Category: Nanodot

from the bits-and-pieces dept.

According to an article in the New York Times (18 August 2000), chemists at the University of California at Los Angeles are reporting a further advance in the effort to produce electronic circuitry on a molecular scale. (Note: access to the Times site is free, but requires registration. To avoid logging in, read instead this version at the San Jose Mercury News.)

In an article published in the 18 August 2000 issue of Science, the U.C.L.A. team, led by James Heath and J.Fraser Stoddart, says it has succeeded in using a molecule to create an electronic switch that can be reconfigured — turned on and off, and on again — like a transistor.

UPDATED: UCLA has also posted a lengthy press release in which the researchers discuss their work in some detail. It's a useful overview of the work, straight from the source.

from the makes-our-heads-hurt dept.
Surely the problems that we at Foresight take on — e.g. heading off abuse of nanotechnology and machine intelligence — are some of the most complex ("wicked") around. Those of us trying to work on these problems — alone or in groups, online or in person — will benefit from this essay on wicked problems and how to come at them for best effect: To solve wicked problems, we need to confront a more complex mass of information than we are used to dealing with, while unleashing creativity and opportunity-driven thinking. It is a more complex and chaotic process…"Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them."–Laurence J. Peter Thanks to Scott Johnson, editor of Future Presence email newsletter from Arlington Institute, for the pointer.

from the Nano-Blue dept.
IBM-Almaden researcher Isaac Chuang described his team's experiments that demonstrate what IBM claims is the world's most advanced quantum computer, which is based on a single, specially designed molecule containing five fluorine atoms. Chuang presented the results on 15 August 2000 at Stanford University at the Hot Chips 2000 conference, which is organized by the IEEE Computer Society. An IBM press release described the research; the web version contains a number of useful links to related items.

UPDATED: An article in the 26 August 2000 issue of Science News provides a useful overview of this research, a graphic of the molecule used, and links to references and resources.

from the "let's-build-better-tools-for-thought" dept.
The results are in for the final stage of the Software Carpentry open source software design competition. The design paper for Roundup, an issue tracking and discussion tool which is part of the plans for Engines of Creation 2000 phase 4, was chosen as the winner of the "issue tracking" category of the competition. Senior Associate Ka-Ping Yee is the creator of Roundup, which Foresight plans to use for serious discussion.

from the poke-it-again-Sam dept.
Researchers have written 0.8 nm (presumably diameter) conductive marks in a thin organic film with an STM. The marks were stable for at least the 2 hour scanning session. They attribute the marks to polymerisation of the film under the STM tip.

from the Pocket-Change dept.

Researchers have obtained the most detailed images yet of catalytic site of the ribosome, the factory where amino acids are linked into chainlike proteins.

In two articles published in the 11 August 2000 issue of Science, researchers led by Thomas A. Steitz, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Yale University, report that they have obtained the atomic structure of the 50S subunit of the ribosome at a resolution of 2.4 Ångströms.

A press release describes the studies of the basic structure of the ribosome, which includes the first unequivocal proof that the ribosome is a ribozyme, an RNA enzyme.

from the Cutting-the-gordian-knot dept.

Custom-engineered proteins have long been seen as one possible route to molecular nanotechnology. But the challenge of understanding how and why protein molecules assume the shapes they do to perform their structural and functional roles, has been an enduring problem in the field of protein engineering.

A press release describes work that apparently explains at least some aspects of protein structure by working from first principles. "We have discovered a simple explanation, based solely on principles of geometry, for the protein's preference for the helix as a major component of its overall structure," says Jayanth R. Banavar, professor of physics at Penn State and a member of the team of U.S. and Italian research physicists that made the discovery. The work was also reported in the 20 July 2000 issue of the journal Nature.

from the Do-not-go-gently dept.

Preventing damage by ice crystals is one of the major challenges to successful cryopreservation of humans and other organisms. But it's known that some relatively large animals do survive freezing.

A press release describes work by researchers from Queen's University and the University of Alberta who have "gleaned the precise structure of winter protection proteins derived from insects." The antifreeze proteins were found to be up to 100 times more powerful than similar proteins found in fish.

from the Reverse-engineering-3billion-years-of-R&D dept.

The translation of DNA/RNA instructions and the synthesis of proteins is arguably the most complex single-site operation carried out by biological systems at the molecular level, and it's done by relatively huge molecular machines called ribosomes. Insight into the operation of these naturally evolved molecular assembly devices could be invaluable to the design of artificial molecular machines.

Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute reported in the 20 July 2000 issue of the journal Nature that they have have "detected a ratcheting rotation deep inside the cell's tiny protein-making 'factory' at a key point in the protein construction process." An overview of their work, as well as some animations of ribosome operation, appear on the HHMI web site.

from the If-it's-not-one-thing-it's-another dept.

Researchers examining complex systems, both biological and artificial, find interesting parallels between communities of organisms and the Internet in their tolerance for error — and in their high vulnerability to attack. Complex networks of nanotech devices may exhibit similar behaviors; this presents a design challenge for future MNT systems engineers, as well as today's information system engineers. The article appeared in Nature (sorry, no link, since access requires an active subscription).

If you have access to the printed journal, see "Error and attack tolerance of complex networks," by Reka Albert, Hawoong Jeong and Albert-Loszlo Barabosi, Nature, v406, pp 378 – 382.

(The full text of the abstract appears in the "Read More.")

Update: The full text of the Nature article, plus a commentary is available either online or as an Acrobat PDF file on the Nature web site. (Note: Full access may eventually be cut off, but this was current as of 31 August 2000.)