Responsible Nanotechnology

Exceptionally Stiff Organic Nanostructures

Lots of things work better as they get smaller: power density increases, operating speed increases, and number of features per volume increases dramatically.

One of the few things that doesn't get better is stiffness - in fact, stiffness gets worse. A material that's stiff enough to build human-sized things out of may be too floppy for the nanoscale.

There's been lots of exciting developments over the last decade in organic nanostructures... but one question that's been on my mind is how to make them stiff enough to build conventional mechanical devices out of. (Floppy natural protein machines are cool, but inherently limited in some ways, and stiff devices can benefit from centuries of accumulated invention.)

Now comes an announcement of a new record in stiffness (a Young's modulus of 275 GPa) for aromatic dipeptide nanospheres. Basically, that means they're built out of protein. In fact, they're built out of just two amino acids. And the simple structure means they can be built in shapes other than spheres as well.

This may be a significant enabler toward building engineered nanomachines using protein-handling nanomachinery.

Here's an article that explains the dipeptide nanospheres.

Hat tip to Next Big Future.

Chris Phoenix

They Keep Getting Smaller... And More Powerful

I remember back in the late 1980's, seeing a billboard advertising IBM's studly computer power. In huge words, the billboard proclaimed: "17 MIPS Zone!"

Nvidia is announcing that by the end of next year, they'll have a chip with (Brian Wang calculates) about 1.5 Teraflops. That's 100,000 times as fast.

Even for someone who grew up knowing Moore's Law and laughing at how the old science fiction writers put room-sized computers in space ships, every once in a while my mind gets blown by just how fast computers are getting.

The other thing that impressed me is that this chip will be made with a 28 nm process. The smallest patterned feature on this chip will be smaller than most viruses. And I'm guessing it'll have somewhere around a billion of those features.

(If I remember right, back in the late 80's, the smallest feature on a chip was over 1,000 nm.)

Back in 1998 when I first heard about nanotechnology, there was basically no way to build things that size. Now, industry is doing it.

I don't have a nice conclusion for this post. I just was impressed enough to want to write and say, Wow. 

Chris Phoenix