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."

Comments

lots of small things working together

[cats-paw]

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.