Slashdot Mirror
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!"
If it can move and place particles with 100% accuracy then at least at some point we know both where it is and how fast it's moving...
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
does this mean someone can artificially alter their DNA using the nanobots?
Exactly. Moving individual atoms and placing them where we want them is about as fine grained as we can get before we run into the Uncertainty Principle.
"100% Accuracy" implies a positional error of zero meters (to infinite decimal places), which is obviously not what they're talking about.
I caught that, too. But really "percent" doesn't even make sense as a unit of accuracy, does it? Unless it's fractional, in which case I'd take it to mean that if you want to make a relative move of x, you'll get something in the range (0,2x) or maybe (0.5x, 1.5x)? I mean, on the nano scale that's still kind of remarkable, but as you've pointed out it's just not what they mean. /pedantic
m0nstr42.blogspot.com