Nanotechnology

[TheBeast17]

Mini Technology

Been reading about a group of people that have created the worlds smallest transistor, out of a molecule.

Exactly how small do you think technology can get?

 

[Anonymous]

What about mental technology? Devices that only exist in imaginary space, but exert an influence on physical reality... They would take up no physical room at all.

 

[mikelegs]

Nano-tech

Not non-existently small, but very small, yes.

 

[Mattattattatt]

PRESENT technology can only get that small... remember what happened when valves met transistors

 

[Anonymous]

What about mental technology? Devices that only exist in imaginary space, but exert an influence on physical reality... They would take up no physical room at all.

Ah, but not if a mind cannot exist without a brain...

 

[Anonymous]

Ah, but not if a mind cannot exist without a brain...

Haha... Indeed. If that is the case, then the brain is still an incredibly powerful peice of technology for its size - considering that we are still only partially understand it's most base capabilities... A reality generator no less!

That is assuming that a mind needs a brain to exist.

 

[Anonymous]

<Begin "Wild Speculation">

When we work out the size of the device, do we include its extension into parallel universes? (Though how we do that, god only knows )

This isn't quite as mad as it first seems as this is one possible interpretation of how a quantum computer gets so much computation done. (Talk about "parallel" processing.)

<End "Wild Speculation">

 

[Anonymous]

Smart Dust

According to this a team at Berkeley have come up with what appear to be almost microscopically small computers:-

'Researchers working in a wide range of disciplines have created a series of tiny modules, complete with sensors and communications, with the aim of demonstrating 'smart dust'--self-sustaining network nodes measuring millimeters or less per side.

The new technologies will find uses in environmental monitoring, health, security, distributed processing and tracking--and doubtless create some uses of their own, including spotting when food is no longer fresh or has been in dangerous conditions. The team also predicts some more unusual devices; for example, one mote could be put under each fingernail and report back on finger movements, which make it possible to build invisible keyboards and gesture-control and 3-D input devices...'

'One of the key innovations the Berkeley scientists are testing is optical links by lasers and mirrors: A mote is illuminated from afar by a laser, and signals back by moving a mirror fabricated as part of a micro electrical mechanical system (MEMS)--the new nanotechnology of building moving systems on chips.

By building reflectors into a corner-cube retroreflector (CCR)--three mirrored surfaces at 90 degrees to each other, with the property of sending light back in the direction it came from--the dust can send a signal a great distance with practically no power, of the order of 10,000 times less than by radio.

The same laser beam can also carry programs and data into the mote, providing two-way communications. In tests, the researchers have sent a signal more than 21 kilometers using a standard hand-held laser pointer and electronic sensors. The team says that in principle, it may even be possible to signal to satellites in 300km orbits...'

'The team has acknowledged that smart computers the size of grains of sand monitoring everything around them and sending out signals create some privacy and secrecy issues. But the researchers dismiss these issues as less important than the benefits.'

As long as the experts are happy, then.

 

[Anonymous]

EC announces nanotechnology plans

Just a small footnote in the news, but maybe an important one.

As posted in Ananova

EC announces nanotechnology plans


The European Commission is investing £440 million in nanotechnology research.

Research commissioner Phillippe Busquin hopes the move will encourage more government and industry investment.

Nanotechnology involves manipulating products at molecular level.

A nanometre is more than 1000 times thinner than a human hair.

Mr Busquin says advances will bring safer, cleaner, and more durable products.

Story filed: 09:12 Tuesday 8th October 2002

Although I guess, when you look at multinational tech business and technological development on that scale that £440 million is quite a miniscule sum of money.

 

[Anonymous]

A little more Nanotech news

As posted in Ananova

Researchers train bacteria to build circuits

Scientists in Japan are training bugs to make electrical circuits.

The experiments have been carried out at the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, in Ibaraki.

The team are using Acetobacter xylinum bugs to lay down cellulose fibres onto grooved films.

Researcher Tetsuo Kondo says the technique could point the way to tiny machines that can build microscopic circuits.

He told Nature there could be other applications, including using bugs as the basis for nano-machines that regenerate skin.

Story filed: 14:05 Tuesday 8th October 2002

 

[Anonymous]

A war on tiny things!

It appears that nanotech is the new GM. According to New Scientist, campaigners came from all over the world to a meeting in Brussels, with the main agenda item being a moratorium on all nanotechnology, including research in labs.

A telling point is that no nanotechnologists were invited to speak at the meeting. Whilst there is some legitimate concern, it appears that the a significant section of the green movement is willing to spout rubbish in order to get a campaign mobilised against it. For example we have the Green MEP, Sarah Lucas, claiming that

"The laws of physics do not apply at a molecular scale."

(Can someone get her a primer on quantum mechanics? )

The organisation that organised the meeting (the Canadian environmentalists ETC) claimed

"We can't control genetically modified organisms, so what makes us think we can control atomically modified organisms."

Which, to be honest isn't the first thing that comes to mind when I think about nanotechnology.

I wonder if the greens really know what they are doing. There is a real sense of huge mountain being built up out of a molehill. Could it blow up in their faces, leaving people wondering if they can be relied on for a realistic, objective, assessment of the things that ail our planet?

What do you reckon?

 

[Anonymous]

Re: A war on tiny things!

What do you reckon?

As a scientist, I resent these wishy-washy greens denying me the pleasure of seeing the remaining rainforest being consumed by genetically-modified nanobots, after which they will descend upon Prince Charles, injecting him with an overdose of a non-organic MMR vaccine (which will also contain tartrazine). By my calculation, his stem cells could then be used to create designer babies, who, frenzied by a combination of phyto-oestrogens, mobile-phone usage and living near powerlines, will embark on a rampage of baby seal killing, possibly using the corpses to bludgeon the last whale to death.

Frankly, I blame globalisation.

 

[Anome]

"The laws of physics do not apply at a molecular scale."

Sadly, many proponents of nano-tech think the same way. Many of them seem to think it is analogous to magic.

I would say that, if the standard nano-technologist fantasy of what can be achieved is ever realised, then there will be real cause for concern. Unfortunately, nano-tech is yet to be used for anything useful. It's currently a bunch of vague notions and absurd hype, and thus no real cause for concern. Yet.

(Personally, I have my doubts that it will ever be useful, I think that we stand a better chance of getting productive results on a slightly larger scale.)

 

[NilesCalder]

All technology can be dangerous, by it's very nature. Flight can be used to bring down buildings, computers can be used to spread pornography, steam can be used to drive engines of war. Let's all go back to living in caves!

Nanotechnology promises to level the playing field, to give everyone practically unlimited resources. Nanotech is the ultimate recyceler. I think what really scares the greens is that nanotech has the potential to make their comfortable middle-class existance obsolete and turn as all into nobility.

Quite frankly I'd mulch the lot of them.

 

[Anonymous]

Nanotechnology promises to level the playing field, to give everyone practically unlimited resources. Nanotech is the ultimate recyceler. I think what really scares the greens is that nanotech has the potential to make their comfortable middle-class existance obsolete and turn as all into nobility.

It's magic!

Ho Ho Ho!

 

[NilesCalder]

It's magic!

Only to the ignorant. Hell, Televison is magical to most people and don't get me started on computers...

 

[Anonymous]

Only to the ignorant. Hell, Televison is magical to most people and don't get me started on computers...

I was refering to your claims of boundless benefits. :hmph:

Yet another Frankenstein product. Mary Shelley had this macho, bollox, this hatred and jealousy of the creative power of the womb sussed, nearly 200 years ago.

Would we be better off in caves? Some have already been driven back to them, for safety.

The next 50 years will interesting. Viruses, bacteria, plants and animals permanently, tinkertoy engineered by beany hat wearers that think the Segway is a major advance in transportation.

Self reproducing machines, smaller than grains of dust and backed up by snake oil claims, similiarily employed in permanently changing the environment.

Flight, computers, steam? Have already made permanent and damaging changes to the Earth's environment and human society. Huge benefits for the few, encroachment and misery for billions.

 

[Anonymous]

I think that one of the problems is the way that the notion of the "unstoppable grey goo" has become entrenched in the perception of what nanotech is about. Most sensible folks believe that that is a long way off (if it happens at all.) In the meantime nanotech includes things like "nanoparticles of titanium dioxide" in sun-cream, "nanocapsules" in cosmetics, and pretty much anything else on a nano-scale. (At least from the perspective of the campaigners.)

To give you a taste, from Caroline Lucas (Green, MEP)

WOMEN FACE GREATER EXPOSURE TO 'GREY GOO' SCIENCE
- HEALTH & BEAUTY PRODUCTS TREAT WOMEN AS GUINEA PIGS
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Some of our most popular health and beauty products contain ingredients manufactured by 'nanotechnology' - the science of manipulating chemicals at the molecular level.

Major branded products such as L'Oreal's Plenitude, Lancome's Flash Bronzer Self-Tanning Face Gel and Vanicream Sunscreens contain nanotech ingredients - despite the technique being so new it is subject to no special licensing or labeling requirements and that grave concerns still exist over its safety for human use.

Prince Charles expressed concerns about the new technology last month, echoing scientists' warnings that proposed nanotech developments could wreak havoc on the environment, reducing man-made and natural structures to 'grey goo'. Experts have also expressed reservations about currently available nanotech applications.
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"After the recent media attention on the dangers of nanotechnology, I did some research - and was horrified to find nanotech products sitting innocently in my bathroom cabinet," she said.
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"The Government must introduce an immediate ban on the sale of nanotech products until we have carried out the necessary research to prove the technology is completely safe.

"Even then, health and beauty products manufactured using these new methods must be clearly labeled to ensure consumers have the right to choose whether they want to use them or not."

http://www.carolinelucasmep.org.uk/

There are reasonable concerns. (After all, look how important size is when you want to weaponise anthrax spores.) Sadly it's all lumped into the same pot, and there is also no understanding of how nanoscale objects already occur naturally or have been used for years if not decades. For example the filler used in car tyres is carbon black. This is a nanoscale material.

Perhaps it comes down to presentation. I came across a quote from a chemist a few days ago. He said that chemists have been doing nanoscale engineering since the birth of chemistry. It only became nanotechnology when physicists tried to muscle in.

 

[Anonymous]

I think that one of the problems is the way that the notion of the "unstoppable grey goo" has become entrenched in the perception of what nanotech is about. Most sensible folks believe that that is a long way off (if it happens at all.) In the meantime nanotech includes things like "nanoparticles of titanium dioxide" in sun-cream, "nanocapsules" in cosmetics, and pretty much anything else on a nano-scale. (At least from the perspective of the campaigners.)

So, 'self reproducing machines, smaller than grains of dust,' aren't one of the goals of nanotechnicians? Machinelike concurrents for biological systems?

Really, these guys are simply out to produce better ways to deliver ungents to collagen sites for the cosmetics industry?

My Arse! :sceptic:

 

[phgnome]

This follows the same line of logic as GM food crops. I'm not necessarily against GM foods but I think we need to be responsible with it. We need to find ways to absolutely isolate it from our regular crops until we know more about it.

Yes, it has the potential to impact and destroy our whole environment -- the whole planet -- but it also has the potential to save our a$$es one day. We need to approach it with a responsible attitude (I know, I'm sounding like my mother) -- it would be very foolish if we approached it carelessly.

I don't think it's something that ought to be driven or traded in the capital market -- you can't always rely on private organizations to act responsibly. At the same time, I don't think we should stop learning about it. Just because there is a risk of being killed in a car accident, it doesn't mean that we should stop driving. The best we can do is to contain the risk by making it routine to observe regulations.

 

[Anonymous]

Oh, the Greens are on this now, are they?
I can understand their concerns...
selfreplicating machines could establish themselves as an ecology in competition to the natural world; in fact that might be the most efficient way for them to work.
Nanotech is going to be a very large part of our lives, if I read the future right; it includes nanoscale manipulation of materials by larger tools, which I imagine will happen first, and as the independently operating devices get smaller the medical potential is remarkable.
Direct neural interfacing, immune enhancement, life extension.
Self Tanning Face Gel.
Pollution and waste could be reprocessed until it becomes resource, which is surely every Green's dream.

Of course these things will be subject to the laws of physics, and are likely to be limited in the amount of energy and information they will have available at the point of operation, which is why the very small units imagined by some people are unlikely to be useful in the near future.
Also the enormous binding energy of metals will defeat them to a large extent.
However nanoscale technology can also be applied by larger devices with nanoscale manipilators, and these larger devices can be linked into a network of control and replication and energy storage units, so that a swarm of machines resembles a colonial organism or microecology.
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But everyone is worried about grey goo, thanks to Bonnie Prince Charlie; perhaps correctly. As I said, tiny machines are very limited thermodynamically; in nature viruses are parasites that need a host to replicate. Any grey goo swarm would need to be composed of a large number of specialised units, some large, some small;
The swarm would probably be unable to penetrate or affect steel or other metal defences, and might be vunerable to EMP and chemical attack. However, the organic materials of the biosphere (plants, humus, animals if the swarm can catch them) will be easy to utilise, and it is likely that a nanoswarm will largely be constructed out of proteins and enzymes, probably with metal and diamond/buckyball components in the mix.
Something like a gritty cheese or a slimemold, no doubt with a number of larger objects scuttling around performing support functions; not a very nice image.
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Such a complicated set of devices will not be feasible in the near future, thankfully-
I do however see military nano in the near future which could assemble explosives, antipersonnel mines, or biochemical weapons out of the surrounding biosphere.
So there is good reason to worry.
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Having said all that constructing nanotech weapons is much more effort than knocking up a tailormade virus in a small lab somewhere; if any tiny swarm is going to be used in warfare, the influenza/ebola cross is much more cost effective.

 

[Anonymous]

Of course these things will be subject to the laws of physics, and are likely to be limited in the amount of energy and information they will have available at the point of operation, which is why the very small units imagined by some people are unlikely to be useful in the near future.
Also the enormous binding energy of metals will defeat them to a large extent.

'Maxwell's Demon' made, err... of gray goo!

Now, there's a thought.

 

[brianellwood]

Something like a gritty cheese .....A killer goganzola! ARRRGH!

 

[Pete Younger]

So what are the chances of this becoming reality in the near future ?

 

[rynner2]

GREY GOO

This goes back to 1986 and Eric Drexler’s book The Engines of Creation. He is the guru of the world of nanotechnology, in which individual molecules are manipulated as though they are snooker balls. In fiction, but not (yet) in fact, intelligent sub-microscopic machines do extraordinary things like building spaceships from raw materials without human intervention or circulate in the bloodstream to monitor our bodily fitness and cure every ill.

Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems, hardly a techno-Luddite, has written about a negative side to this magical molecular mystery that may one day be ours. He argues that these nanotechnological auto-assemblers might get out of control and convert the planet and every living thing on it to a uniform but useless mass of bits and pieces: the grey goo (a term actually invented by Mr Drexler). Mr Joy goes as far as saying that there are some areas of research we ought not to pursue, because the consequences might be so dire.

Michael Lewis, who has just published thoughts on his own brand of futurology in a book called The Future Just Happened—and in the process spawned a fresh set of sightings of the term—says that concern about grey goo is an allegory of mid-life personal obsolescence. Or just possibly a fear that developing technology is going to eat our bodies as well as our souls.

The nightmare is that combined with genetic materials and thereby self-replicating, these nanobots would be able to multiply themselves into a “gray goo” that could outperform photosynthesis and usurp the entire biosphere, including all edible plants and animals.
[American Spectator, Feb. 2001]

Grey goo is a wonderful and totally imaginary feature of some dystopian sci-fi future in which nanotechnology runs riot, and microscopic earth-munching machines escape from a laboratory to eat the world out from under our feet.
[Guardian, July 2001]

World Wide Words

Not everything in science fiction is real!

 

[Anonymous]

So, 'self reproducing machines, smaller than grains of dust,' aren't one of the goals of nanotechnicians? Machinelike concurrents for biological systems?

That's one area of interest that has got the media going. It's just not likely to happen any time soon. Currently all nanotechnology is just making nanoscale things. It's just as much about grey goo, as micro-electronics is about building sentient androids.

Really, these guys are simply out to produce better ways to deliver ungents to collagen sites for the cosmetics industry?

My Arse! :sceptic:

That's the problem. The term "nanotechnology" covers such a broad range of things that, yes, I guess "nanocapsules" could comfortably be described as nanotech. (The Greens certainly include these things under their definition.)

Of course this means that a moratorium on nanotech would cover a huge range of items, including those that you wouldn't expect to have an environmental impact, such as advanced memory devices, and molecular wires, etc. It could even apply to "simple" chemistry. (After all, what are buckyballs but nanoscale structures?)

 

[Anonymous]

This stuff makes me nervous. I don't like the idea of being broken down by gritty cheese. I can see great uses for nanobot-thingies, but let's keep them simple and stupid, eh?

 

[Anonymous]

'self reproducing machines, smaller than grains of dust'

That's one area of interest that has got the media going.

I don't know. The 'Media.' Like sheep aren't they.? :hmph:

 

[NilesCalder]

Look

The Nanotech box is already open. All it takes to make nanoscale devices is a manipulating electron microscope (it can see and manipulate things at a nanoscopic scale). I say "all", they're huge and expensive bits of kit, but they're hardly advanced; the tech's decades old.

My point is that all a moritorium is going to do is stop those responsible nanotechnologist who have no intention of abusing their research and only want to cure AIDS or something. Those nanotechnologists who want to build dissasemblers and turn the world into "grey goo" will do it anyway...

For an example of this consider the moritorium on "desinger babies" and cloning. Just this week a "designer baby" was born who has a 95% chance of saving the life of an sibling...

 

[Mythopoeika]

This 'grey goo' fear is mostly due to fear of the unknown, and a fear that the necessary controls might not be put in place.

Really, just as with artificial intelligence, the safety precautions required for this technology are mostly down to careful programming.

If nanotechnologists program nanobots to behave in a responsible fashion, and to stay within the confines of a controlled area, they could ensure that nothing will go wrong.

If nanobots are used in an isolating chamber (for example), and they are programmed not to stray from that chamber, there should be no chance of them leaking into the outside world.

Also, they could be given a limited life, to prevent them from running wild.

Potentially, it's a more controllable, safer technology than GM.