Analysis: Review of Anti-Nanotech Terrorism Case Emphasizes Weaknesses of Science Journalism
Journalists’ need to sensationalize potential risks interferes with public understanding of technology.
Talk of nanobots and the “grey goo” that Drexler conjectured would result if they went unchecked brings us back again to the terrorists responsible for the Mexico bombing.
Grey goo is at best an extrapolation by a gifted scientist who has since utterly dismissed it as a realistic scenario. But the idea lingers on and it seems to have taken hold in the terrorist group responsible for the Mexico bombings, Individuals Tending Toward the Savage (ITS), and another group of eco-activists who call themselves Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC, pronounced et cetera).
While ETC thinks itself enlightened since it doesn’t blow up innocent people, it harbors the same misperception as ITS about grey goo being an environmental threat.
Ultimately, ITS and ETC are responsible for their own ill-conceived notions and the acts that they carry out because of them. But everyone along the way is responsible too. The Nature article takes scientists to task for their contribution to the confusion that exists.
But to the extent scientists are responsible for this confusion, the responsibility mainly resides at the point where they attempt to explain their work to reporters. I have chronicled these crossed wires between journalists and experts before and it’s never a pretty picture.
(via Searching for Causes of Nanotech Terrorism - IEEE Spectrum)
Nanoparticles Observed Self-Assembling Into Nanorods
Led by Haimei Zheng, a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, the researchers used a combination of transmission electron microscopy and advanced liquid cell handling techniques to carry out real-time observations of the growth of nanorods from nanoparticles of platinum and iron.
Their observations support the theory of nanoparticles acting like artificial atoms during crystal growth. “We observed that as nanoparticles become attached they initially form winding polycrystalline chains,” Zheng says. “These chains eventually align and attach end-to-end to form nanowires that straighten and stretch into single crystal nanorods with length-to-thickness ratios up to 40:1.
This nanocrystal growth process, whereby nanoparticle chains as well as nanoparticles serve as the fundamental building blocks for nanorods, is both smart and efficient.”
If the near limitless potential of nanotechnology is to even be approached, scientists will need a much better understanding of how nano-sized particles can assemble into hierarchical structures of ever-increasing organization and complexity. Such understanding comes from tracking nanoparticle growth trajectories and determining the forces that guide these trajectories.
(via Nanoparticles self-assemble into nanorods | KurzweilAI)
Micro-bubble Robots, Steered By Lasers, for Nanoscale Construction Projects
Aaron Ohta’s lab at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has come up with a novel new way of creating non-mechanical microbots quite literally out of thin air, using robots made of bubbles with engines made of lasers.
To get the bubble robots to move around in this saline solution, a 400 mW 980nm (that’s infrared) laser is shone through the bubble onto the heat-absorbing surface of the working area. The fluid that the bubbles are in tries to move from the hot area where the laser is pointing towards the colder side of the bubble, and this fluid flow pushes the bubble towards the hot area. Moving the laser to different sides of the bubble gives you complete 360 degree steering, and since the velocity of the bubble is proportional to the intensity of the laser, you can go as slow as you want or as fast as about 4 mm/s.
This level of control allows for very fine manipulation of small objects, and the picture below shows how a bubble robot has pushed glass beads around to form the letters “UH” (for University of Hawaii, of course)
Besides being able to create as many robots as you want of differing sizes out of absolutely nothing (robot construction just involves a fine-tipped syringe full of air), the laser-controlled bubbles have another big advantage over more common microbots in that it’s possible to control many different bubbles independently using separate lasers or light patterns from a digital projector.
With magnetically steered microbots, they all like to go wherever the magnetic field points them as one big herd, but the bubbles don’t have that problem, since each just needs its own independent spot of light to follow around.
The researchers are currently investigating how to use teams of tiny bubbles to cooperatively transport and assemble microbeads into complex shapes, and they hope to eventually develop a system that can provide real-time autonomous control based on visual feedback.
Eventually, it may be possible to conjure swarms of microscopic bubble robots out of nothing, set them to work building microstructures with an array of thermal lasers, and then when they’re finished, give each one a little pop to wipe it completely out of existence without any mess or fuss.
(via Microbots Made of Bubbles Have Engines Made of Lasers - IEEE Spectrum)
Nanogenerators Getting Easier and Cheaper to Make, Presaging Explosion of Self-Powered Nanomachines:
Now researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have taken up the mantle of Wang’s work by creating a piezoelectric “nanogenerator” more easily and cheaply than ever before.
The research, which was initially published in the Wiley journal Advanced Materials, produced a piezoelectric nanocomposite through relatively simple processes such as spin-casting and the bar-coating method. So this new generation of “nanogenerators” is not restricted by a complicated and high-cost process or even size.
Even Wang himself is impressed by this work. “This exciting result first introduces a nanocomposite material into the self-powered energy system, and therefore it can expand the feasibility of nanogenerator in consumer electronics, ubiquitous sensor networks, and wearable clothes,” says Wang.
(via Nanogenerators Easier and Cheaper to Produce than Ever Before - IEEE Spectrum)
Microsubmarines Can Decontaminate Water, Deliver Drugs in Bloodstream:
The cone-machines are made from self-assembled monolayers and have special chemical properties that encourage them to pick up oil. They move quickly through the water and require very little fuel, so they could work efficiently.
In lab tests, Wang and colleagues proved the machines could move through water and pick up both olive oil and motor oil, transporting collections of droplets around. Their water-repellency could also pave the way for new drug-delivering molecules or for transferring liquids in otherwise immiscible environments, the authors say.
The devices are about 10 times thinner than a human hair, so presumably you would need epic fleets of them to make a difference in massive oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Large-scale cleanup operations would also require different types of motors, perhaps driven by magnetic fields or electrical current, the authors note. Still, the machines could be more environmentally friendly than new types of soaps or other absorbent material.
(via In Successful Test, Microsubmarines Help Clean Up Oil Spills | Popular Science)
The Future of Robotics: Fast Cheap and Out of Control
Much as the computing industry progressed from a mainframe to a PC to a mobile stage, with each stage marking bigger improvements in computing power while shrinking in size, the robotics industry could be headed for the same trajectory. What this means is the day is coming soon when each of us could have teams of personal robots that follow us around in our daily lives, doing everything from cleaning our toilets to cleaning our arteries, and communicating with each other as part of swarm intelligence. That’s a radical idea, but no more radical an idea than that one day each of us would have a personal computer. Remember the skeptics who once doubted why anyone would ever purchase a personal computer.
(via The Robotic Future is Fast, Cheap and Out of Control | Endless Innovation | Big Think)
![NASA Recruiting Synthetic Biologists to Create New Organisms for Space Habitats:
A lot of proposed synthetic biology applications can seem pretty out there, but some are really out there. NASA is currently advertising open postdoctoral positions in synthetic biology, with particular emphasis on food production in space. Engineered organisms have the potential to do lots of things that would be useful for space colonists, from producing food and fuel to treating wastewater. Because organisms replicate themselves, future astronauts would only have to bring some spores and seeds and empty bioreactors, the organisms would do the rest of the work.
[via] [Synthetic Biology @ NASA] [photo credit by Matt Mansell]
(via futurescope)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1uudsBxIR1r08k60o1_500.jpg)
NASA Recruiting Synthetic Biologists to Create New Organisms for Space Habitats:
A lot of proposed synthetic biology applications can seem pretty out there, but some are really out there. NASA is currently advertising open postdoctoral positions in synthetic biology, with particular emphasis on food production in space. Engineered organisms have the potential to do lots of things that would be useful for space colonists, from producing food and fuel to treating wastewater. Because organisms replicate themselves, future astronauts would only have to bring some spores and seeds and empty bioreactors, the organisms would do the rest of the work.
[via] [Synthetic Biology @ NASA] [photo credit by Matt Mansell]
(via futurescope)
Self-Organizing “Robot Pebbles” Used to Duplicate 3d Objects:
The Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT today detailed research aimed at replicating objects by essentially carving them from an unformed pile of “smart sand” or “robot pebbles.”
The vision is to have these miniature robots automatically create replicas of different sizes with only an original shape to work with. A key difference from other approaches to replicating objects is that, unlike three-dimensional printing techniques, the smart sand builds by subtracting building blocks from a larger heap, according to MIT.
Each of the pebbles is equipped with a very simply processor and the ability to communicate with pebbles which touch it. Individual robots send messages among themselves to determine the original shape and their relative position to each other. With that information, they can begin to replicate the original shape from the larger pile of devices.
(via MIT ‘smart sand’ and ‘robot pebbles’ replicate objects | Cutting Edge - CNET News)
World’s Smallest Engine is 18 Atoms Wide
What we really need, if we want nanobots that can actually self-assemble into helpful swarms, is a nano-scale motor that can be driven with a tiny amount of power — and that’s exactly what researchers at Tufts University in Massachusetts have done.
They have taken a single butyl methyl sulfide molecule — C5H12S, just 18 atoms in total — and turned it into an electric motor that can be discretely controlled by a stream of electrons.
The molecule mounts itself on a piece of copper, via adsorption, with the sulfur atom acting as a pivot — and by applying a stream of electrons from a scanning tunneling microscope, the molecule begins to spin at up to 120 revolutions per second. With a total diameter of just one nanometer, not only is this by far the smallest electric motor in the world, but because the power source is a microscope — the directional tip of the electron microscope is an electrode in the motor — the entire process can also be visualized and confirmed in real time.
Most importantly, though, the electron microscope is so accurate that single-molecule motors can be turned on and off. “People have found before that they can make motors driven by light or by chemical reactions, but the issue there is that you’re driving billions of them at a time — every single motor in your beaker,” says Charles Sykes, one of the chemists behind the discovery. “The exciting thing about [this] electrical [motor] is that we can excite and watch the motion of just one, and we can see how that thing’s behaving in real time.”
(via Nanobots rejoice: Electric motor made from one molecule, 18 atoms | ExtremeTech)
