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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!"
So, the first one builds a friend, then each builds a friend, and each of those builds a friend. Soon enough there will be millions, and they will be able to invade your blood cells!
I for one welcome our nano sized robot overlords
-EL
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?
Now it is possible to build the perfect woman! Of course, it'll take a few thousand years to get her fully assembled.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
That narrows it down.
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.
The Nature Nanotechnology article is almost a year old. There are lots of people working on similar stuff, here's a review which mentions the Seeman work among many others (you probably need a library subscription to see the article, but the abstract should be accessible at least):
http://journals2.scholarsportal.info/details-sfx.xqy?uri=/14394227/v10i0015/2420_catdn.xml
I don't know a heck of a lot about nanorobots and such, so I don't know whether it's possible or not, but if placing atoms with 100% accuracy is possible, shouldn't it also be possible to _remove_ atoms with 100% accuracy?
In that case, would it be possible to build something that disassembles atmospheric carbon dioxide, and build pencil lead and release oxygen in the process?
Of course, then you get into the problem of the energy stored in chemical bonds, and the energy required to overcome that. I have no idea if/how that applies to nanoscale robots, since they're mechanically working on individual atoms, rather than a bulk chemical reaction.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
The article is about protein folding and manipulating DNA. It has nothing to do with a robot that picks up atoms and places them somewhere else.
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them
yes, but where the scientists want them and where the scientists have told its programs to put them are two different things!
Gold?
Can they make HP ink?
no, they can't make gold, because they don't move elementary particles, they move atoms. gold is an atom, hence they'd need gold to make gold, which isn't a very impressive feat. what would be cool is if they could take simple graphite (pencil lead), and assemble it into diamonds, and make the whole process significantly cheaper than diamonds are today. it could be a real game-changer, and i'd really enjoy seeing diamonds that now cost millions of dollars lose almost all their value, thus screwing over anyone who has made large investments into diamond jewelery. something like this happened with aluminium - it used to be a very expensive metal, because it was difficult to extract it from the ore, so there was a lot of aluminium jewelery. then some guy came up with a new way to extract it, and it became the cheap-ass metal we all know and love today.
weinersmith
h >= dp * dx / 2 * pi
Modded informative? This equation is backwards.
h is a lower bound on certainty, not an upper bound.
I can assure you that nothing is ever 100%.
and you are 100% certain?
no one said that +5 informative means +5 truthful. In this case we are pleasantly informed of something where the majority of it is true.
Ack!! Thank you!
h <= dp * dx / 2 * pi
is of course the correct equation. Note that the text was correct; I just fat-fingered the inequality.
Just be sure to consult your molecular biologist if you experience a nanotechnological enhancement lasting more than four hours.
Or the writing was some kind of summery giving a general idea using the common-use term exactly and not exactly to scientific precision.
Not a nanobot, but perhaps another tiny incremental step toward positionally controlled chemistry. I can't get to the core Nature article, but it looks like they make a DNA tile cassette, which they can insert a variety of DNA tooltips into. They probably get ~1-10 nm positional accuracy between tooltips. Not precise enough or controlled enough to do diamond mechanosynthesis, but possibly an interesting route to bootstrapping into that kind of technology. As per usual, the biggest problem is that DNA isn't particularly stiff, making it hard to apply the kinds of forces at picometer precision that seems necessary for the sci-fi nanotech visions. Variations of this technology may prove useful in designing and building/folding artificial proteins or biomolecules. With biomineralization, that might eventually provide the stiffness and strength necessary to start beating nature at this mechanosynthetic game.
With all the misinformation in this thread, Schroedinger's cat is rolling over in its grave... with probability one half.
First, the researchers made a nanodevice with two slots that could accommodate so-called "DNA cassettes" in a programmable way. The DNA cassettes themselves have free ends that can only bond with complementary DNA. Each of the DNA cassettes has an 'A' end (that can only bond with other A-type molecules) and a 'B' end (I'm simplifying this greatly; 'A' has nothing to do with adenine). The cassettes can be inserted into the two slots with either the 'A' end up or the 'B' end up. So this means there are a total of four states for the device: (1) first slot: A up, B down; second slot: A up, B down; (2) first slot: A down, B up; second slot: A up, B down, etc. The researchers were then able to take four target molecules (one for each of the four programmable states) and show that they bonded to their complementary state. Further, by developing an error-correcting scheme, they were able to get the fidelity of the bonding to 'apparently flawless' levels (quoting FTA, more on this in a sec).
A little more explanation is in order. All of the target molecules have an 'A' and 'B' marker on both ends of their strand. Now, say for example the nanodevice is in state 2: 1A down, 1B up, 2A up, 2B down. The complementary molecule to bind this state would have four markers with 'A' oriented downward and 'B' oriented upward on one end of the strand, and 'A' orented upward and 'B' oriented downward on the other end of the strand. The problem with this is that other target molecules which aren't complementary can still bind. For example, the target for the 1A up, 1B down, 2A down, 2B up would fit equally well into this binding pocket upside down. Also, any of the target molecules can bind with half of the binding pocket, leaving the non-complementary end either dangling or only loosely bound. The researchers get around these two problems using their error-correction scheme. It turns out that the correct target molecules bind more tightly to their complements than the incorrect ones. By heating the devices slightly, the researchers can dissociate the incorrect binding while keeping the correct binding intact. This is, I believe, what was meant by the phrase '100% accuracy.' So, in short, it's still exciting research, at least from my point of view, but no one's moving individual atoms with 100% accuracy or any of the hyper-exaggerated nonsense that I've been reading here.
Just because she calls it nano doesn't mean....aw.
I don't believe that there's such a thing as "100%" of anything happening at atomic scale. "100%" is what "99.9999999999999%" looks like when things are big enough that you have to drop the precision due to statistical balancing.
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make install -not war
I want Doctors to tell patients in the future "We are going to pump you full of Seeman" with a straight face.