May 2011

An advance in atomically precise
building-block assembly

May 27, 2011

A paper in Science reports a design method that substantially advances the macromolecular technology base for building atomically precise nanosystems. Background: foldamer engineering As many readers know, biology shows an effective way build large, intricate, atomically precise systems: Use covalent chemistry to build chains of small building blocks, and design these chains to fold into [...]

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Science and engineering at NIH

May 10, 2011

In response to (yet another) proposal to reorganize and redirect the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Russ Altman writes in Nature that …it is crucial to separate the engine of discovery from the engine of application. Discovery is stochastic and opportunistic; application is the stuff of engineers. That is why attempts to over-engineer discovery fail [...]

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Nanosystems for India

May 6, 2011

Wiley India publishes textbooks “catering to the needs of Indian students”, and now offers Nanosystems:  Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, the book I wrote on the principles and potential components, architectures, and implementation pathways for high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing systems. Here’s a list of Indian distributors. Wiley India, a branch of John Wiley & Sons, [...]

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Polyoxometalate papers

May 3, 2011

Background: polyoxometalate nanostructures are cool (more here). Lee Cronin sent me a pdf of the polyoxometalate paper I discussed in my previous post, and he notes that readers can download it here, with other papers on his group’s website here. The Israel Journal of Chemistry has a new special issue, “Frontiers in Metal Oxide Cluster [...]

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