From the monthly archives:

February 2009

High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing:
Small Parts (with videos)

February 27, 2009

In a post about molecular assembly lines, I discussed non-ribosomal (hence non-programmable) peptide synthetases, a form of specialized molecular manufacturing machinery found in some cells, and added that

In the molecular-manufacturing architecture described in Nanosystems, simple assembly-line mechanisms — not elaborate, programmable machines — perform the overwhelming majority of fabrication operations.

Actually, the term “assembly line” isn’t [...]

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Back to the New Future of Space

February 26, 2009

The National Space Society has released a critical report* on NASA’s performance and objectives which argues that plans to return to the Moon are both underfunded and misdirected. Coauthored by Buzz Aldrin, pilot of the first lunar lander, the report instead advocates missions to near-Earth asteroids (a.k.a.“Near-Earth Objects”, or NEOs), a promising a source of [...]

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Making vs. Modeling:
A paradox of progress in nanotechnology

February 25, 2009

Knowledge and know-how often go together. Where technologies are concerned, we tend to understand the things we make, and often can make the things we understand. This is a widespread pattern, but it’s important to recognize the exceptions, and nanofabrication is one of them.
There’s no necessary connection between understanding something and being able to make [...]

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How Nanotubes Grow: A theory that has nothing to do with reality

February 24, 2009

Today I read a report of a controversy about the growth of carbon nanotubes. There’s an entirely bogus theory involved, two scientists using harsh words, and another scientist taking the hit. Behind the controversy is another theory that I think is almost certainly correct. The real story, though, is in the reporting itself. [See update [...]

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Design Software for Atomically Precise Nanotechnologies

February 23, 2009

Design software is arguably the chief limiting factor in the rate of progress toward advanced nanotechnologies, and this makes it a topic of central importance. Questions of design and modeling also touch on diverse topics: technology objectives, scientific knowledge and unknowns, research directions that deserve many millions of dollars of funding, and specific problems that [...]

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What’s in the Vault?

February 22, 2009

They’re called “vaults”. They‘re in our cells, and in those of every* plant, animal, and fungus. Like ribosomes, they’re atomically precise self-assembled structures made of protein and RNA, but they’re big and hollow, large enough to pack many ribosomes inside. They’re relatively simple and symmetric: A vault consists of two identical halves, each consisting almost [...]

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Nanomachines, Nanomaterials, and Klm

February 20, 2009

Toward Advanced Nanotechnology: Nanomaterials (5)
My previous post in this series, Nanostructures, Nanomaterials, and Lattice-Scaled Stiffness, explains why the lattice-scaled modulus, Klm, is an important figure of merit: For a set of machines made of different materials, but with similar structures (similar numbers and arrangements of lattice cells), the Klm parameter determines the energy required [...]

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Studying Nanotechnology: A Preface

February 18, 2009

Students interested in nanotechnology have often asked me for advice on what to study. I plan to write a series of posts about this, but there’s one basic piece of advice that will serve not only for nanotechnology, but for almost any area of physical science and technology: Study math and physics, then study more, [...]

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Advanced Nanotechnology Keynote

for WORLDCOMP’09

February 17, 2009

I’ll be giving a keynote talk for the opening plenary session of WORLDCOMP’09, the 2009 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing. The conference, to be held July 13–16 in Las Vegas, is the largest annual gathering of researchers in computer science, computer engineering and applied computing.
In my keynote, I’ll describe critical [...]

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Nanostructures, Nanomaterials,
and Lattice-Scaled Stiffness

February 15, 2009

Toward Advanced Nanotechnology: Nanomaterials (4)

The peg aligns with the hole if the hole is large enough, and the fluctuations are small enough.

In a nanofabrication technology that uses nanomachines to assemble products, the stiffness of the machines is important because it limits the amplitude of thermal fluctuations, yet tolerance for fluctuations is important too. When both [...]

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For Darwin Day: On the Origin of Genetic Information

February 12, 2009

The ideas that evolved from Darwin’s thought have shaped my thinking for more than 35 years, and a decade later, writing Engines of Creation, I relied on the generality of evolutionary principles as an anchor point for surveying the future of technology. Today, in my home, “Uncle Charles says…” means “Evolutionary principles say…”

In joining the [...]

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Nanomachines: How the Videos Lie to Scientists

February 10, 2009

Sound physical inference from an illusory premise

Don’t let this animationfool you about the physics!

By now, many scientists have seen videos of molecular-scale mechanical devices like the one shown here, and I have no way to know how many have concluded that the devices are a lot of rubbish (and have perhaps formulated an unfortunate corollary [...]

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