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

Re:Science has triumphed once more!!!!

[mxh83]

"perfect" is a subjective thing. There is no single "perfect" woman. Do you still find the same women attractive as you did 10 years ago, and is there just one such person?

Question:

[Progman3K]

Can they make gold?

If they can place atoms with 100% accuracy, could they not then assemble molecules into any chosen configuration?

When's the first test?

I suppose it would take a long time doing it one atom at a time, but as noted by Feynman, they could make other copies of themselves first and when there are enough of them they could start assembling the elements themselves...