From the category archives:

Nanotechnology

Open comment thread for
“Molecular Manufacturing:
The NRC study and its recommendations”

January 7, 2010

Comments on “Molecular Manufacturing: The NRC study and its recommendations” are invited below.

“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”
(Richard Feynman, Pasadena, 29 December 1959)

December 29, 2009

“Feynman’s 1959 talk, entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’”, was delivered 50 years ago today, and the words I’ve quoted above are the first words in the first sentence of the first paper I wrote, almost 30 years ago, on what later became known as “nanotechnology”. Feynman read and discussed the paper with [...]

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The Molecular Machine Path
to Molecular Manufacturing (2):
Exploiting Improved Methods and Building Blocks

December 27, 2009

Part 4 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

Rigid, structurally diverse bis-peptide oligomers C. Schafmeister, JACS, 2006

In this post, I’d like to outline the promise of fabrication technologies that are within reach of [...]

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Update to
“The promise that launched
the field of nanotechnology”

December 27, 2009

Part of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

I’ve updated my recent post, “The promise that launched the field of nanotechnology”, with the following graphic and caption:

Engines of Creation, boosted by the 1986 OMNI [...]

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The Molecular Machine Path
to Molecular Manufacturing (1):
Foldamers and Brownian Assembly

December 25, 2009

Part 3 of a series prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

Lathe, 1911 A machine tool, used to make machines

In my view, the most attractive way forward in developing advanced molecular machine systems is by exploiting the molecular machine systems that are available today. Historically, [...]

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Basement development? Big leaps?

December 20, 2009

Part 2.1 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.
A commenter on the previous post has aired the often-mentioned basement-breakthrough scenario for achieving high-level molecular manufacturing. This scenario makes no sense, and I probably [...]

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Molecular Manufacturing: Where’s the progress?

December 19, 2009

Part 2 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

John Stewart Mill Debugging defects in human thought

As cognitive psychologists know, we human beings suffer from multiple, systematic cognitive biases, aberrations of intellectual vision that [...]

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The promise that launched
the field of nanotechnology

December 15, 2009

Part 1 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

When the first million readers encountered “nanotechnology”
Now, over 20 years after the fact, it is easy to forget that a concept called “nanotechnology” first swept [...]

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Quantum-coupled single-electron
thermal to electric conversion

December 4, 2009

An analysis in the current Journal of Applied Physics shows how to achieve solid-state conversion of thermal energy to electrical power by exploiting the physics of coupled quantum dots, delivering high power density at an efficiency close to the Carnot limit. The work also provides an excellent example of the methodology of exploratory engineering.
The approach [...]

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Flat graphene is stable, even in theory

November 23, 2009

Many scientific papers suggest that the mere existence of free-standing graphene sheets violates theoretical expectations, that it is an anomaly that demands an explanation because flat graphene sheets would somehow destroy themselves. A paper in the current Nature describes “Ultraflat graphene”, but this graphene resides safely on mica surfaces. The paper mentions the numerous observations [...]

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Most popular posts, continued…

November 18, 2009

A few weeks ago, I highlighted some of the most popular posts in Metamodern’s first year (see “Knowledge about Knowledge…”). Posts that offer videos, documents, or talk slides also ranked high:
With downloadable documents and talk slides:

Molecular Nanomachines: Physical Principles and Implementation Strategies
My MIT dissertation — a draft of Nanosystems — is now online [...]

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How to make carbon nanotubes
at room temperature

November 15, 2009

As I noted in a recent post on self-assembled nanoelectronics (“Carbon Nanotube Transistors through DNA Origami”), carbon nanotubes (CNTs) hold promise for self-assembled nanomechanical systems, too: They are orders of magnitude stiffer than biomolecules, and can serve not only as rigid components, but also as low-friction linear and rotary bearings to support moving parts.
Recent [...]

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