From the category archives:

Videos

Video of my talk
at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum

December 23, 2011

A video of my talk at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum is now on YouTube. I gave this talk on advanced nanotechnology prospects to an audience drawn from local technical universities during my recent Moscow visit.

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Video of my Oxford nanotechnology lecture

December 7, 2011

I recently gave the Inaugural Lecture for the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology at the Oxford Martin School, and the lecture video is now available.*
The talk describes the application of physical law and exploratory engineering to studies of the future potential of nanotechnology.
Summary here: News & Research Highlights.

* With thanks to Stuart Armstrong, [...]

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Fukushima — where are the Parrots?

March 24, 2011

Here are two Monirobo robotic machines — radiation-hard, 2.4 km/hr, 600 kg robots, recently arrived on site:

These probably aren’t very good at exploring wrecked buildings, viewing fuel storage pools obscured explosion debris, sampling smoke plumes rising from (?), etc.
Here’s a Parrot AR.Drone — iPhone controlled, resistant to multiply-lethal radiation doses [update: > 10 times the [...]

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Molecular machine animations
in the New York Times

November 16, 2010

The New York Times has an article, “Where Cinema and Biology Meet”, on the recent high-quality animations of biomolecular machines.
The author, Erik Olsen, highlights Drew Barry as the Steven Spielberg of the field:
Mr. Berry’s work is revered for artistry and accuracy within the small community of molecular animators, and has also been shown in museums, [...]

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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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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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