Posts Tagged ‘nanotechnology’
“Nanotechnology is an idea that most people simply didn’t believe”*…
Indeed, in the 1980s, even as nanotech pioneer Erik Drexler, a graduate student at MIT at the time, was doing the early work of defining and charting a course for the nascent field, MIT’s departments of electric engineering and computer science refused to approve his Ph.D. topic and plan of study (though ultimately the Media Lab did, and Erik earned his doctorate).
Today the reality– and centrality– of the field are only too apparent and have become the subject of trade and industrial policy… because while the U.S. led in the development of nanotech science, it lags in manufacturing and commercialization. In an excerpt from their book Industrial Policy for the United States: Winning the Competition for Good Jobs and High-Value Industries, Ian Fletcher and Marc Fasteau explain…
Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter at scales from a fraction of a nanometer to a few hundred nanometers — sizes between individual atoms and small single-celled organisms — at which it has radically different properties. Nanotech is already significant in many industries. Integrated circuits are a form of nanotech. Other nanotech provides the light, strong composites in aircraft and space vehicles. Still other nanotech powers the solid-state lasers used to transmit information through the internet and the light-emitting diodes in LED light bulbs and flat-screen TVs. Nanotech also makes possible solar cells, the batteries in electric cars, and medical technologies such as vaccines. It is thus the unifying thread of many of today’s most advanced technologies. Unfortunately, America is falling behind.
In the future, nanotech-based quantum computing and communications will lead to more powerful computers, transforming national security and internet commerce by making currently secret communications insecure. Medical nanotechnologies will permit targeted interventions at the cellular level, providing new weapons against diseases, biological weapons, and defenses against them. China is known to be working on these.
Much of the science underpinning these advances was developed at firms and universities in the US. But the huge manufacturing industries built on it are mostly overseas. For example, the organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology Kodak created didn’t save that firm from going bankrupt in 2012. But it did enable lucrative businesses for Korea’s Samsung, to whom Kodak licensed the technology, and LG, which bought Kodak’s entire OLED business in 2009. Today, American firms like Nanosys and Universal Display develop important nanotechnologies, but do not actually manufacture the end products and are thus relatively small.
How did the US get itself into this situation? A major government program, the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), has been funded since 2001, but Washington failed to appreciate the importance of having both a technology and a manufacturing strategy. The prevailing wisdom was that if the academic science was supported, mass manufacturing would follow automatically. By contrast, successful rival nations in nanotech have focused on making these technologies manufacturable at scale, employing every policy tool from R&D subsidies to cheap capital to tariffs. A 2020 National Academies review of the NNI urged that the US recognize that ‘the recent, focused, and in some cases novel commercialization approaches of other nations may be yielding better societal outcomes.’…
A little wonky, but both fascinating and important: “Nanotechnology,” via the invaluable Delanceyplace.com.
(Image above: source)
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As we get small, we might send miniscule birthday greetings to a man who whose work has contributed to the development of medical applications of nanotech: Bert Sakmann; he was born on this date in 1942. A cell physiologist, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Erwin Neher) in 1991 for their work on “the function of single ion channels in cells”– work made possible in part by their invention of the patch clamp.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a wiener!…
From The Atlantic‘s always-illuminating Alexis Madrigal, “The Year in Hot Dog Innovation.” E.g.:
A printing press for corn dogs
More contributors to the quest for fabulous franks here…
Let it never be said that our nation stood still while others carried forth the banner of progress.
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As we reach for the improved sweet onion relish, we might box a dome-shaped birthday cake for inventor, educator, author, philosopher, engineer and architect R(ichard) Buckminster Fuller; he was born on this date in 1895. “Bucky” most famously developed the geodesic dome, the only large dome that can be set directly on the ground as a complete structure, and the only practical kind of building that has no limiting dimensions (i.e., beyond which the structural strength must be insufficient). But while he never got around to frankfurters, he was sufficiently prolific to have scored over 2,000 patents.
“Fullerenes” (molecules composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow spheres, ellipsoids, or tubes), key components in many nanotechnology applications, were named for Fuller, as their structure mimes that of the geodesic dome. Spherical fullerenes (resembling soccer balls) are also called “buckyballs”; cylindrical ones, carbon nanotubes or “buckytubes.”
I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we’re really qualified to take on the responsibility we’re designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courageto really go along with the truth?
God, to me, it seems
is a verb,
not a noun,
proper or improper.
We are collaborators in creation*…
Scientists have developed a way to carve shapes from DNA canvases, including all the letters of the Roman alphabet, emoticons and an eagle’s head.
Bryan Wei, a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues make these shapes out of single strands of DNA just 42 letters long. Each strand is unique, and folds to form a rectangular tile. When mixed, neighbouring tiles stick to each other in a brick-wall pattern, and shorter boundary tiles lock the edges in place…
Read the story on Nature‘s blog (or the full paper in Nature).
As CoDesign observes,
Creating a DNA alphabet was simply a vivid way for the scientists to demonstrate the flexibility and atomic-level accuracy of their system. But you don’t even need a PhD in order to use it, because they also created a graphical user interface that lets anyone with a mouse (and access to an atomic force microscope, the device that “draws” the DNA) sketch out the shape they want without mucking around with code or technical specs.
Still, the DNAlphabet could actually have intriguing applications of its own. Security-minded (or just plain egomaniacal) researchers could use these microscopic structures to watermark their synthetic-biological products, just like that scene in Blade Runner. Even cooler: “One can imagine we can use the shapes as invisible ink in a secret-agent way,” says Wei. “High density information can be delivered in a test tube or simply as powder.”
* “Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.” – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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As we reach for the tweezers, we might recall that it was on this date that Marie Skłodowska-Curie (AKA Madame Curie) went before the examination committee at the University of Paris for her PhD. She was awarded the degree… and later that year, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on “radioactivity” (a term she coined). She became the first female professor at the University, and went on to win another Nobel (the second, in Chemistry)– the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to date to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences… on the basis of which, in 1995, she became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon.
Her work was central to a wave of research that enabled the development of x-ray crystallography, the tool used by Rosalind Franklin in making critical contributions to the project that unravelled the fine molecular structures of DNA (for which Crick, Watson, and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize).
Marie Curie
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