Posts tagged as:

bionanotechnology

A High-Performance Polymer
for Nanosytems Engineering

March 19, 2009

Molecular objects made of a nylon-like, high-performance polymer are among the most intricate and functional nanostructures in existence today, and they’re being used to develop increasingly advanced, atomically precise nanotechnologies. This high-performance polymer is really more of a construction kit: Its monomeric parts can be bonded and folded to build atomically precise structures that self-assemble [...]

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Pyrite Nanomaterials for Solar Photovoltaics

March 13, 2009

A new paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology assesses the requirements for scaling solar photovoltaic systems to the terawatt levels needed to supply electric power on a global scale. The authors identify iron pyrite, FeS2, as an attractive but unconventional alternative: The raw materials for pyrite aren’t scarce, and both the energy and [...]

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CAD for Nanoengineering: DNA, proteins, and search-intensive design

March 11, 2009

In my previous post I discussed some basic design concerns that arise with atomically precise structures, and focused on materials having crystalline order. However, the ability to make structures like these is now extremely limited. Because they can’t yet be built systematically from smaller building blocks, structures of this general are more likely to be [...]

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Making vs. Modeling:
A paradox of progress in nanotechnology

February 25, 2009

Knowledge and know-how often go together. Where technologies are concerned, we tend to understand the things we make, and often can make the things we understand. This is a widespread pattern, but it’s important to recognize the exceptions, and nanofabrication is one of them.
There’s no necessary connection between understanding something and being able to make [...]

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What’s in the Vault?

February 22, 2009

They’re called “vaults”. They‘re in our cells, and in those of every* plant, animal, and fungus. Like ribosomes, they’re atomically precise self-assembled structures made of protein and RNA, but they’re big and hollow, large enough to pack many ribosomes inside. They’re relatively simple and symmetric: A vault consists of two identical halves, each consisting almost [...]

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Nanomachines, Nanomaterials, and Klm

February 20, 2009

Toward Advanced Nanotechnology: Nanomaterials (5)
My previous post in this series, Nanostructures, Nanomaterials, and Lattice-Scaled Stiffness, explains why the lattice-scaled modulus, Klm, is an important figure of merit: For a set of machines made of different materials, but with similar structures (similar numbers and arrangements of lattice cells), the Klm parameter determines the energy required [...]

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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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Nanomedicine, Nanomaterials, and the NIH

December 29, 2008

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been developing what they term the NIH Nanomedicine Roadmap Initiative. This is much more than a study; it’s a research program that includes a national network of eight Nanomedicine Development Centers.

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Modular Molecular Composite Nanosystems

November 10, 2008

Framework-directed self assembly
Researchers have amassed a wonderful collection of functional, atomically precise components with potentially useful properties — optical, electronic, chemical, mechanical, and so on — but they haven’t been assembled to make complex, atomically precise nanosystems. I think of this as the “circuit-board problem”: Functional devices are small, simple, and may have interesting physics, [...]

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Combining Molecular Signals

October 27, 2008

When I discuss medical applications in my talks, I often mention the advantage of targeting cells with active agents, such as toxins, directed by adding and thresholding signals from sensors of different kinds. This is not so necessary in targeting bacteria and viruses, since they look so different from mammalian cells, but could help greatly [...]

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