From the monthly archives:

April 2009

Machines Evolving to the Brink of Failure

April 30, 2009

While writing a post on molecular engineering for the Macromolecular Modeling Blog, I came across an EMBO Reports paper that provided new guidelines for protein engineering; It also illustrates a general principle that should be taken to heart by anyone thinking about molecular engineering from a biomolecular perspective:
Molecular machines tend to evolve toward the [...]

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Top Posts

April 26, 2009

The tab above links a new page that highlights top posts by category. I’ll be updating it from time to time. Here are the current contents:

Selected top posts:

Modular molecular composite nanosystems
Molecular modeling: next steps in development
Self-assembly for atomically precise nanotechnologies
Greenhouse gases and advanced nanotechnology

 

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Earth Day 1970,
and a high road down to molecules

April 23, 2009

I had read Silent Spring before the first Earth Day (now 39 years ago), and I recall telling my classmates that it seemed like a bad idea to spread persistent poisons all over the landscape of a finite world. I was 14, living in a small college town in Oregon.
I read The Limits to Growth [...]

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The Casimir Effect and Nanomachines

April 20, 2009

The Casimir effect can be viewed as a manifestation of the quantum-mechanical zero-point energy of the vacuum, and has recently been hyped as if it were something new and mysterious that will assist or maybe ruin advanced nanomechanical systems. It has inflamed the minds of something-for-nothing energy enthusiasts, too.
In reality, what Casimir described is a [...]

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Macromolecular Modeling
for Molecular Systems Engineering

April 16, 2009

Nir London of the Macromolecular Modeling Blog has invited me to offer my perspective on the field. After patiently waiting for me to complete it, he’s posted the resulting essay, which I have cross-posted below.
The Macromolecular Modeling Blog is hosted by the Rosetta Design Group, which offers molecular modeling services based on the Rosetta protein [...]

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Mechanochemistry, Mechanosynthesis,
and Molecular Machinery

April 14, 2009

Volume 1, Number 1 of Nature Chemistry is now out, and the next issue will include an article titled “Activating catalysts with mechanical force”. This article reports a nice experimental result and helps to illustrate the broad range of physical processes included under the umbrella terms of “mechanochemistry” and “mechanosynthesis”.
The authors demonstrate two examples of [...]

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Motors, Brownian Motors,
and Brownian Mechanosynthesis

April 11, 2009

I read a new paper today titled “A Bipedal DNA Brownian Motor with Coordinated Legs”, but I find that this has prompted me to write not about what is new there — an advance in mechanical DNA nanotechnologies that is related to purely-DNA-based logic circuits — but instead about motors, Brownian motors, and their relationship [...]

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Nanotechnology in Science Fiction
(and vice versa)

April 9, 2009

Advanced nanotechnology concepts and science fiction have been intertwined almost from the beginning. In the early years, critics often declared that the idea of molecular manufacturing “Sounds like science fiction” (like Moon rockets, perhaps?). They were right about the similarity, of course, because science fiction writers had pounced on the ideas almost immediately.
There was a [...]

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Upcoming Talk at the
Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum

April 6, 2009

On April 26th, I’ll be giving a keynote addess at the Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum, a cross-disciplinary meeting organized by the Berkeley Nanotechnology Club and sponsored by the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Berkeley Nanosciences & Nanoengineering Institute, and the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems, among others. The meeting will be Sunday, April [...]

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Nanosystems for Molecular Manufacturing

April 4, 2009

While upgrading parts of the E-drexler.com website, though, I’ve been re-reading some of the on-line content from Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, the book that grew into, then out of, my MIT dissertation. Nanosystems explores what physics tells us about the potential of advanced molecular manufacturing systems and products. It outlines some ideas about [...]

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Graphene Nanotechnology
(and TEAM Microscopes)

April 2, 2009

I’ve intended to write about the wonders of graphene and related materials for nanotechnology, both as products and as a basis for building productive nanosystems, but there is so much to say that I didn’t know where to begin. As Rosa reminds me, though, a great virtue of a blog is that you can use [...]

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