admit they feel humbled when they read things like this?
You know, there's a word for a vehicle that doesn't have an engine, or a bed, and is smaller than a car.
It's called a wagon.
Doesn't sound as cool, does it? But that's what it is, isn't it?
Rechargable nanomotors that don't break - that's what we need for this kind of thing. Its the holy grail for nanotech right now.
If you don't avoid all references to objects that move under their own power (and you're talking about nanotech), then you're sensationalizing the news. Its like saying "Fusion done in cold!" when you mean that someone built a fusion laser system in Anarctica. Obviously cold means something specific when its that close to the word "Fusion."
Keep up the sensationalism, and you can't get the point across when you come across something that's actually fantastic.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
What is a nano-toxin? How does it differ from a toxin? In what way does the creation of a small macromolecule in the shape of a car contribute to toxicity?
This is phobia and panic, started in the realm of GE food, and spreading, through ignorance, into the world of nanotech. Nanotech is ill defined, and literally means anything over the nano-scale. Scaremongers try to use new scary words (hence their profession), like nano-toxin, and site that nanoparticles are in things like sunscreen, aerosols...etc. Of course they are, for without TiO4 in sunscreen, it wouldn't block ultraviolet rays, and it wouldn't work. I fail to see the difference between a nano-toxin and a toxin, but regardless of what I fail to see, this kind of irrational skepticism and 'but it could be NANO-toxic!' are unhelpful, and only serve to further the divide between scientists and society. Likewise, scientists dismissing the concerns of the public also furthers this divide.
Inform yourself, ask questions of the scientists, but don't say sarcastic unhelpful things like 'it's perfect for producing nano-toxins', without explaining how this might occur.
M.