Actual progress in real nanotech.


"Ahem A Rivet's Shot"
Speculative nanotech discussion has indeed gone very
quiet in the last few years. I think mainly because of
the dearth of visible activity ni the field - five
years or so there was much reporting of simple
machines being made at nanoscale and the like but this
seems to have dried up.

A machine is being build to read DNA that takes a single
strand of DNA, strips off bases one base at a time, and
lets the bases get sucked through a measuring device one
at a time - the measuring device is a pore that only one
base at a time can pass through. As the base passes
through, it partially blocks the pore, modulating the
ion current by an amount that depends on which base it
is.

The machine is constructed from extensively modified
biological molecules, and molecules that are imitations
of or inspired by biological molecules.

The heavy reliance on biology suggests that designing
nanomachines that actually work is hard to do from first
principles.

The machine itself is a very large molecule, covalently
held together, constructed by the usual methods of
convergent synthesis, embedded in a lipid bilayer, which
is itself embedded in a much larger silicon pore in a
silicon chip, which silicon pore has the usual
dimensions of modern logic gates in modern ICs.


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We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.

http://www.jim.com/

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