Nano-Scale Robot Arm Moves Atoms With 100% Accuracy 266
destinyland writes "A New York professor has built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The nano-scopic device is just 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit inside a single red blood cell. But because of its size, it's able to build nanoscale structures and machines — including a nanoscale walking biped and even sequence-dependent molecular switch arrays!"
Did we just break heisenberg's principle? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it can move and place particles with 100% accuracy then at least at some point we know both where it is and how fast it's moving...
d'oh. (Score:1, Interesting)
over a million could fit inside a single red blood cell.
And it's just a matter of time until someone does. Let's hope by then software engineering will be in a better state than it is now, or we may be scrambling to kill artificial viruses along with the real ones. As if the world wasn't deadly enough...
DNA (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Moving individual atoms and placing them where we want them is about as fine grained as we can get before we run into the Uncertainty Principle.
No it really is 100% accuracy (Score:1, Interesting)
The atoms will always be placed on a lattice site on a surface which is a kind of groove, or they are attempting to bond/touch it to another specific atom. Once in that site, the atom will stick there. Thus you essentially are placing the atom with 100% accuracy, unless you entirely miss the lattice site.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle has nothing to do with this. Stop trying to sound smart.
Misleading headline (Score:3, Interesting)
The article is about protein folding and manipulating DNA. It has nothing to do with a robot that picks up atoms and places them somewhere else.
Re:"Success Rate" not "Accuracy" (Score:4, Interesting)
"100% Accuracy" implies a positional error of zero meters (to infinite decimal places), which is obviously not what they're talking about.
I caught that, too. But really "percent" doesn't even make sense as a unit of accuracy, does it? Unless it's fractional, in which case I'd take it to mean that if you want to make a relative move of x, you'll get something in the range (0,2x) or maybe (0.5x, 1.5x)? I mean, on the nano scale that's still kind of remarkable, but as you've pointed out it's just not what they mean. /pedantic
Re:DNA (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd like better eyesight.
Although likely, companies will patent this
technology.
Microsoft DNA Kit. just plug this wifi adapter into your computer and specify the alterations you want.
Although, if people could hack the system, untold tragedy/hilarity would ensue.
My neighbour could hack my body into constantly thinking about shock images and replacing every fifth noun with the word "porn"
Re:Just a thought..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Just a thought..... (Score:1, Interesting)
To further that thought... if you can make diamonds from the carbon in the air (Unlikely but awesome if true) Then you can construct the resulting diamond in any shape needed... such as replacement teeth, armor for vehicles/people or any other construction that would benefit from an extremely hard substance
Re:Just a thought..... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Just a thought..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Diamond manufacturing is already possible. The synthetic stuff is way cheaper than the stuff the cartels sell.
Their reaction? Build better detector machines that can find the flaws present in a "natural" diamond vs. a synthetic one to tell whether it's worth anything. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_diamond
I Don't Believe It (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't believe that there's such a thing as "100%" of anything happening at atomic scale. "100%" is what "99.9999999999999%" looks like when things are big enough that you have to drop the precision due to statistical balancing.