Posts tagged as:

Nanotechnology

How to study for a career in nanotechnology

February 24, 2010

Students often ask me for advice on how to study for a career in nanotechnology, and as you might imagine, providing a good answer is challenging. “Nanotechnology” refers to a notoriously broad range of areas of science and technology, and progress during a student’s career will open new areas, and some are yet to be [...]

Read the full article →

“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”
(Richard Feynman, Pasadena, 29 December 1959)

December 29, 2009

“Feynman’s 1959 talk, entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’”, was delivered 50 years ago today, and the words I’ve quoted above are the first words in the first sentence of the first paper I wrote, almost 30 years ago, on what later became known as “nanotechnology”. Feynman read and discussed the paper with [...]

Read the full article →

Molecular Nanomachines: Physical Principles and Implementation Strategies

October 1, 2009

I’ve migrated another paper to E-drexler.com:

Drexler, KE. “Molecular Nanomachines: Physical Principles and Implementation Strategies”, Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure, 23:377-405 (1994).
(With thanks to Robert Bradbury for the original HTML conversion.)

Click to read.

See also:

The Physical Basis of Atomically Precise Manufacturing
A Telescope Aimed at the Future
Productive nanosystems: the physics of molecular fabrication [pdf] (from [...]

Read the full article →

How to Learn About Everything

May 27, 2009

My recent post “How to Understand Everything (and Why)” discussed an untaught, integrative kind of knowledge, and why is so important in science and engineering — how it can leverage specialized knowledge and improve the trade-off between bold innovation and costly blunders. I discussed the nature of this knowledge and how it can be applied, [...]

Read the full article →

Nanotechnology and Nuclear Reactions

May 4, 2009

Both nanotechnologies and nuclear reactions involve interactions between small things, but so far as I can see, they won’t have much interaction with each other at a really basic level. Nanotechnologies have potential applications to processing materials and making devices that are useful in nuclear technologies, but the nuclear interactions themselves are in an almost [...]

Read the full article →

Machines Evolving to the Brink of Failure

April 30, 2009

While writing a post on molecular engineering for the Macromolecular Modeling Blog, I came across an EMBO Reports paper that provided new guidelines for protein engineering; It also illustrates a general principle that should be taken to heart by anyone thinking about molecular engineering from a biomolecular perspective:
Molecular machines tend to evolve toward the [...]

Read the full article →

Mechanochemistry, Mechanosynthesis,
and Molecular Machinery

April 14, 2009

Volume 1, Number 1 of Nature Chemistry is now out, and the next issue will include an article titled “Activating catalysts with mechanical force”. This article reports a nice experimental result and helps to illustrate the broad range of physical processes included under the umbrella terms of “mechanochemistry” and “mechanosynthesis”.
The authors demonstrate two examples of [...]

Read the full article →

Motors, Brownian Motors,
and Brownian Mechanosynthesis

April 11, 2009

I read a new paper today titled “A Bipedal DNA Brownian Motor with Coordinated Legs”, but I find that this has prompted me to write not about what is new there — an advance in mechanical DNA nanotechnologies that is related to purely-DNA-based logic circuits — but instead about motors, Brownian motors, and their relationship [...]

Read the full article →

Upcoming Talk at the
Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum

April 6, 2009

On April 26th, I’ll be giving a keynote addess at the Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum, a cross-disciplinary meeting organized by the Berkeley Nanotechnology Club and sponsored by the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Berkeley Nanosciences & Nanoengineering Institute, and the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems, among others. The meeting will be Sunday, April [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Atomic Layer Deposition
for Atomically Precise Fabrication

March 23, 2009

I recently posted on a surprising atomically precise fabrication process, and in a comment, Tom Craver remarked that
If a method like this could be combined with Single Layer Deposition , it seems like it’d be getting awfully close to allowing building 3D structures — embedded in a solid, so the next step would be [...]

Read the full article →

A High-Performance Polymer
for Nanosytems Engineering

March 19, 2009

Molecular objects made of a nylon-like, high-performance polymer are among the most impressive nanostructures in existence today, and I expect structures like these to be used in developing advanced, atomically precise nanotechnologies in the coming years. This high-performance polymer is really more of a construction kit: Its monomeric parts can be hooked up to make [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries