June 3, 2008 -- They might not look like your Ford F-150 or Toyota Camry, but a new generation of nanocars and nanotrucks (along with nanotrains and even nanobackhoes) could eventually build anything from computer memory chips to entire buildings, atom by atom.
Now they don't even have to be built; some nanomachines can build themselves, according to an upcoming study.
"Most things that people build are top-down. You cut down a tree to build a table," said James Tour, a scientist at Rice University and co-author on the upcoming study, which will appear in the upcoming issue of the new journal Tetrahedron.
"But what if you could make the table from assembling molecules together from the bottom up?" said Tour.
Tour developed the first nanocar -- so small that 30,000 of them could drive abreast down a single human hair -- in 2005. It had four wheels, each made of one 60-atom carbon buckyball and two axles connected by a tiny light- and heat-powered drive-shaft.
Since then, Tour's group has develop a total of 12 different nanovehicle models, including a six-wheeled version and larger nanotrucks to transport the nanocars.
In his most recent work, Tour's group reports nanocars and nanotrains that assemble themselves.
Both the nanocars and the nanotrains start out with the same parts -- essentially, vehicle halves.
Tour's group connects the two halves with a molecular glue that creates chemical bonds between the parts. The placement of the glue determines if the resulting vehicle will be a car or a train.
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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