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Science

Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures 176

Posted by Hemos from the constructing-our-future-atom-by-atom dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Chips holding 10 terabits of data? Copper as strong as steel? Ceramics tough enough to be used in car engines? All this will be true in five years, thanks to two new methods to create self-assembling 3D nanostructures. These methods used pulsed laser deposition to create layers of nanodots organized in a matrix. These arrays of nanodots are consistent in shape and size -- 7 nanometers with nickel for example. But the real beauty of these methods is that they can be applied to almost any material, like nickel for data storage or aluminum oxide for ceramics. These methods also reduce drastically imperfections, leading to future superstrong materials. Read more here for other details and an image of a single nickel nanocrystal, or nanodot."
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Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures More

Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures

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  • Mithril blades (Score:5, Funny)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) * on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:04AM (#10167988) Journal

    So that's it then - the elves had nanotech. It all makes sense now. Looks like steel, feels like steel, but cuts like sinclair molecule chain :-)

    I do remember the UK Science minister at the time (Lord Sainsbury, I think it was) who said "Nanotechnology is going to be really BIG". He didn't quite get it, did he... Oh well, science is anathema to most politicians in the UK :-(

    Simon

    • Re:Mithril blades (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      While your statement about science and politicians is true in the sense that every lawyer joke is true, actually the UK has one of the more enlightened sceience-friendly governments around. the POST in the UK (parliamentary office of science and tech) is particularly good and people such as gordon brown have been pretty active in promoting science and technology.

      but, of course, what do you know. you're just some dork spouting off about elves on slashdot.


      • Quoth the anonymous coward:

        but, of course, what do you know. you're just some dork spouting off about elves on slashdot


        At least I'm not an ANONYMOUS dork...

        Simon.

    • Re:Mithril blades (Score:2, Interesting)

      by wtrmute ( 721783 )
      Actually, in "The Hobbit", Mithril was described as silver with the strength of triple steel. So it would have to be silver, then? Still expensive...
    • These things are "self-assembling"!! Doesn't this just scare the hell out of you?!?!

      How long will it be before these 3D nanostructures figure out they no long need Mankind to survive...and see us as a threat!?!?

      I for one will welcome our new Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures Overlords!
      • This isn't redundant man...don't you GET IT?

        Listen. And understand. Those Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures are out there. They can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, EVER, until we are dead!

        • Ok, after reading the article (Score:5, Interesting)

          by nounderscores ( 246517 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @09:14AM (#10168426)
          At the moment, "self assembling" means that we don't have to push the nanodots together after we make them. That's all. You still need to ablate a carefully prepared target with a laser to etch the structures we want.

          Personally, I'm excited about their solid state lighting idea.

          from the article The most interesting application may be the development of energy-efficient, low-cost, solid-state lighting. By creating a matrix of layers of varying sizes of nanodots embedded in a transparent medium such as aluminum oxide, Narayan can create a chip that glows with white light. Solid-state lighting would use about one-fifth the energy of standard fluorescent lighting and last for approximately 50 years.

          Looks like my LCD monitor is about to become obsolete: there's no reason why these solid state can't be made the size of a pixel and tied to active matrix display electronics. Maybe the us military might be able to replace their $30,000+ individual soldier helmet monocles which are currently using 5000 hour MTBF organic led technology with durable, bright and efficient nano-leds and save taxpayer money while we're at it.
          • Maybe the us military might be able to replace their $30,000+ individual soldier helmet monocles which are currently using 5000 hour MTBF organic led technology with durable, bright and efficient nano-leds and save taxpayer money while we're at it.
            Er... $6/hour for... night-vision goggles?
            • Fortunately the headsets I'm talking about are not nvgs but data displays. Of course you can route nvg images through them. read about a representative system here here [liteye.com]. The 5000 hour life was a figure I got back in 2002, mostly based on how long it took the blue oled to burn out. Maybe liteye might have improved since then.
          • Thanks for the misleading headline. "Self-assembling 3D Nanostructures" is a far cry from a form of ultra-micro-lithography.

        • Re:Mod parent up! (Score:2, Informative)

          by ScottGant ( 642590 )
          Lol, how is this redundant? It's a fricken joke you idiot moderators.

          Ok, how is this in ANY WAY a troll? Who am I trolling? It's an obvious joke taken from the Terminator...if you guys can't get that it was suppose to be funny and NOT a troll, don't mod it at all...just ignore it.

          Morons
        • My kind of guys!

          Actually, I thought it was humans who couldn't be reasoned with...But of course, humans REALLY feel pity (for themselves), remorse (for themselves) and definitely fear.

          And humans definitely won't stop doing this until they're dead.

          The only question: why do you say that like it's a Bad Thing?


        • Those self-assembling 3D Nanostructures are really cool, and by really cool, I mean totally sweet.

          Their purpose is to flip out and kill people. They fight ALL the time.
      • "These things are "self-assembling"!! Doesn't this just scare the hell out of you?!?!"

        No, but I think I read a little farther than you did.
      • It's a joke!

        Read the post again.
  • last I heard, MIT was working [mit.edu] on something like this. Just a rumor - can anyone verify?

  • Spam (Score:4, Informative)

    by soyuz_2 ( 810631 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:07AM (#10168006)
    Roland Piquepaille is a blogspammer, every day for over a week now, we've had his rehashings of old stories posted on the frontpage. Don't click on the first and the last link in the story.

    • Re:Spam (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LeBlanc_Joey ( 756213 )
      I second that, just link straight to the story.

    • Re:Spam (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I see by your high UID number that you've probably only been here a week or two. Roland Piquepaille has been blog-spamming us for a long time now, though it seems that lately he's been getting an article every single day. I'd like to know how much slashdot editors are taking in bribes from this guy. I submit great articles and they get rejected for this. If they'd at least trim out all his spammed radio.weblog.com links I would tolerate him. Now I only read the articles by him in order to comment on what a

    • Re:Spam (Score:3, Insightful)

      by aussie_a ( 778472 )
      You say not to click on any of the links but don't provide any alternate links for us to click. How are we to RTFA if we don't get any links..... oh wait. Sorry, I forgot where I was momentarily.

    • Re:Spam (Score:4, Informative)

      by ajna ( 151852 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @10:12AM (#10168816) Homepage Journal
      As I posted earlier on /. [slashdot.org], block the following regex in your ad-blocker of choice (adblock [mozdev.org] in Firefox, PithHelmet [culater.net] in Safari) and be gone with your troubles: radio\.weblogs\.com\/0105910.

      Also, the Triangle TechJournal article is not spam, but merely slashdotted. Here is google's cache: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:uVKexn1-BtYJ:ww w.triangletechjournal.com/news/article.html%3Fitem _id%3D666+&hl=en&start=1 [66.102.7.104]

    • Re:Spam (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GileadGreene ( 539584 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @10:28AM (#10168946) Homepage
      Trust me, it's been going on for way more [slashdot.org] than the last week. Somehow Piquepaille has managed to average 1 story every 2-3 days for the past 6 months or more. I don't know how he does it. Kickbacks to the /. editors maybe?
    • Oh, for fuck's sake, enough about Piquepaille's success already. You don't have to read them. Heck, you don't even have to read /.

      Are you people bitter that you haven't had their stories posted? Is it because the man's French?

      WTF is blogspamming anyways, and why do you care?
    • Is Roland actually submitting this stuff to Slashdot? Or are the illustrious Slashdot editors merely mining Roland's excellent site for material to fill whatever story quotas they have?

      Either way, I make a point of checking Roland's site regularly because he manages to have a posting every day that's usually interesting.
    • Hey, if he wants to spend hours of his own time researching stories for Slashdot, I don't see why Slashdot shouldn't reward him by putting his stories on the front page. Especially since they are often about interesting things, and he doesn't have obnoxious advertising on his page or anything. What's wrong with that? Isn't that why you read Slashdot, to find interesting stories about technology, submitted by readers?

  • Ceramics (Score:4, Informative)

    by tuxter ( 809927 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:07AM (#10168008) Journal
    I haven't RTFA, but ceramics [motorcyclistonline.com] are already used in certain motorcycle engines.

    • Re:Ceramics (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bconway ( 63464 ) *
      And very expensive [autointell-news.com] brakes.

      • Re:Ceramics (Score:4, Interesting)

        by joib ( 70841 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:50AM (#10168271)
        Ceramic brakes have been used for a pretty long time on racecars. IIRC at least since the early 90'ies. During night races (e.g. Le Mans 24 h) you can see how the brake discs glow red when they brake into the corners.
        • Those aren't ceramic, they are carbon brakes.

          For a while Ferarri and perhaps a couple other teams used a molybdenum (maybe not molybdenum) composite that has been since outlawed in F1 racing, but Porsches ceramic solicon carbide brakes are new.

          FYI, the clutch in the Carrera GT is silicon carbide as well.

    • Re:Ceramics (Score:2, Insightful)

      by RicktheBrick ( 588466 )
      Ceramics in engines to me means no cooling needed. A engine that can be heated to 2000 degrees without cracking would save alot of energy and polution.

  • But how does it kill people? (Score:5, Funny)

    by MacFury ( 659201 ) <me@nOsPAM.johnkramlich.com> on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:08AM (#10168011) Homepage
    I guess you could make stronger bullets...How else could it be used to kill people? I'd like to see this technology get funded.
    • Perfectly smooth ceramic or glass projectiles fired from a sabot [wikipedia.org]?
    • Theoretically, you could make super-strong body armor to outfit your stormtr^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsoldiers. So, indirectly, it can be used to kill people...

      Of course, even super-strong body armor pales before the power of the Force :)
      • Theoretically, you could make super-strong body armor to outfit your stormtr^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsoldiers. So, indirectly, it can be used to kill people...

        Of course, even super-strong body armor pales before the power of the Force :)

        The heaviest and highest tech of the current body armours work on sub machine gun and small arms fire only. A rifle will lay waste to any and all current body armour. even if you had a body armour equivilent to 10 times it's thickness in steel, some rifles will cut right through tha
        • "A rifle will lay waste to any and all current body armour."

          Bullshit. Threat Level III withstands 7.62 NATO/.308 ammo and Threat Level IV withstands 30.06 armor-piercing. These body armors use titanium steel plates.

          Unless of course you riddle the fucker with multiple rounds at the same impact point - or simply shoot his arms and legs (and head, of course) full of holes.

          Not to mention the fact that a rifle IS considered "small arms." If you mean handguns, ignoramus, say so.

      • But the super strong body armour won't even protect the troops from spear-wielding teddybears! We must first learn to build spear-proof armour, lest our soldiers be decimated by primitive abboreal merchandising tie-ins!

    • Re:But how does it kill people? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You build nanomachines that turn people into gray goo [wikipedia.org], obviously.
    • Well a rather obvious application would be in better body armor. Or maybe more durable rifles. Most rifle barrels wear out after only a few thousand rounds.
    • How else could it be used to kill people?
      1. Make android
      2. Android makes 'toys'
      3. Toys go nuts, make more of themselves and kill everything, then leave
      4. Android goes to sleep
      5. Toys still going nuts, making more of themselves and killing things. This pisses your friends from space off.
      6. You find android and wake it up. It makes more toys, which try to kill you but android tells toys to go to sleep just as you kill it.
      7. You give your friends the android
      8. They use the android to call all the toys to their homeworld to c

  • Pffft (Score:5, Funny)

    by frankthechicken ( 607647 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:14AM (#10168050) Journal
    I used to have self assembling lego/mechano structures, thanks to my father's need to 'help' me whenever I got a new set.

  • Imperfections (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "methods also reduce drastically imperfections"

    Maybe he should have used those methods on his text!

  • Space Elevators.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:32AM (#10168157)
    Hmmm, isn't this just what we need to make space elevators possible?

    • Re:Space Elevators.... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) *
      No. Carbon nanotubes are what you want for that. But we need better production.

      OTOH, this might be jim dandy for the electrical connections. (Might, because I'm not sure how well it conducts electricity, or what conducting electricity does to it's strength.) It's obviously desireable to minimize the parasitic weight that the elevator contains in its lift cable.

      P.S.: To me it seems a poor idea to go directly to a Space Elevator. Starting with an easier design might well be better, say with a pinwheel

      • 50,000 feet is certainly doable in a plane - not that much higher than where a commercial international flight gets to.

        And there are things [scaled.com] that will get to 60 miles without too much trouble...

        • Ideally, you'd want this to be reachable by a standard (high altitiude) cargo plane. But certainly any increment in height will improve things...lighter cable, less air friction, etc. 12 miles up is better than 10, and 15 is better than 12, etc.

          Also, if you can arrange things properly you might get it so that air friction acted to speed up the rotation of the arms...but I'm not sure what effect that would have on delta-V at contact, which you would prefer to be zero.

          Additionally note that with a pinwhee

  • Already slashdotted (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:40AM (#10168207)
    Google [64.233.179.104] cache
  • This sounds like the stuff that the Asimov robot cities are made of that are mentioned in the Robots and Aliens series of books.
    • I am not familiar with Asimov's "Alien" series of books, but the only robot city I am familiar with was actually an entire robot world, but everyone was "one" with nature and all that hippie crap. They were probably running a GPL operating system.
    • Asimov did not write a "Robots and Aliens" series of books. His Foundation and robot novels were noteworthy for a total lack of alien sentient life.

      The stories you refer to may be pastiches written after his death.

  • greatest invention since the lightbulb (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jotham ( 89116 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:48AM (#10168257)
    Why is it that every time I read about a scientific breakthrough, journalists always promise that it could lead to... *drumroll*... an improved lightbulb?

    I wonder if Einstein had this problem.
    E=mc^2... helps us understand the relationship between energy and matter... which could lead to...
  • Great... As if contact lenses weren't bad enough, we'll soon be on hands & knees searching the carpet for somebody's Very Compact Disc collection

  • Can we use it for the space elivator project? (Score:4, Informative)

    by bluFox ( 612877 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @09:10AM (#10168400) Homepage Journal
    The space elivator [wikipedia.org] project needs materials strong enough to with stand the tension of its own weight, and we already have carbon nano fibers that provide 60-70% of the strength needed to make it a reality. If this new technique can get us to the magic strength, we are probably in the threashhold of a new era.
    • The other obstacle to making the space elevator is that we can't manufacture carbon nanotubes of non-microscopic length yet. And depositing single atoms at a time won't solve that problem.
    • Can someone explain to me how the space elevator is going to make up for changes in rotational momemntum as the elevator moves up and down? Are they going to have rockets on it to counter-act coreolis forces?

      • Re:Rotational Momentum (Score:3, Interesting)

        by HeghmoH ( 13204 )
        As the cargo goes up, the elevator will lag slightly behind the earth's rotation because of coriolis forces. This will create a tension in the cable, pulling on the elevator, and causing it to speed back up. This will slow down the earth's rotation by an extremely small amount. The same kind of thing happens when things go back down.

  • new life for LCD tech vs OLED (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 06, 2004 @09:32AM (#10168533)
    > 'chip-light using' one-fifth the energy of standard fluorescent lighting and last for approximately 50 years

    Well that puts LCD back in the race against the upcoming OLED technology. If they can further reduce bad pixels and failure it may be more environmentally friendly than OLED which may have a shorter life span. The energy used by the backlight was LCDs culprit, with that solved LCD may become our long lasting friend.

    OLED pushers better speed their cheap display printing tech to market before we expect displays to last 40 years.
    --
    Dennis SCP

  • The Diamond Age (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Viking Coder ( 102287 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @10:14AM (#10168839)
    Okay, so this has been really bugging me, ever since I first read it. In "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, he talks about making tiny little diamonds that are lighter than air. They have vaccuum inside, and they're diamond, so they're strong enough to handle the pressure. So, they end up being diamonds that float in our atmosphere.

    Is that possible, or is there something fundamentally flawed about it?

    • Re:The Diamond Age (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mikael ( 484 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @11:03AM (#10169180)
      They have vaccuum inside, and they're diamond, so they're strong enough to handle the pressure. So, they end up being diamonds that float in our atmosphere.
      You'd probably need a good few layers of carbon atoms to make sure no oxygen, nitrogen or even hydrogen atoms sneaked in. Not forgetting the byproducts of cosmic rays. My guess is that the total mass of the casing / volume would exceed the density of the surrounding air.

      Buckminster Fuller has a similar idea, but on a much grander scale. He figured you could could create floating cities from ordinary steel. If you could imagine a geodesic polyhedron 2 miles in radius with steel pipes 2-3 metres in radius for the edges, the force exerted by raising the air temperature inside the pipes by just a couple of degrees would be enough to make the structure float in the air.

      The closest real-world implementation at present is a nyoln fibre airship, with helium gas for lift. Roughly, you get 1 Kg of lift for every cubic metre of Helium. For a 6x2 metre airship with 25 cubic metres, the weight of the skin is around 8 Kg, when inflated, and 25kg of lifting weight.
    • There's no fundamental reason that would be impossible, but I suspect that would would have to have very thin walls and therefore be quite brittle, even if it is made out of the hardest substance we know of.

  • But when will it work with alchohol (Score:3, Funny)

    by GomezAdams ( 679726 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @10:18AM (#10168865)
    I'd rather like to see something along this line that would assemble the finest Cuba Libre on the planet, a good cigar, and then assemble some red headed carbon based life form to share it with. That would be nano-technology worth investing in!

  • I had known this for months.

    If you really want to be up to date in nano, check out news.nanoapex.com [nanoapex.com].

    Every day there's a new discovery.

  • 5 years? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @11:04AM (#10169186)

    Sounds extremely over-optimistic to me.

  • Yawn. Nothing to see here. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hey slashdot: if someone puts the word nano in front of a sentence it does not mean the material is instantly going to build your nerdy wet dream of a space elevator, coming to take you away from your sad little cubicle/hand jobs.

    More nano hype. It's published in a crappy journal, and he's got nanoparticles to assemble into a lattice, which they've been doing now for, ooh >5 years? Suitably stabilized Nanoparticles do this anyway, it's called CLOSE PACKING and should be familiar to anyone with a modicum
  • The potential implications of this are huge if you extrapolate the development and combine it with the open source philosophy.

    In principle you could make a more-or-less general purpose machine that could replicate itself and other machines, given enough raw material. If the software driving it was open source, in principle anybody could become their own manufacturing plant. Have the machine produce other machines that mine raw materials, and you could set it loose in a mineral-rich area and it would repli

    • Thank you for telling us what K. Eric Drexler told us in his first book published, uh, eighteen years ago now?

      • Thank you for telling us what K. Eric Drexler told us in his first book published, uh, eighteen years ago now?

        What I find more amazing is that according to you, he somehow managed to post something to SlashDot before it existed. Very impressive indeed.

        • What part of "in his first book" didn't you comprehend?

          • You are an idiot. What part of "he told us" did you not understand when you were writing it? He told us, the /. readership, nothing of the sort. He may have told those who read his book, but that does not fit any reasonable definition of "us" in this context. In the context of your post, it was critical that "us" be inclusive, otherwise you were just being a moronic jerk. Presumably you are one of these 12 year old /. readers I keep hearing about.
            • Since you can't comprehend simple English and react with hysterical insults when called on it, I'd opine that you're one of those 12 year olds,
              i.e., someone who can't comprehend "us" as meaning any reader of his book - not to mention that many /.'ers are quite well aware of his book anyway since nanotech is one of the news sections on /.

              I happen to be 55, actually.

              Do run along now and play.

  • Something I've been wondering for a while: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lazyhound ( 542184 ) on Monday September 06, 2004 @08:40PM (#10173213)
    What would I be best off majoring in if I wanted to get involved in nanotechnology? Material engineering?

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