Nanotech manufacturing: are you small enough for the industry?
Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 12:09AM 
WSJ story leveraging a Nature feature about researchers who create atomic-scale assembly line where DNA robots at 1/100,000th a human hair width can make 8 products--nothing too complex but still!
For the first time, microscopic robots made from DNA molecules can walk, follow instructions and work together to assemble simple products on an atomic-scale assembly line, mimicking the machinery of living cells, two independent research teams announced Wednesday.
Until this, most of the nanotech breakthroughs were novelty demos, like putting sunglasses on a dust mite--that sort of gee-whiz stuff.
Now, we're talking nano robots that crank chem compounds or do a Fantastic Voyage job on your body (BTW, Paul Greengrass is doing a 2013 remake!).
Today, nano-materials have been exploited in hundreds of products, but this is the first time production was achieved by "exotic man-made DNA objects" so small that their instructions had to be encoding in the world around them (e.g., chemical markers that direct their movements).
Still think nuclear weapons are going to define WMD and the world of security in the 21st century?
Reader Comments (2)
Germ warfare scares me a whole lot more then nukes.
This kind of scientific breakthrough is straight out of a comic book. I am simultaneously amazed, hopeful, and scared of what someone with "evil" intentions could do.
And for over a decade, US was a leader in defining and demonstrating Nano-tech and other modern technologies while our investors and workers and students pursued bizarre side bet finance schemes, and 'safe' ventures like expensive private and commercial real estate that zoomed up faster than our core and overall economy. Now that those balloons busted, maybe its time to get media & public interest on meaningful transformations.
Check out DARPA & NIST web sites for meaningful past US demonstrations.