NanoGuy

Bottom up pulls ahead

2008-08-09T20:55:00.000-07:00

It looks like the top-down crowd is falling behind in the race for molecular precision. In the linked article, entitled "Chiral Kagomé Lattice from Simple Ditopic Molecular Bricks" we see another example of fine atomic precision engineering which mirrors many of the control elements provided in DNA architectures.

The next closest top-down approach which is currently shining involves a UV laser building molecularly precise shapes in type III and V elements. However, that is far less developed than the bottom up approaches.

Brilliant use of self-assembly

2008-06-17T17:43:00.000-07:00

Self assembly meets pick-and-place with microfluidics. Really clever use of mixed engineering principals. Click chemistry and some other self assembly (DNA origami for instance) could go a long, long ways in such circumstances.

Bigger than nano but really cool

2008-06-17T17:39:00.001-07:00

A device for isolating cancer cells from whole blood. Dang clever.

Careless futurism and amateur science fiction

2008-04-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

Like many internet savvy Americans I've long been a fan of science fiction. For the last few years I've been writing short stories and scenario snippets based on my readings of nanotechnology, futurists and assorted others which I'm calling "The Glassman Anthologies" I hope to have the collection on the web before summer is out.

Today my futurism thinking is centered on terraforming Mars. There's been a lot of work about thickening the atmosphere of Mars with chloroflourcarbons, melting the polar ice caps, installing domes and releasing CO2 from frozen reserves. But these plans overlook one of the biggest issues causing the martian atmosphere to be degenerate from the point of view of earth life. This is the lack of a powerful magnetosphere. Much of Mars' atmosphere is lost to scouring by the solar winds.

To prevent this it would be necessary to install both synchronous orbiting magnetic field generators and to locate nuclear powered magnetic field generators on the surface near any residual magnetic domains preferably near the poles.

This would allow gases to accumulate more readily in the atmosphere as well as reduce harmful particle flux from the sun.

My other terraforming ideas involve an enormous freznel lens made of thin film placed in a parallel orbit to mars that would focus sunlight near the equator of the planet. This could actually be a narrow ring with a diameter greater than the planet thus not blocking light to any other part of the planet. A similar parallel orbit scheme could be used to place a gigantic shade cloth between the sun and Venus thus dropping the temp of Venus. But there's the whole solar wind pressure problem to deal with there. Still working on that...

No wonder people are confused

2008-04-09T10:03:00.000-07:00

Here are 2 articles at azonano.com that seem to be diametrically opposed on the subject of the safety of buckyballs and other nanoparticles in the ecosystems.

This one says little or no toxic effects.

This one assumes toxicity.

Notice the difference in phrasing. The first article points directly to researchers who clearly state a case. The second article says

there are reports that these aggregates can be toxic

without any actual supporting documentation or citation. This is common behavior for alarmists and spin doctors.

Broader Perspectives

2008-03-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

Been enjoying the pugnacious and perspicacious writings of Melanie Swan over at Broader Perspectives. Is she humanoform or is she a digital descendant? How far has her avatar evolved? Only time and reflection will tell.

Probabilistic CMOS

2008-03-14T17:29:00.000-07:00

MIT's Technology Review has a fascinating article about Krishna Palem's development of probabilistic electronics. This looks especially interesting for artificial intelligence software.

I wrote my first ELIZA program and cellular automata when I was in high school and later moved on to fuzzy sets and neural nets so I can tell you for sure that a probabilistic design scheme like the one described in this article holds out great promise in all these AI arenas.

Friends of Earth=Chicken Little

2008-03-11T18:59:00.000-07:00

The sky is falling again. I always have to laugh at articles like this. It's pretty much just a list of unsupported accusations. Lots of mights and maybes made to sound like "absolutely and for sure" but then never a single specific to detail any true threat. Where is the list of exact agents and products?

Look for the individual agenda of one group or another trying to position itself to increase its political power and social persuasion when facts aren't readily available.

Doesn't bode well but might be great

2008-03-10T20:15:00.000-07:00

Fred Friendly has made some really thought provoking programs over the years which I have almost always enjoyed. And this one looks pretty good too, called "Power of Small" it presents many of the current discussion points surrounding nanotechnology. I will keep an open mind until the full series begins in April but I must say I am concerned by hearing many of the misleading and alarmist statements that are facetiously batted around the web in shallow science and tech news articles. Check it out for yourself ( a short preview is available at the link)

Nano-Lies at the LA Times

2008-03-01T16:31:00.000-08:00

One of the most egregious examples of nano-paranoia I've ever read, the LA Times article "An unprecedented ability to harm" by George Kimbrell is composed of unsupported statements and sourceless references. All the usual lies, distortions and misunderstandings. He even stole my line "The new asbestos" from a year ago. According to Mr. Kimbrell, all that is unknown will most certainly kill us all with even the slightest brush. And of course industry can never be trusted to act responsibly and only the government can save us from the evil nanotech overlords.

A tour-de-farce of propaganda and fear mongering, when will the old media outlets quit poisoning the data stream with their agenda driven spin-doctoring?

Aatish Salvi does a passable job of countering these claims in his answering article "Fake fears shouldn't stop progress" but I sense in this an attempt by the LA Times to engineer plausible deniability. Aatish could do a better job of pointing out that many of the issues George raises are either out-right lies or are based on poorly designed experiments.

Nanoscale View

2008-02-29T21:09:00.000-08:00

A pretty good blog there. Heavy on the science which my brain finds delicious.

Event Horizon

2008-02-28T21:22:00.000-08:00

Stretching and bending some analogies here, but that helps me think.

A number of different authorities have predicted the technological singularity's arrival at anywhere from about 2018 to 2050 (lots of other's have placed it sooner, later or not at all but I'm sifting some sand here)

So I've got to wonder if we are approaching the singularity's "Event Horizon" yet. In astrophysics this is the point-of-no-return beyond which light or information can not escape a black-hole's gravity well. In societal and technological terms the Event Horizon will be marked by some similar phase transition after which the singularity will become unavoidable excepting perhaps a nearby gamma-ray burst or sudden cometary impact which utterly wipes out all life on earth.

The web is seeing a proliferation of do-it-yourself-ism and intention hacking such as the biohackers, reprap, Make, Lifehacker and of course our hopeful friends the transhumanists. Social networking is building slow meta-minds and even potentiating some initial loops that might network meta-minds into meta-meta-minds. These minds are even beginning to have the means to effectively take a hand in our world with groups like The Point. Meanwhile "ancient" infrastructure such as usenet are still bubbling along providing the rich and varied services they always have, almost like the older parts of the human brain that give us primitive emotions and fight-or-flight style instincts.

I recently read that in about another year or two over half the people on earth will have cell phones. This means every odd numbered person on earth will have a potential immediate open line to half the people in the world. Somewhere a hungry meme opens its baleful eye and yawns awake.

Apologies to Ray

2008-02-28T08:46:00.001-08:00

An earlier posting criticized Ray Kurzweil for his website's lack of feedback abilities. Michael A. has corrected my perceptual bias. I've only been reading the news section for some years now and was unaware of the forum section. Although in my defense, if it were labeled "Forum section" instead of "Brain-X" [a title of questionable meaning] I might have been aware of it.

I have taken that post down and apologize for the haste of my judgment.

If I could offer a constructive suggestion: the news section is the most actively engaged part of Ray's page. The featured articles change seldom and once you've perused them all you pretty much don't bother going back. So a comment section for each news article would also be a really good thing.

Why the progression of science freakin' ROCKS!

2008-02-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

A very promising bit of research revealing a path to type 1 diabetes cure. Keep your fingers crossed on this one for early human trials.

Pullin' the Merkle Bootstrap

2008-02-26T13:10:00.000-08:00

Bootstrap was a very important idea when I started to learn programming back in '78. It was the means of loading enough software so you could load more software, a tricky philosophical treat.

Ralph Merkle has done a fine job of finding a molecular bootstrap for diamond manufacture. With as few as 9 molecules he has defined a set of tools which can not only make themselves but should also make some nifty diamond.

Hattip Michael A.

The nano Sky is falling

2008-02-22T14:41:00.000-08:00

A host of new safety concerns floated to the top again this week. I guess some mental conditions just never get old.

I think what I find most egregious about these articles is that they assume time and again that no one what-so-ever is aware of safety issues.

The other assumption is that government agencies are the only hope of any sort of safety. That industry can never, ever be trusted to make the right choices. But if you compare the track records of government and industry which is the one that really gets things done? Can you imagine a government agency trying to run eBay or Amazon?

Some misnomers, exaggerations and out-right lies you'll see:

Materials behave differently at the nanoscale. Materials behave the way they behave regardless of scale. Only a few examples of scale dependent structures are significant such as nanocrystals of gold. A nanocrystal of aspirin might dissolve faster but other than that once it's dissolved it is still just aspirin.

Nanoproducts are strange, unheard-of or alien. Many nanodevices, components and structures are actually very familiar and well studied. Fullerenes for instance have been present in soot throughout history and they've been a product of study for about 20 years. All of modern chemistry employs bottom-up statistically derived nanotechnology.

Replicators will destroy the earth. For the last 3 billion years every living organism on this planet has struggled mightily to convert as much mass into copies of itself as it could. And yet only a tiny amount of the planet is actually conscripted into this process. If an inconceivably large population of replicators using trial and error for billions of years can't do it what makes anyone think intentionally designed devices will?

Ultimately everything is composed of nanodevices: the atoms and molecules which chemistry has long ago elucidated for our understanding. The fact that someone is too lazy to comprehend this understanding does not give them the right to spread panic and rumor.

Some details

2008-02-20T11:54:00.000-08:00

Not finished with this yet and I don't have time right now to find the links supporting this design. Plus I've also got a diagram displaying the folding process for penta- and hexa- graphitic ring origami coming. But I promised Michael Anissimov a graphic explaining an earlier post so here's what I have so far. Nothing is to scale and a few details are missing but it should still explain much. Stay tuned:

Click to view large

Update (1:36pm):
here's a link to using oligonucleotides on AFM tips.

Dreaming of nanotech

2008-02-17T12:16:00.000-08:00

I dreamt of this last night. It is a form of simple nano factory

Take a bunch of magnetic nanowires engineered with atomically sharp tips and place them in an elastomer matrix. Attach oligonucleotides to these tips. Float polymer precursors in a solvent on top of the elastomeric matrix. Capillary action will transfer the mers up onto the oligonucleotides. Using a technique like this to assemble precise sequences of polymer subunits which are then deposited on a substrate that passes over the nanowires/dna tips. If the substrate is a controlled material like synthetic sapphire, silicon, graphene etc. and the nanowire's motion is controlled by very precise magnetic fields from circuit traces or NEMS underlying the elastomer matrix then the deposited polymers will only be able to fall in certain locations on the substrate. As the substrate passes over the many tips phenol rings in the polymer will line up in precisely controllable manners on the substrate.

If the chemistry is managed right, then oxides and other radicals will depart the polymer deposition upon pyrolysis. Using origami-like modeling the resulting graphitic structures will fold up into designed shapes due to energetic changes like folding a flat piece of cardboard into a box.

No obvios toxicity to carbon nanotubes

2008-02-15T13:52:00.001-08:00

A several months long study demonstrates that most carbon nanotubes are excreted rapidly by the body and do not accumulate or damage organs.

Scientific American: Revealing their own ignorance

2008-02-15T08:10:00.000-08:00

I've been a fond reader of Scientific American since I was 11. Most of the time they delight me with mind-expanding articles about cutting edge discoveries.

But every once in a while one of their contributors writes an article that just makes me shake my head "How did this get past the editors?" Has SciAm been taken over by some sort of political action committee?

In the linked article is some of the grossest glossing of an entire field I've ever seen. In the first page the vast and complex arena of nanotechnology is reduced to some niggling dust engineering.

Furthermore, the article completely overlooks all industry-wide accepted standards and practices as well as an entire field of researchers already dedicated to the purpose of scrutinizing the safety of nanotechnology. There is no mention of good workers like the folks at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology or the Foresight Institute both of whom have long spoken of the dangers and need for research on this issue.

More and more SciAm disappoints me as it loses its scientific objectivity to the politics of panic.

DNA-Directed Synthesis of short polymers

2008-02-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

Wow! this was another great article from the ACS. I never thought I'd come across a method for controlling the growth of polymers so precisely. Well sure, oligonucleotides but not aromatics like Aniline and 4-Aminobiphenyl. I can see some promising polyblock copolymer technology developing from this. Especially when you think of it in terms of some of the recent active and structural DNA designs being developed.

Damn! I wish I had the spare change to become an ACS member!

Stole my idea...

2008-02-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

The Navy done stole my idear!

Not that I'm implying any impropriety.

About a two months ago I was working with thermalizing/pyrolyzing linearized polystyrene ( a conveniently configured source of aromatic rings) with metallic stearates. I used stearates because ferocene's aren't readily available. I had pretty good success, able to produce distinguishable fullerenes and nanotubes. But now the Navy has beaten me to the punch.

A nanorocket?

2008-02-05T16:51:00.000-08:00

This is some brilliant stuff, coupling two complimentary proteins on the surface of a nanotube results in glucose being used as a power source for motion. The product looks safe for biological use and it doesn't take much imagination to picture a control mechanism stashed inside the tube which could block/unblock the two enzymes in order to stop/start the thrust.

Hat tip to Christine at Foresight.

Metal-Peptide Frameworks for metamaterials?

2008-02-05T16:32:00.000-08:00

Metal-peptide frameworks look like a promising medium for the design of very high frequency metamaterials.

Best nanoscope ever

2008-02-01T08:15:00.000-08:00

Was going to type "microscope" then I realized...
This device gives better resolution than 1 hydrogen diameter so it's definitely a nanoscope. This along with the other stuff I've written about this week; I'm starting to think 2008 will be a great year for nanotechnology.