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3D Crystal Grown On a DNA Lattice
An anonymous reader suggests an article over at ScienceDaily about the achievement of the holy grail of nanoscience: "[R]esearchers at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have for the first time used DNA to guide the creation of three-dimensional, ordered, crystalline structures of nanoparticles. The ability to engineer such 3-D structures is essential to producing functional materials that take advantage of the unique properties that may exist at the nanoscale — for example, enhanced magnetism, improved catalytic activity, or new optical properties."
Did you light the grail science-beacon on top of the castle? You must be punished!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Pfft! In Soviet Russia, three-dimensional, crystalline nanoparticles grow on YOU!!!
My blog
We're built from information contained in DNA, is it so far a stretch to think that one day we will grow the items we need on a day to day basis? Perhaps this is the basis for replicator technology.
Synthehol anyone?
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When you quote a piece, you're supposed to put anything you add that isn't in the original quote in square brackets. What you add is supposed to be harmless, of course, not changing the original meaning, but keeping it grammatically and typographically correct.
In this case, the full quote would be:
"In an achievement some see as the "holy grail" of nanoscience, researchers..."
The summary dropped the introductory phrase, which makes the quote:
"researchers..."
But if the quote is used where it is, the first letter should be capitalized to make it grammatically correct. Hence, the capital is added, but it's put in square brackets to put you on notice that this is not precisely a direct quote.
Another common use of the convention is when you quote something that contains a pronoun, and you need to put the proper nouns in to make sense of it:
"Joe Slashdot couldn't care less. He hated journalists anyway."
To quote only the second sentence, you'd write:
"[Joe] hated journalists anyway."
Because if you leave it as "he" your audience wouldn't know who the heck "he" is.
a brief explanation of what this is all about:
Intel and AMD spends billions of dollars to print 'tiny' lines. It's actually the *most* expensive and difficult part of the manufacturing process. Scientists now are trying to exploit the tiniest, most precise printing process that nature does routinely. By 'piggy backing' on DNA molecules, scientists/engineers can put materials where they want. Gold is not too interesting since it's just a conductor. But it's a start.
Moreover, with the advances in organic semiconductors, the opportunities seem even more interesting.
Blog
DNA structure deduced from crystallography, now crystals formed in DNA lattice. Kind of fun how that worked out.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
I though the holy grail was self replicating fabricators effectively killing the economy when people can print diamonds, gold, oil, electric cars, monster trucks, food, medical supplies, platinum, titanium, nanotubes, cake, solar panels, computers (to the point that it becomes a computing power vs mass and probably quantum), mp3 players, replacement organs, replacement people, guns, nukes, space elevator materials, self sustaining spaceships/stations, replacement cells to reverse the aging process, green eggs and ham, money, billions of tiny wireless internet routers, man machine interfaces, an actual holy grail (probably many verities, including those from the Indiana Jones movies), mind uploading systems.
A 3D crystal might be cool and could help lead to that but I wouldn't describing it as the 'holy grail' is a bit much
cat
Dude just look at my thesis, it has magnetism, DNA and nanoparticles and to show off I threw in 3D-particles, Im definitely going to pass this year.