Photos The Nanocar Concept
Dabbing glue onto the 'inner' parts fuses the halves into one nanocar. Putting glue onto both the outer and inner parts causes them to attach end-to-end into a train. Tour is currently focused on making a nano-sized backhoe that could load and unload atoms and molecules into the other nanovehicles for transport. He expects to publish a paper on that research this fall. One hundred years form now, Tour envisions entire buildings made from the ground-up, atom by atom. But the first practical applications of this technology, still years away, will be in smaller things like computer chips. If building a house with machines so small that most microscopes can't see them sounds implausible, the sheer numbers of the nanomachines it will take is even more so. Tour claims that he can reliably produce a billion trillion of the tiny machines. A billion billion ("That's a one with 18 zeros after it," said Tour) nanocars will fit into a vial about the size of a finger. "They don't have to carry much," said Tour. "But with a lot of them they can carry a lot." Karl Berggren, a nanoscale researcher at the University of Texas, Dallas, questions the practicality of the nanovehicles but finds the work "imaginative." "It sparks the mind to think that 'Wow, you can do that?'" said Berggren. "Now we just need tiny nanopeople to get into the cars." Related Links: Eric Bland's blog: Interior Design |
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