Posts tagged as:

molecular manufacturing

About releasing building blocks…

August 19, 2010

A reader asks a general question about mechanosynthesis — How could a device release a reactive molecule once it’s bound to a product? — and I’d like to outline why there are many answers.

 

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Molecular Manufacturing:
The NRC study and its recommendations

January 7, 2010

Part 6 of a series prompted by the recent 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. This is arguably the most important post of the series, or of this blog to date.
Topics:
— The most credible study of molecular manufacturing to date
— The study’s recommendations for Federal research support
— The [...]

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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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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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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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My MIT dissertation — a draft of Nanosystems —
is now online

September 26, 2009

My MIT doctoral dissertation, “Molecular Machinery and Manufacturing with Applications to Computation”, is a draft of Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation, and MIT has now made it available as a 30 MB pdf. You can download it here.
The Nanosystems project began as notes for a seminar that I taught at Stanford, grew toward a [...]

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The Physical Basis
of High-Throughput
Atomically Precise Manufacturing

June 12, 2009

The section below, adapted from a longer work, discusses the physical basis for understanding atomically precise fabrication systems: first, a very general class of systems, and second, the specific characteristics of high-throughput systems of a kind several technology levels above where we are today. (In my previous post, “A Telescope Aimed at the Future” I [...]

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The Technology Roadmap Translated: Russian

May 13, 2009

The Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems explores how current laboratory techniques for atomically precise fabrication can be extended to develop progressively more powerful fabrication technologies; it focuses on current capabilities and next-stage applications, then outlines paths toward high-throughput molecular manufacturing.
The Russian Academy of Sciences has now made a translation of the Technology Roadmap [pdf] available. [...]

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Earth Day 1970,
and a high road down to molecules

April 23, 2009

I had read Silent Spring before the first Earth Day (now 39 years ago), and I recall telling my classmates that it seemed like a bad idea to spread persistent poisons all over the landscape of a finite world. I was 14, living in a small college town in Oregon.
I read The Limits to Growth [...]

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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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Molecular Assembly Lines

January 5, 2009

Cells use what are, in effect, molecular assembly lines to manufacture a range of complex molecular products. Biochemists recently learned in greater detail how these biomolecular assembly lines work, and are considering how to string devices together to make artificial machines that work the same way.

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