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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."
The researchers will be asking for a bailout instead of a grant?
No cup holders? Worthless. Even Nanites need somewhere to put their Nano-Dr Pepper.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
sorry - too little, too late :)
Oh hell no, please.
My wife has enough trouble finding the regular sized car when she has been shopping.
How the hell will she find a nano-car?
liqbase
I for one look forward to the day when the physical world is reduced to being as fluid as intellectual Property is today.
Have a Nano factory in your garage(call it a replicator for you Star Trek fans) where you can download the latest gadget and it is produced before your eyes.
"The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." -Thomas Szasz
THE car for the man with an incredibly long penis.
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 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
I don't know about that. There are, I think, definitely things that we haven't even begun to imagine. I mean, a couple of centuries ago, they could've only imagined "horseless carriages". I don't think they could even grasp the concept of a nanocar back then, or nano-anything for that matter.
It's pretty pessimistic to think that all that we can achieve is only what we can imagine at the moment. There will probably be more out there for us to discover. Don't worry.
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!
4 nanometers is 1/3,657,600,000 of a Volkswagen.
Here it is --> .
(couldn't help myself)