 may have finally found a source of power. Engines that convert chemical energy into motion could someday enable swimming nanomachines to operate despite the random motion and fluid thickness that tend to dominate at microscopic scales. )
Microscopic robots of the future (shown here in an artist's conception) may have finally found a source of power. Engines that convert chemical energy into motion could someday enable swimming nanomachines to operate despite the random motion and fluid thickness that tend to dominate at microscopic scales.
Image: KENN BROWN MONDOLITHIC STUDIOS (MICROSCOPIC ROBOTS)
In Brief
- Nanotechnology promises futuristic applications such as microscopic robots that assemble other machines or travel inside the body to deliver drugs or do microsurgery.
- These machines will face some unique physics. At small scales, fluids appear as viscous as molasses, and Brownian motion makes everything incessantly shake.
- Taking inspiration from the biological motors of living cells, chemists are learning how to power microsize and nanosize machines with catalytic reactions.
Imagine that we could make cars, aircraft and submarines as small as bacteria or molecules. Microscopic robotic surgeons, injected in the body, could locate and neutralize the causes of disease—for example, the plaque inside arteries or the protein deposits that may cause Alzheimer’s disease. And nanomachines—robots having features and components at the nanometer scale—could penetrate the steel beams of bridges or the wings of airplanes, fixing invisible cracks before they propagate and cause catastrophic failures.
In recent years chemists have created an array of remarkable molecular-scale structures that could become parts of minute machines. James Tour and his co-workers at Rice University, for instance, have synthesized a molecular-scale car that features as wheels four buckyballs (carbon molecules shaped like soccer balls), 5,000 times as small as a human cell.
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7 Comments
Add CommentThis idea of the nanomachines sounds like a futuristic approach. I am not a scientist, but to all those brilliant scientific minds across the globe this idea may be a beneficial contribution to mankind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI came here from the print magazine to see the video, but the link is broken.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLink is still broken
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe video link is still broken
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVideo link is still broken. Disappointing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI just checked and the video can be seen at:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.scientificamerican.com/video.cfm?lineup=1406165298&id=21818160001
Some of the actual videos of moving rods discussed in that article can be seen at:
http://research.chem.psu.edu/axsgroup/supporting_information.html
Hope this helps.
In the editing of this article, a key reference to the work of Prof. Geoffrey Ozin and coworkers at the University of Toronto, who independently demonstrated the principles of catalyzed motion with Ni-Au nanorods, was inadvertently deleted. The authors apologize for this error. Please see their paper in Chemical Communications, 2005, pp. 441-443.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this