Features NanoTechnology

Micromachines Technology

NanoTechnology       Microelectromechanical systems or MEMS are micro versions of electrical gears, motors, switches, etc. that are used to significantly reduce the size of many of today's and future devices from all kinds of industries. Common uses include defense/munitions applications, computer hard drives, optics, and many others. The image above shows the top view of gear reduction unit. Click to enlarge.


The World's Smallest Scissors

NanoTechnology       Scientists in Japan have created what may be the smallest scissors in the world—molecular clippers that are opened and closed with light. These novel shears could help control genes, proteins and other molecules in the body, researchers said.

       The scissors are just three nanometers, or billionths of a meter, long. This makes them more than 100 times smaller than a wavelength of violet light. Just like real shears, the molecular device that researcher Takuzo Aida at the University of Tokyo and his colleagues have designed consists of a pivot, handles and blades. The team presented their findings today at the American Chemical Society annual meeting in Chicago.

The World's Smallest Thinker

NanoTech       Using lasers, Korean researchers have crafted a microscopic version of Rodin's famed sculpture "The Thinker" just about twice the size of a red blood cell at 20 millionths of a meter high [image]. Muscles and even toes are visible in the tiny model. The new technique could help develop novel biosensors and other complicated microscopic devices, the scientists said. For more than a decade, researchers worldwide have experimented with lasers to fabricate elaborate 3-D creations. They start with a resin that hardens when exposed to certain frequencies of light. Using overlapping beams of lasers, researchers can then solidify a sculpture with details measuring less than a wavelength of visible light in size.

The World’s Smallest Robot

NanoTech       Researchers have built an inchworm-like robot so small you need a microscope just to see it. In fact about 200 hundred of them could line up and do the conga across a plain M&M. The tiny bot measures about 60 micrometers wide (about the width of a human hair) by 250 micrometers long, making it the smallest untethered, controllable microrobot ever.

        "It's tens of times smaller in length, and thousands of times smaller in mass than previous untethered microrobots that are controllable," said designer Bruce Donald of Dartmouth University. "When we say ‘controllable,' it means it's like a car; you can steer it anywhere on a flat surface, and drive it wherever you want to go. It doesn't drive on wheels, but crawls like a silicon inchworm, making tens of thousands of 10-nanometer steps every second. It turns by putting a silicon 'foot' out and pivoting like a motorcyclist skidding around a tight turn."

World’s Smallest Car Gets Microscopic Motor

Motor       Last year scientists announced they had made the smallest car ever, a molecule-sized vehicle that rolled on tiny wheels. But what good is a car without a motor? In another feat in the effort to truly downsize Detroit, the researchers have now installed a miniature, light-powered motor in their diminutive automobile. The nanocar is about as wide as a strand of DNA. Roughly 20,000 of them could park side-by-side in a lot no wider than a human hair.

        Such small devices will one day be used to transport drugs to specific destinations inside the human body, researchers say. They could also be used to manufacture tiny factories or help run miniscule computers. For now, the itty bitty cars are largely an exercise in nano-construction, a way to test various assembly methods and materials. "We want to construct things from the bottom up, one molecule at a time, in much the same way that biological cells use enzymes to assemble proteins and other supermolecules," said lead researcher James Tour of Rice University.

Scientists Drill Possibly World's Smallest Holes

NanoTech       Using new machinery, researchers have drilled holes narrower than a human hair in stainless steel and other materials. They say the holes are likely the smallest ever made by humans. The effort is geared toward future uses in electronics and medicine.

        "The holes we are now drilling in Cardiff with the electro-discharge machining (EDM) process could be the smallest in the world," marketing director Frank Marsh of the Manufacturing Engineering Center at Cardiff University in the UK. The holes are as small as 22 microns in diameter, or 0.022 millimeters. Human hairs range from 50 to 80 microns wide. Laser technology had previously made holes down to 150 microns.

The World's Smallest Car

NanoTech       Using the parts inside a single molecule, scientists have constructed the world's smallest car. It has a chassis, axles and a pivoting suspension. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece. It'd be a real squeeze to take it for a spin, however. The whole car is no more than 4 nanometers across. That's slightly wider than a strand of DNA. A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick. Other groups have made car-shaped nanoscale objects. But this is the first one that rolls "on four wheels in a direction perpendicular to its axles," the researchers reported Thursday.

       What's the point? Nanotrucks, of course. Eventually the researchers want to build tiny trucks that could carry atoms and molecules around in miniature factories. "We'd eventually like to move objects and do work in a controlled fashion on the molecular scale, and these vehicles are great test beds for that," said James Tour, a Rice University research who co-led the work. "They're helping us learn the ground rules."

The World’s Smallest Fountain Pen

NanoTech       Researchers have created the world's smallest fountain pen with a tip so tiny it can draw lines a hundred times thinner than a red blood cell. Called the "nanonfountain probe," it can paint lines as thin as 40 nanometers and has its own reservoir to hold various types of inks, including pigments for painting patterns and organic materials for designing sensors.

Scientists Make Smallest Manmade Organic Particles

NanoTech       Scientists who have created the smallest precisely crafted organic particles are billing their breakthrough as a potential boon to medicine and technology. The tiny structures could one day be used as vehicles for delivering drugs or genes into the human body or perhaps imaging you from the inside-out, the researchers said today. They might also find uses in electronics.

       The nanotechnology industry has long been making strong claims, and this latest process is in its infancy. And it is no longer a big feat to make small things. Other scientists have created molecule-sized structures and even microscopic motors in the nanometer range. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter. But traditional nano-products are made mostly of metals and other inorganic materials that must be baked, etched or processed with solvents that would destroy fragile DNA or drugs. The new structures are made of organic materials without all the harsh treatment and can be constructed as spheres, rods, cones, or trapezoids. They could be made biodegradeable to disintegrate after insertion into the body.

The World's Smallest Motor

NanoTech       Scientists recently unveiled the tiniest electric motor ever built. You could stuff hundreds of them into the period at the end of this sentence. One day a similar engine might power a tiny mechanical doctor that would travel through your body in the ultimate house call. The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube.

       One droplet is even smaller than the other. When a small electric current is applied to the droplets, atoms slowly eek off the larger droplet and join the smaller one. The small droplet grows - but never gets as big as the other droplet - and eventually bumps into the large droplet. As they touch, the large droplet rapidly sops up the atoms it had previously sloughed off. This quick shift in energy produces a power stroke.

       The technique exploits the fact that surface tension -- the tendency of atoms or molecules to resist separating -- becomes more important at small scales. Surface tension is the same thing that allows some insects to walk on water. The motor, a surface-tension-driven nanoelectromechanical relaxation oscillator, was built by a team of researchers led by Alex Zettl at the University of California, Berkeley.

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