Posts tagged as:

Nanotechnology

Moscow Report (II):
Russians embrace a radical vision
of nanotechnology

December 21, 2011

(This is followup to my brief post from Moscow.)
Because I’m primarily known for the concept of an advanced, atomically precise nanotechnology, the enthusiastic welcome I received in Moscow at Rusnanotech 2011 indicates how the idea is received in Russia. With that in mind, here are some markers of Russian interest in the concept:

Dmitry Medvedev speaking [...]

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Crystallizing molecular assemblies
that don’t exist

April 26, 2011

Leroy Cronin’s group has pioneered the development of large, atomically precise metal oxide clusters (the polyoxometalates) with an eye to applications in nanotechnology. A recent publication shows why crystal engineering is a natural complement to this work — and to the engineering of self-assembling systems in general.
Here’s an excerpt from the abstract (emphasis added):
Cations in [...]

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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 [...]

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“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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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