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Electric Motor Made From a Single Molecule
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time, an electric motor has been made from a single molecule. At 1 nanometre long, it's the smallest electric motor ever. Its creators plan to submit their design to Guinness World Records, but the teeny motor could have practical applications, such as pushing fluid through narrow pipes in 'lab-on-a-chip' devices. E. Charles Sykes at Tufts University in Boston and colleagues anchored lopsided butyl methyl sulphide to a copper surface and flowed current through it."
does it comes with gears?
imagine if you took a conical bath...
Molecules have previously converted energy from light and chemical reactions into directed motion like rolling or flapping. Electricity has also set an oxygen molecule spinning randomly. But controlled, electrically-driven motion â" necessary for a device to be classed as a motor â" had not yet been observed in a single molecule.
Try reading that and try not to get the wrong impression. Faping?
It clearly reads "flapping."
Stop fapping so much, turns your brain into jelly.
When will they release drivers for Linux?
Is that they want $18 for instant access to the full document...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Now I can see how my car does on the quarter mile
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
he's probably right
Impressive yes, but it looks like they`re defining a motor as an armateur while ignoring the equipment that generates the electric fields.
wtf has happened to /. is it really all trolls? doesn't anyone have anything useful to say?
the axis is a few atoms of copper, the asymmetric butyl methyl sulphide molecule, which is a sulphur atom with a chain of four carbons on one side and a lone carbon atom on the other. The molecule is pinned down somehow by the copper atoms 'binding'? to sulphuf atom, which forms a 'propeller' and then they apply DC to it and the molecule rotates 50 times a second. I say what, build 2 of these, link the copper parts together, attach the world's smallest battery and put an amoeba on top. You got yourself the world's smallest biker.
Liquid crystal molecules (e.g., the cyanobiphenyls with aliphatic tails which form E7) have lengths of ca. 2 nm. These definitely respond to external electric or magnetic fields to spin and reorient (otherwise, you'd likely be looking at a fairly boring screen right now...)
The novelty here is that the researchers have formed a pivot about which the structure rotates. Further, they seem to have overcome any electrostatic attraction to the surface which would act to lock the molecule in place.
Interesting stuff.
I'm thinking plasma pumps...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Molecular manufacturing technology may be decades away, but things like this are enheartening to read about. Out of all of the possible technologies we might develop in the foreseeable future, molecular manufacturing nanotechnology is the most promising. (that we know are possible within the laws of physics...antigravity or free energy would be nice but we don't know of any physical principles that would allow them)
Essentially, "all" we have to do is develop a nanoscale machine that is made of gears and motor systems like this one and has sensors and electronics packages. It has to duplicate the functions of a 3d printer under extremely controlled conditions.
Limitations on the machine : conditions will need to be as predictable as humans can make them. That means cryogenic temperatures, a vacuum chamber, a steady and consistent power source, and a steady supply of completely pure feedstock to work with.
The machine's function would be to place a single atom in one of several possible locations, and/or to stabilize a structure with some kind of atomic clamp that injects or removes electric charge. Each machine would probably only be able to work in a single case...say a carbon atom in a single bonding scenario for one machine.
You'd build arrays of these machines, and with a few hundred variants of the machine (each one only slightly different than the others) you'd have a complete printing system able to print nearly any structure you have the atomic bonding map for, including COPIES OF THEMSELVES.
That last bit is everything. Nanotechnology is merely a hyper-expensive way to make high end electronics and other expensive items without self replication.
WITH it, the sky is the limit. With self replication, we could very soon make huge arrays of these 3d printers, big flat plates with trillions and trillions of individual, identical subunits. These machines could gradually produce, inside big vacuum chambers and at cryogenic temperatures, almost anything you have the resources and means to make.
All those kids who claim they want to help the unfortunate in Africa? We need this kind of technology to really make a dent in the world's problems. Anyone want to go to outer space? The only real way we could ever make rocket rides cheap enough for the average man is if building high end spacecraft was as easy as printing out the parts, with near complete automation (and the parts would be atomically near-perfect, eliminating the need for most quality control)
We could even use disposable rockets this way...just send out a tractor to pick up the spent stages, melt down the metals in a plasma furnace to separate the different elements, and reform the atomic feedstock you need to print out new spacecraft.
Want artificial intelligence? Ain't going to happen with today's software methods nor today's neuroscience. But if you could look at atomically perfect scans of a perfectly preserved human brain (through careful cryogenic freezing and fixation) you could actually steal the firmware of human intelligence right from the hardware. With automated tools, you'd convert neural maps of human beings you KNOW were sentient (before they died) and emulate them on molecular computing circuitry. It probably would still be an incredible challenge, but with these kinds of tools I think working AI would be merely a matter of time.
Tired of being born, growing up, enjoying a brief period of good health and sexual function, and then gradually declining decade after decade until death? In the long run, this same technology could be used to repair human bodies or even eliminate the need for them entirely.
Here is a great idea for stimulus and money well spent - put more money towards R&D, build moire atoms and molecules, whatever, will generate jobs, engineering, science. Stop wars and spend money on building. Infrastructure, science, universities, schools, engineers, molecules, anything to get the economy going in the right direction. With these electrical motors, who needs oil? Put more electrical motors all over the place, attach some solar cells and wind tunnels, get moving, fix the economy.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
Isn't there a nanofoot, imperial units users?
Just because someone has "experience", doesn't make them good. Especially if they're clearly and terrifyingly ignorant. Usually I don't give a fuck about politics, but if I were American, I would have voted for Obama. I would have voted for a mouldy lump of cheese over Palin. The only person I'd trust less than her is that beauty pageant woman talking about "the Iraq and such as like".
which is totally what she said
You're thinking of the theoretical subatomic particle known as the Bachmann Neuron. The scientists at the LHC are going to investigate its existence once they've finished their work on the Higgs Boson - that's much more important, and most research suggest that the Bachmann Neuron is very unlikely to exist anyways.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
http://youtu.be/A5lVnTleSgs
The group also made a video trying to explain the project.
Every single nanobot would need to have an algorithmic description of the construction plan of the target device
This isn't necessary and is in fact a potentially dangerous design if you are considering grey goo. Numbered instructions can instead be transmitted to the assemblers on a continuously repeating loop. Aside from being safer, it simplifies the design of the assembler.
How long until we see a General Products Hull?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
;-)
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Much like Palin's brain, so they are quite comparable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm pretty sure this is a Star Trek: Voyager episode. This should get the attention of the Borg.
We don't live in Shouldland.
You think she said she could see Russia from her house in Alaska.
Refer to the 57 US states?
Refer to a Navy corpsman as "corpse man"?
Think Sioux Falls SD is in Iowa?
Say Arkansas was closer to Kentucky than Illinois?
Think that the same languages are spoken in Iraq and Afghanistan so that translators assigned to Iraq (who speak Arabic or Kurdish) could be effectively reassigned to Afghanistan (where they speak Pashto or Farsi)?
Oh wait, that was Obama.
And don't even get me started on Biden.
I can't stand Palin myself, but she's nowhere near taking the cake on ignorance and gaffes.
These guys built a rotor, not a motor, of molecular size. A motor also needs a stator and a commutation device in this case, as it is supposed to always turn in one direction, not "mostly" like this does. To be a motor, you have to include the tunneling microscope apparatus as its stator which blows their Guinness claims out of the water. What I also cannot believe is that they scammed their way into a peer reviewed journal with this joke.