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Biotech IBM Science

Chemistry Breakthrough Offers Unprecedented Control Over Atomic Bonds (newatlas.com) 44

Posted by EditorDavid from the protons-turn-weird dept.
"In what's being hailed as an important first for chemistry, an international team of scientists has developed a new technology that can selectively rearrange atomic bonds within a single molecule," reports New Atlas. "The breakthrough allows for an unprecedented level of control over chemical bonds within these structures, and could open up some exciting possibilities in what's known as molecular machinery."

"Selective chemistry — the ability to steer reactions at will and to form exactly the chemical bonds you want and no others — is a long-standing quest in chemistry," adds the announcement from IBM Research. "Our team has been able to achieve this level of selectivity in tip-induced redox reactions using scanning probe microscopy." Our technique consisted in using the tip of a scanning probe microscope to apply voltage pulses to single molecules. We were able to target specific chemical bonds in those molecules, breaking those bonds and forging new, different ones to switch back and forth at will among three different molecular structures.

The molecules in our experiment all consisted of the same atoms, but differed in the way those atoms were bonded together and arranged in space... Our findings were published today and featured on the cover of Science.

Our demonstration of selective and reversible formation of intramolecular covalent bonds is unprecedented. It advances our understanding of chemical reactions and opens a route towards advanced artificial molecular machines.... Imagine one could rearrange bonds inside a molecule at will, transforming one structural isomer into various other ones in a controlled manner. In this paper, we describe a system and a method to make exactly that possible — including the control of the direction of the atomic rearrangements by means of an external driving voltage, and without the use of reagents.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Grokew for sharing the story!
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Chemistry Breakthrough Offers Unprecedented Control Over Atomic Bonds More

Chemistry Breakthrough Offers Unprecedented Control Over Atomic Bonds

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  • So, would this make artificial gasoline practical?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      Sure, it's the same as using the LHC to generate gold atoms from lead... to generate a profit.

    • No, nothing does that. It doesn't make sense at all when you can make biofuels from algae, and you can grow algae on practically any water, and at most latitudes.

      On the other hand, it is a first step towards a universal nanotech assembler. What all prior potential avenues in that direction have lacked (in particular, anyway) is the ability to target specific molecules.

      • Re:Artificial gasoline (Score:4, Interesting)

        by garyisabusyguy ( 732330 ) on Saturday July 23, 2022 @05:05PM (#62727960)

        Yes, first step in a similar fashion to IBM drawing their logo with atoms [wikipedia.org]

        Given time and effort these could result in great things, or the Grey Goo [wikipedia.org] that so many people fear

        I honestly hope that we see a new age of manufacturing with these products and that we manage to avoid killing ourselves off with them. Given the past 50 years with plastics... it may be a coin toss

        • Given time and effort these could result in great things, or the Grey Goo that so many people fear

          Grey goo should be hard, because where does the energy come from? But there's plenty of room for accidentally making large amounts of toxic stuff everywhere, you don't have to go full grey goo to kill everyone.

          I honestly hope that we see a new age of manufacturing with these products and that we manage to avoid killing ourselves off with them. Given the past 50 years with plastics... it may be a coin toss

          Agreed on all counts there.

          • Grey goo should be hard, because where does the energy come from? But there's plenty of room for accidentally making large amounts of toxic stuff everywhere, you don't have to go full grey goo to kill everyone.

            Well, you could have it eat protein, delicious, delicious protein since it can alter the molecules into fuel like our digestive tract does. On second thought....

        • ... or the Grey Goo [wikipedia.org] that so many people fear

          Whew! I thought that what was left over from squeezing geese to make vodka [wikipedia.org]. :-)

        • I'm not gonna lie, I'm rooting for the Grey Goo.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Jimekai ( 938123 )
          Could Grey Goo be reversible, and guided by a conscious AI into finally re-cloning humans, before itself turning to dust in say a thousand centuries? If so, once all traces of the Anthropocene from the ocean and land, are moved back underground to remain as oil, earlier steps of applying patch dynamics, and then terraforming the Earth should be easy, as long as 17 fingered plastic gloves aren't left lying around to be found 25,000 years later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Yes for a hydrogen car. As in a car so tiny only a hydrogen atom can drive it around, because this proof of concept currently requires an STM and you can only make one molecule one at a time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Sure. As long as you do not mind getting a few micro gram for each MWh invested.

  • ... but I guess this is not scalable to produce any substantial amount of whatever substance you desire, probably not even enough to produce a substance for testing its effect on living cells.
  • We can now make gold. Catch: we have to do it one molecule at a time.

  • Question (Score:3)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Saturday July 23, 2022 @05:08PM (#62727964)

    I read the first article which answered one of the questions I had. However, I had to do a quick DDG search to remember about chemical bonds.

    If chemical bonds are nothing more than electrons, how are they able to apply an electrical pulse to these bonds to get them to do what they want? Is it simply the electrons of the pulse temporarily moving the electrons of the chemical bonds into a higher or lower state? Or would this be more like billiards where the electrons of the pulse "rearrange" the electrons of the chemical bonds to produce the desired result?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Whibla ( 210729 )

      ... Is it simply the electrons of the pulse temporarily moving the electrons of the chemical bonds into a higher or lower state? Or would this be more like billiards where the electrons of the pulse "rearrange" the electrons of the chemical bonds to produce the desired result?

      Are these not the same thing? Analogies we use so we can pretend to understand what's going on. Perhaps the only good answer is both and neither are correct. I can't even be sure when I say that the bonds have their own energy, whilst also taking energy to break. How one might apportion the energy held by the bond as opposed to the electrons involved in the bond, that's verging on philosophy it's so subjective.

      As an afterthought, while we think of electrons as the charge carriers of an electric current, ano

      • Let me try my two examples again. In the first, is the energy of the pulse being applied to the electons of the bonds to give them a higher or lower energy state which allows the couplings to be moved, or, in the second case, is the pulse "physically" rearranging the electrons to get the desired result?

        I know those aren't the best analogies, but in the one case you're changing the energy level of the electron while in the second you're "moving" the electron without a change in energy level.

        Or maybe one isn'

    • Is it simply the electrons of the pulse temporarily moving the electrons of the chemical bonds into a higher or lower state? Or would this be more like billiards where the electrons of the pulse "rearrange" the electrons of the chemical bonds to produce the desired result?

      That is a great question.

      Selective chemistry -- the ability to steer reactions at will and to form exactly the chemical bonds you want and no others

      It sounds like it is a little of column A and a little of column B. Column A will not give you exclusions by itself. It can only "prepare" the area for further manipulations.

      Column B does not really pass the sniff test by itself. Colliding a free electron with a bound electron is going to be stupidly difficult because of the Pauli Exclusion Principle and Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and electrons are just absurdly small; however, it seems that some form of that must be taking pl

  • iron my clothes (Score:3)

    by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Saturday July 23, 2022 @05:15PM (#62727982)

    Let me know when I can use this tech to iron my clothes. Just rearrange the wrinkles out for me please.

  • The possibilities once this is scaled up would be insane. Like you could go in and repair anything. Fix things like rust or even structural damage

    Maybe even speed it up and make a true 3D printer

    • Read "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, I think you'll love it.

    • might be a 3D blockchain, since this is IBM we're talkin' about.

    • "... once this is scaled up..." Aye, there's the rub. In a hundred grams of rust, there are on the order of 10**23 molecules. Re-arranging those one-by-one (which is apparently what this technology does) would take A Long Time. The universe is on the order of 10**18 seconds old, so if you started back when the universe was young, and your technology allowed you to re-arrange 100,000 molecules per second, you'd just be finishing next Tuesday.

  • IBM and others have been using scanning tunneling microscopes to manipulate atoms and molecules in various ways for decades.

    https://cen.acs.org/analytical... [acs.org]

  • ...xkcd [xkcd.com] quote.
  • What I'm seeing is the ability to craft and correct DNA/RNA at the atomic level, base pair by base pair, until you have the *exact* version you want. After that you don't need to do it a billion times...you let it replicate itself in vivo or via polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
  • Yes all fine and dandy but 1) you need a very expensive microscope and 2) you need to do this roughly 6*10^23 times and 3) extract the modified atoms in a usable state to actually get a useful amount of compound... This is like an 8 year old shouting at their mother they can bike with no hands on the handlebar. \_()_/
  • Matter Materializer here we come!

  • Every press release announces a new breakthrough. There were 6,435,243 press releases in 2021.

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