Nano-Scale Robot Arm Moves Atoms With 100% Accuracy

destinyland writes "A New York professor has built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The nano-scopic device is just 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit inside a single red blood cell. But because of its size, it's able to build nanoscale structures and machines — including a nanoscale walking biped and even sequence-dependent molecular switch arrays!"

Comments

"Success Rate" not "Accuracy"

[michaelmalak]

"100% Accuracy" implies a positional error of zero meters (to infinite decimal places), which is obviously not what they're talking about. Amazingly, this mistake is not just in the Slashdot summary, but in the cached FA as well.

If we go to the referenced Nature article abstract we see that the development "yields programmed targets in all cases."

The correct terminology then would be "100% Success Rate" not "100% Accuracy".

P.S. Presumably "success" is defined by something like "90% Accuracy", to put an ironic spin on it. But it makes no sense to speak of accuracy in terms of percentage without a reference, such as "a single atom". So the criteria was probably something like X nanometers accuracy.

Re:Question:

[blincoln]

Can they make gold?

This device manipulates atoms and molecules, not individual protons and neutrons within the nucleus of an atom. So no, it can't make gold out of another element. You can do that with nuclear reactions if you want to live the alchemists' dream.
It's still really amazing. I wish Feynman had lived to see it.

Re:Did we just break heisenberg's principle?

[martas]

i don't know why this is rated funny, but it's true. even your table has wave-like properties, and theoretically it could be passed through a diffraction grid, and you'd get cool positive/negative interference of the table with itself if you put a wall on the other side of the grid. the only problem is that the table would have to move very slowly...