From the category archives:

Videos

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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Productive Nanosystems: The Movies

January 30, 2009

In his comment on Molecular Machine Assembly: The Movie, Drew Whitehouse reminded me of a set of excellent animations of biological productive nanosystems, work done by Drew Berry. These videos are based on scientific data describing molecular structure and function, and from what I’ve seen, Drew Berry’s work is the best of its kind. Below [...]

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Molecular Machine Assembly: The Movie

January 12, 2009

I just watched an extraordinary set of videos that shows the assembly and operation of an intricate molecular machine. Beware, though: these highly realistic videos lie — but because they must!

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