Nano-trains in New Scientist

The Evil Dwarf from Hell writes "New Scientist has a very interesting article on Nano-trains. The researcher built the tracks out of microtubles in cow neurons with the motors of kinesin running on fuel of ATP. " OK, next I need a nano-train that speeds up the flow of my neuropeptides across the synaptic cleft. Then I'm set-or starting on a whole new set of things.

Comments

The usefulness of bottom-up instead of top-down

[Chris Worth]

A basic principle of Drexlerian nanotech is that bottom-up is better than top-down. This nanotrain is a huge achievement, but ultimately it's quite simple - just a few moving parts. And once you've built something simple but foolproof, you can build something a bit more complex on top.... and test it to foolproofness again... and then... it's essentially how life developed, except evolution is somewhat more random.

There's a parallel here with software, of course - open source stuff "grows" bottom-up from hundreds of coders solving real problems, whereas Windows trickled top-down into a thousand pools of problems. For me, this is a more fundamental difference between OSS and CSS than the few coders/many coders difference. If we're to build the incredibly complex machines nanotech will make possible, we have to go the bottom-up route - no question.