MIT Researcher Enlists Bacteria To Assemble Nanotech Materials

The Register reports on an approach to nanotech that combines biological computing with micro-mechanics, embodied in the work of MIT associate professor Timothy Lu. Lu's research has resulted in the creation of tiny structures assembled using modified E. coli. "Specifically," says the article, "the MIT researchers were able to put bacteria to work producing conducting biofilms, some of which were studded with quantum dots, and arranging gold nanowires. This paves the way for the development of mass manufactured cell-based material factories, and even 'living materials' that have some of the desirable properties of bones or trees, Lu confirmed." His most radical idea, says Lu, is furniture that shapes itself to cushion the user's most-stressed areas.

dogchairs

[jcomeau_ictx]

"furniture that shapes itself to cushion the user's most-stressed areas"... the Bene Gesserit have had those for years.

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[jcomeau_ictx]

oops, chairdog. I had a 50% chance of getting it right before googling.

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[Cryacin]

Hmm, nanotech assembly, build anything you want from the molecular level upwards, and the most "radical" idea they have is for a piece of furniture? Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Yo, I heard you like chairdogs so I put a dog in your chair and ... well, I hope that suits you.

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[Applehu Akbar]

I would award this guy a Nobel if he could at least come up with furniture that identifies and kills bedbugs.

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[I'm New Around Here]

Teg would not approve.

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[Mr D from 63]

Its all good..................until your chair catches a virus.

Oh great, MORE job losses

[Tablizer]

H1Bacteria

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[invictusvoyd]

American H1Bacteria !! .. No outsorsing here ! even unicellulars have their share in the yeeconomy .

Setting One's Sights Low

[Anna Merikin]

I am thunderstruck by the irony of the mind-blowing promise of this technique and the "most radical" use that the lead author can dream up (according to the Register, anyway, which has a reputation to me of overhyping a story and burying leads): A comfy chair made of high-tech volatile-memory foam which needs to eat.

Another irony: the original TFA appears to be paywalled so we mortals get to read the Register's digest of it. Maybe some advanced-degree reader of Nature can come up with some more original (and profitable, to boot) use for this technique. I mean, quantum dots, gold nanowires and such can conceivably lead to computational devices, can't they? Can this be used to extend Moore's Law further into the future?

Without even using imagination

[dbIII]

Snails teeth made of dislocation free incredibly high strength iron is a pretty amazing existing use of metal assembly by an organism without even getting into possibilities. Scaling up something like that (or scaling it up with other materials) has a lot of potential even before getting into possibilities of design right down to the microscopic level - not just composite materials but incorporating electronics and tiny mechanisms.
Drexler wrote a lot about those sort of possibilities in a few very easy to

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[Vinod Kumar]

Can You be more discriptive to this as i m not able to conclude anything Anjimile Mtila Oponyo

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[Sockatume]

Nature Materials hasn't actually put the paper in an issue yet. When they do, there should be some decent editorial in Nature Mat itself and probably Nature's public news site. Meanwhile these articles are riffing on this press release and (apparently) some other press comments the author has made.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/... [mit.edu]

These hybrid materials could be worth exploring for use in energy applications such as batteries and solar cells, Lu says. The researchers are also interested in coating the biofi

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[Sockatume]

Text news? Tech news.

Implementation harder than Ideas

[dbIII]

There's a lot of stuff going on at the microscopic level that makes things harder than at the macro level. For instance tiny gears stick together a lot more than large ones due to different forces being proportionally higher at that scale. The same thing that helps geckos cling to the ceiling makes it difficult to turn microscopic gear wheels.
On a different note it's relatively trivial to lay down material for a semiconductor junction that's only one atomic layer thick (eg. chemical vapour deposition), bu

I for one wellcome

[dimko]

I for one welcome our bacteria assembled overlords!

in before grey goo

[Arancaytar]

(...)

Prey

[ThunderBird89]

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Michael Crichton's novel "Prey" is set into motion...

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[Sockatume]

What, the researchers called their agent and said "I'm doing The Andromeda Strain again, but with nanomachines"?

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[iMadeGhostzilla]

Let's hope someone in DARPA has read the book past the first couple of chapters and will alert the management to not cancel their funding for the camera that they got the idea for after reading the first couple of chapters. :-)

Not legal, is it?

[Obfuscant]

"the MIT researchers were able to put bacteria to work

Hasn't slavery been illegal in the US for many years? Did anyone ask the bacteria if they wanted to work, and has the AFL-CIO been able to lobby them for unionization?

I'm not sure having e.coli as slaves is a good thing, especially in chairs. The first naked guy who sits on one will introduce the slaves in the chair to the free bacteria, and there may be a mass exodus of slaves from the chair up into the land of freedom and free food.