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Nanocar Wins Top Science Award
Lucas123 writes "A researcher who built a car slightly larger than a strand of DNA won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice Univ. built a car only 4 nanometers in width in order to demonstrate that nanovehicles could be controlled enough to deliver payloads to build larger objects, such as memory chips and, someday, even buildings, like a self-assembling machine. Tour and a team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers constructed a car with chassis, working suspension, wheels and a motor. 'You shine light on it and the motor spins in one direction and pushes the car like a paddle wheel on the surface,' Tour said. The team also built a truck that can carry a payload."
OK, jokes aside, that's effing cool. Starting in the new year, I'll be joining a nano research team so things like this are incredibly exciting. As I see it, the ultimate hurdle with nanoscience won't be on the engineering side. The great challenge will be theoretical, determining what microscopic abilities/properties the nanobots/cars/things will need to have in order for the swarm to exhibit the macroscopic behaviour that's desired. So for example, with these nanocars delivering particles in a ground-up assembly. Each car could be completely autonomous and somehow programmed to bring its payload exactly where it's supposed to go, but that would be completely unfeasible: if you're producing 10^23 vehicles, each needs to be exactly the same, not a custom build like this prototype. So instead you need to figure out exactly what properties and initial conditions the swarm has to have so that, collectively, it does what you want. Sort of like reverse engineering an ant colony. It sounds pretty straight forward, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done in the mathematics of this sort of thing. Anyways, very exciting!
I fail to see the likeness between non-intelligent, non-replicating nanocars, and the Replicators.
Sure, they're both self-assembling machines, in a way, but the nanocars lack the communication between each car, and they don't have any way to digest materials and replicate.
And even then, these things carry payloads, they don't form objects by themselves. RTFA.
I thought the most important point in the FA was the shift in thinking which this kind of technology could one day produce:
But in the future, things will be built not from the top down, but the bottom up -- as in nature.
Nature has always pushed it's own tech forward via lots of small things working together. Lots of small things working together also creates redundancy.
Absolute statements are never true
The inventor, Dr. James Tour, states that he did this "so that we can someday construct buildings and other large objects with molecular-size vehicles."
I'm curious to find out how long it would take for nanovehicles to construct large-sized objects. However, an even greater usage for this invention would be to repair and strengthen structurally unstable buildings, dams, levees, etc.
Best "String" Ever!
When the industrial revolution started the workers "would never allow it" then, either. Small groups of people, however organised will never stop truly revolutionary technologies, what ever century they're living in.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
So with 10^23 vehicles...how the frack do you do traffic control?
That's pretty much the same question the city of Los Angeles asks every day. I'm pretty sure they've given up.
It would have to be Hammond that tests it. Clarkson is too fat and May , well, he's just May.
Unfortunately, under the Nanosafety Act, only nanites whose manufacturers have had them cleared through very rigorous (or, at least, expensive) mandatory certifications will be legal for use, and the manufacturers of those will lease them under terms that prohibit use to manufacture anything not licensed from the nanite manufacturer. These provisions, of course, will be to insure the safety and quality of the produced goods, the effect of outlawing use of "free" designs will merely be an unavoidable but necessary inconvenience.