Posts tagged as:

protein engineering

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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Toward Advanced Nanotechnology:

Nanomaterials (2)

January 16, 2009

As every mechanical engineer knows, the stiffness of a material — its elastic modulus — is often a critical property; likewise in nanomechanical engineering, though in part for a different reason. I’d like to say a few words about this, then discuss some materials of interest in implementing nanosystems. And there is something I must [...]

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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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