Our friends at Nanorex have done it again. You really should click through to see this new nanotech design in action. Click on the design to make it move: This worm drive assembly designed by K. Eric Drexler, Josh Hall, Ninad Sathaye and Mark Sims includes 11 components totalling 25,374 atoms. The animations below have… Continue reading Nanotechnology design-of-the-month reaches 25,000 precisely-placed atoms
We’ll end the week on an upbeat note: It’s good to see the American Associate for the Advancement of Science — AAAS, publisher of the journal Science — covering long-term nanotechnology prospects on their EurekAlert website. An updated essay by Eric Drexler looks at “Revolutionizing the Future of Technology“. Excerpts: Why focus on productive nanosystems… Continue reading Productive nanosystems on AAAS nanotechnology site
High school students in the COSMOS program were treated to an early version of the NanoEngineer-1 modeling software for atomically-precise nanotechnology. Foresight Director of Education Miguel Aznar reported to Nanorex president Mark Sims on the nanotech course results: Success! NanoEngineer-1 greatly enhanced my nanotechnology class. My students were excited to manipulate and simulate the world… Continue reading Nanotechnology software enables students to design molecular machines
Those of you looking for insights on atomically-precise manufacturing may want to check out the Society of Manufacturing Engineers conference August 23-24, 2006 in Oak Ridge, TN: The Next Industrial Revolution: Nanotechnology & Manufacturing. In addition to plenty of coverage on near-term “top-down” nanomanufacturing, this meeting includes “bottom-up” assembly topics. Some speakers familiar to Foresight… Continue reading Beyond nanomanufacturing, Bottom-to-bottom nanotechnology
The U.S. National Science Foundation funded a report on nanomanufacturing, carried out by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences. Though an email announcement to participants stated that the full report is available free for download, all I can find is the 12-page abstract (PDF). [UPDATE: here’s the 75-page 1.9 MB pdf full report.] Two excerpts:… Continue reading Manufacturing with nanotechnology: NSF-funded report now out
The highly prolific Robert Freitas and colleagues have gathered their work on diamond mechanosynthesis onto one website titled the Nanofactory Collaboration. Enjoy! Includes an introduction to the topic, participant list, publications list, and a description of the technical challenges. Most impressive to me is the publications list. How does he do it? Does he not… Continue reading Diamond mechanosynthesis project site launched
UNESCO’s Division of Ethics of Science and Technology has taken a shot at writing about The Ethics and Politics of Nanotechnology. Nanotechnology Now has a brief critique. David Berube has a longer one. To do a thorough critique here of these kinds of documents would take too long—I’d be blogging all day, every day. Instead… Continue reading UNESCO on nanotechnology ethics & politics
John Faith brings our attention to an item at PhysicsWeb on how to overcome friction in nanosized mechanical devices: Friction is a big problem in nanosized devices because they have huge surface-to-volume ratios, which means that their surfaces quickly wear out and seize up. Traditional lubricants are useless in such machines because they become thick… Continue reading Towards frictionless nanomachines
Cees Dekker’s team at the Kavli Institute of NanoScience at Delft University of Technology have produced some intriguing work published in Science (400 KB pdf): Integration of biomolecular motors in nanoengineered structures raises the intriguing possibility of manipulating materials on nanometer scales. We have managed to integrate kinesin motor proteins in closed submicron channels and… Continue reading Dutch team uses molecular motors for sorting
I’m blogging from Moscow, but the news this week is back in the States. We at Foresight like to make win-win connections between worthy projects, and here’s an example: Nanorex Inc., the world’s first developer of tools for the design, simulation and analysis of atomically precise molecular machine systems, will launch its educational outreach program… Continue reading Top high schoolers get early release of Nanorex modeling software
