Materials Science Toys on Display

BoringNitride writes "Nanotech tool vendors hawked their wares to innovative engineers at the spring meeting of the Materials Research Society this week at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Wired took a break from presentations on molecular motors and the mechanical properties of human skin to take a walk across the showroom floor. They captured close-ups of some of the most precise molecule-building and measurement tools in the world."

Re:robbIE goes full censorship with his patentdead

[wellingj (1030460)]

In true Jeopardy fashion, here is my answer:
Who is John Galt?

mmm nanotech porn

[nuzak (959558)]

(hey that's the article title)

The Fujifilm Dimatix printer can churn out OLED (organic LED) displays, biosensors and custom circuits. Unlike an ordinary printer, its piezoelectric head can squirt out gold nanoparticles, colloidal silver or DNA, a few trillionths of a liter at a time.

I wonder if the cartridges on that thing come only 1/4 full?

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[Oktober Sunset (838224)]

and if purity standards for US drinking water continue to deteriorate, soon you will probably be able to deposit the metals too.

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[wramsdel (463149)]

Look, what you do in the privacy of your own home is your business, but once you start bombarding them with electrons it becomes a punishable offense. Besides, if you need systems capable of magnifying by 40,000X to resolve your *ahem* minute features, you might have other problems.

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[ppanon (16583)]

Hey, we all know that it's now legal in the USA to apply torture such as electrical shocks to the gonads. But nobody seems as brazen in bragging about it as you are, sir.

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[ill stew dottied ewe (962486)]

It is supposedly so good that it would be arousing to Nanotech fans. This does not imply sexual content of the article. This has been used in other forms such as geek porn. [blogspot.com]

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[kcelery (410487)]

fetish pron

Robots!

[Colonel Korn (1258968)]

I was hoping to see more automation. Sure, you can buy SEM systems that can handle automated analysis of silicon wafers at various stages of their processing from smooth surface to chip, but where are the _programmable_ tools that will let me set up fifty structured thin films in geometries that _I_ select and leave them to be analyzed overnight?

Re:Robots!

[Goldsmith (561202)]

oh, those exist too...

but for most people doing research, a $60,000 SEM is much more interesting. Not all of us can afford the millions it costs to buy automated systems. We can all afford to allow average students to work in our labs for free, doing what a robot would do. Those of us who are clever find talented students and get them to build the automation into one of these cheap systems from scratch.

In our lab, we've automated both a cheap AFM and SEM, saving a few million dollars and generating a few undergraduate honors projects in the process (although we can't do 50 samples in one night).

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[chrisfez (305204)]

Most professors already have a large number of inexpensive and skilled robots used to perform repetitive tasks during much of the day - they're called "grad students".

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[shadwstalkr (111149)]

I do. It would go right next to the $40,000 FTIR [wikipedia.org] on my desk. That's why you should have studied physics.

Homebrew nanotechnology projects

[the_kanzure (1100087)]

Check this out:
* STM/AFM machines for $100 [heybryan.org] - use a very finely pointed wire to scan across a surface at tens of thousands of atoms per second (raster scanning) to visualize the super small. Hear anything about nanolithography? Hop to it. [heybryan.org]
* STM-based DNA sequencing [heybryan.org] [nanopores?]. Rumor has it that ZS Genetics [zsgenetics.com] is going to be doing this by the end of 2008.
* DIY graphene transistors [heybryan.org] -- this was the subject of a recent article [slashdot.org]. Might be better than semiconductor nanocrystal synthesis (like Kovio [kovio.com]). You can do this a few ways, such as punching holes in graphene (very dense pencil marks), or scanning probe lithography, chemical etchants like in si fabbing [heybryan.org], etc.
* Have I missed anything?

Off-topic: other alternate transistors [heybryan.org] like LiquiFET, etc.

Homebrew nanotechnology in SF

[argent (18001)]

Rebecca Ore used old (well, it would have been old by the time of the novel) homebrew and cheap nanotech like this as a key part of the plot of her recent SF novel Time's Child. I helped her google up some references for it... this article would have been the motherlode. :)

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[Goldsmith (561202)]

If you can make an STM capable of atomic resolution, or a good AFM, or a graphene transistor, you should be getting a paycheck or a degree for it. I'm not saying a degree is necessary to do that, just that this stuff is actually very hard, and many "professionals" have a hard time getting it to work. Get your credit from the establishment if you can do it.

If you were to spend some time in a "professional" lab doing this stuff, you would find that it is almost all DIY. One, if you can buy your experiment,