Advance on Nanotech Dip Pen - The Nano Plotter

techtrend writes "In an article on Eurekalert, Northwestern chemists report making the world's smallest plotter, a device capable of drawing multiple lines of molecules -- each line only 15 nanometers or 30 molecules wide -- with such precision that only five nanometers. They lay down a grid of lines made of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid (MHA). Then dots of octadecanethiol (ODT) are placed at pre-calculated positions using the grid for precision positioning. They plan to use this process to make ultrahigh density arrays of different organic and biological material and nanostructures. "

Comments

Re:People, start looking at the big picture...

[WillWare]

I think I'd rather help bring it around than just sit and hope.

The first, biggest thing to do is to further your education. Physics and chemistry are good places to start. Rambling conjectures on nanotech tend to assume that nothing is impossible, but nanotech will be bound by physical law like every other technology.

An excellent area for contribution is design software. Currently there are a number of excellent free molecular modeling packages: MMTK, NAMD, Moldy, NWchem. There are also several excellent display programs: RasMol, VMD, Midas, and my own feeble effort, xyz2rgb. What is still lacking is:

• Software to generate structures painlessly. Two efforts in this area are CavityStuffer by Markus Krummenacker, DiamondCAD by Chris Phoenix and John Michelsen, and some tinkering of mine.
• Some kind of wrapper that makes all this stuff easy to use. There is a commercial package called HyperChem, and the DiamondCAD folks are working on an open-source version called OpenChem.

And if you really want to go wild with this stuff, get a job at Zyvex.