Thursday, April 1, 2021

Gearing Up Nanoscale Machines: Molecular-Scale Gear Trains for Transmitting Rotational Force

https://scitechdaily.com/gearing-up-nanoscale-machines-molecular-scale-gear-trains-for-transmitting-rotational-force/

1 comment:

flashgordon said...

Exciting news - there was a bit of a nanotech new lull after the protein folding development. Speaking of which, seems the alphafold has gone quiet.

"As of 5 March 2021, DeepMind has not made any code for AlphaFold 2 publicly available to researchers. Four months after announcing the CASP14 results, the company website states: "We’re right at the beginning of exploring how best to enable other groups to use our structure predictions, alongside preparing a peer-reviewed paper for publication." - alphafold wiki.

As you know, there's many pathways to Drexlerian nanotech - protein folding, S.T.M.s, electron microscopes(Richard Feynman's idea), and DNA. Just when you want to count out DNA, there's a new exciting development.

- I got these two recently,

Scaling up DNA Origami Lattice Assembly - https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/chem.202100784

"At total DNA costs of €0.12 per cm², this large‐scale nanopatterning technique holds great promise for the fabrication of functional surfaces"

A synthetic tubular molecular transport system - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.22.436416v1

"The pistons can cover micrometer distances in fractions of seconds. . . . Electric fields can also be employed to actively pull the pistons along the filaments, thereby realizing a nanoscale electric rail system. . . . and it could form a basis for future molecular transportation networks."

The first DNA nanotech news, Scaling up DNA Origami Lattice Assembly, not only has a macroscale construct by means of DNA-nanotech, but it allows them to be able to orient nano-machines and parts and such. Previously, they could place things in a particular spot, the nano-part would be facing in various directions.

- The DNA is as usual, semi-exciting, but I'm still waiting for the latest from the electron microscope guys - also the Scanning Tunneling Microscopes. They've both able to make single atom constructs. They just need to solve massive parallelism. I would think that would be easier done with electron microscopes.

What robots mean for the environment

And now the disruption robots will likely cause, dropping the cost of labor down to perhaps as little as one cent per hour: https://youtu.be...