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Walking Molecule Now Carries Packages

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the delivery-in-20-minutes-or-it's-free dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Chemists from the University of California at Riverside designed two years ago a molecule which could move straight on a flat surface — a nano-walker if you wish. Now, they've found a way to force this walking molecule to carry packages. The nano-worker can now carry two CO2 molecules. And like yourself when you carry two heavy bags, this nano-worker is slower when it carries other molecules. The researchers think their discovery will lead to reliable ways of carrying molecules, an equivalent of the conveyor belts in today's factories."

5 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Energy Source? by William_Lee · · Score: 5, Informative

    What powers this thing?

    From a previous article on the walker:

    "Activated by heat or the nudge of a scanning tunneling microscope tip, DTA will pull up one foot, put down the other, and thus walk in a straight line across a flat surface. The planted foot not only supplies support but also keeps the body of the molecule from veering or stumbling off course."

  2. Re:Energy Source? by ThePopeLayton · · Score: 2, Informative

    Probably ATP, which powers about 90% of the biochemical energy dependent reactions.
    Some reactions require GTP, CTP, or UTP. These other nucleotide tri-phosphates are used much less and only for very specific functions, so it could be one of these but I would bet against them. Other possible sources of energy are: concentration gradients, membrane potentials, pH gradients, etc... There are many many different sources of energy in the biochemical world, however for most biological reactions ATP is the energy source of choice.

  3. New tag by techno-vampire · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've started a new tag, just for this article: piquepaille. The idea is to warn everybody that it's Just Another Slashvertizement.

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    1. Re:New tag by shawn(at)fsu · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually if you would have taken the time to mouseover the link you would have seen that it didn't go to his blog or column, it went to the university's website. Not that I'm a huge Roland fan, but your statement is just flat out wrong.

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  4. Re:Where's the power supply? by Tim+C · · Score: 4, Informative

    The problem a lot of people have with Roland is:

    1) For a while a year or two ago, it seemed like every other story posted was submitted by him
    2) He used to always link *only* to his own blog, not to the actual article in question
    3) He (used to?) sells his consulting services on how to drive traffic to your website
    4) Despite numerous complaints and comments, neither he nor the admins were listening to us

    Now they're not necessarily all his fault, but all together it lead to an awful lot of speculation, including about whether or not he was paying for his stories to be posted. It was this uproar, when the admins finally took notice, that lead to the "nofollow" attribute being added to the submittor's URL when a story is posted.

    I can't blame him for shamelessly seeking a little bit of publicity on Slashdot in order to make some money with his blog.

    That's just it though - for a while, he was shamelessly seeking - and getting - a lot of publicity. It started to look an awful lot like advertising to a lot of people, some of which pay not to get adverts here.

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