From the category archives:

Videos

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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Agile robots, dexterous robots (with videos)

August 27, 2009

Forget about clumsy, lumbering robots. Think fast, precise, and acrobatic.
[Update: only potentially disturbing videos.]

See also the series on High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing —

— Small Parts (with videos, no robots)
— Assembly (with videos, no robots)
— Assembling larger products (with video of a very fast robot)

And…

Why I hate “nanobots”

[...]

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Productive Nanosystems: The Ribosome Videos

July 16, 2009

While browsing the literature on the catalysis of bond formation in protein synthesis by ribosomes*, I came across a wonderful set of videos of the ribosomal protein manufacturing system at work, shown in recent-state-of-the-art molecular detail. These videos were presented in a Chemical & Engineering News article online, but I missed seeing them at the [...]

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What is simple?
Polyethylene, molecular modeling,
and molecular machines

July 8, 2009

A scientist recently remarked to me that molecular modeling techniques cannot accurately predict the mechanical properties of typical polymers, even one as simple as polyethylene, a hydrocarbon consisting of long chains of –(CH2)– units. He was, I think, suggesting that molecular modeling may tell us little about molecular technologies based on structures that would be [...]

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Homo floresiensis, Crows,
and the Baldwin Effect

May 30, 2009

Some scientists have expressed surprise that Homo floresiensis made and used stone tools despite having remarkably small brain. I can see two reasons why this should be no cause for astonishment: One is the intelligence of crows, the other is the Baldwin Effect.
Crows
An adult H. sapiens brain typically weights well over a kilogram. H. floresiensis [...]

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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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AFM Atom Manipulation: A surprising technique

March 14, 2009

Shortly before I launched Metamodern, Science published a remarkable paper by Sugimoto et al. describing atom-by-atom manipulation of a monatomic layer of tin (Sn) on silicon (Si). The animation to the right shows the steps in constructing a pattern of Si atoms that spells ‘Si’. Each frame is an atomic force microscope image made [...]

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High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing:
Assembling larger products (with videos)

March 4, 2009

I’ll get back to self-assembly and related topics soon, but at the moment, I’d like to show more about how macroscale manufacturing works today. There are strong analogies to engineering problems that will arise when a technology base is in place for building complex nanomachines, and I hope that even readers from manufacturing-oriented engineering cultures [...]

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The Space Debris Collision Problem

March 3, 2009

A few weeks ago, a US and Russian satellite collided, spreading debris around near-Earth space. The video below shows an animation based on a state-of-the-art model of the event and the resulting clouds of ultra-high-speed projectiles. Collisions like this can be expected to occur with increasing frequency.
The Economist just ran an editorial calling for countries [...]

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High-Throughput Nanomanufacturing:
Assembly (with videos)

March 1, 2009

If you wanted to use automation to assemble an enormous number of small things, would you use robots? For throughput in the 100 ms/cycle, million-product-per-day range, a room full of robots waving their arms around might not be the best solution. A manufacturing engineer is more likely to think of using a machine like the [...]

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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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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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