Some Small Science News

And I literally mean small. I don't know if many people keep up with this emerging science, but there have been some significant breakthroughs in the field of nanotechnology recently. In fact, some of the newest 'nano-inventions' are going to help open up the realized capabilities of this seemingly sci-fi advancement a lot sooner than most of us are aware. Molecular construction crews are actually on the horizon now...incredible stuff... Jage

All Stories Via LiveScience.com:

The World's Smallest Car

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."

Walking Small: The First Bipedal Molecule

Scientists have created a molecule that walks on two feet when it feels hot or when lured by the tip of scanning tunneling microscope.

The molecule, called 9,10-dithioanthracene (DTA), walks in such way that only one "foot" rests on a surface at any one time. When heated, the body of the DTA molecule pivots forward, causing one leg to lift up and the other to plop down.

In this hot-potato fashion, it plods along in a straight line without veering off course or stumbling.

Bipedalism like this is, of course, the preferred mode of natural movement for humans, but it's not easy to accomplish even in the realm of human-sized robots.

DTA can also be lured by the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope serving as a sort of carrot. In tests on a standard copper surface, DTA took 10,000 steps without faltering once.

Ludwig Bartels, lead researcher of the project at the University of California, Riverside, said the tiny walker could one day be used to guide the movements of molecule-based information storage or even computation.

The World's Smallest Motor

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.

Although the amount of energy produced is small -- 20 microwatts -- it is quite impressive in relation to the tiny scale of the motor. The whole setup is less than 200 nanometers on a side, or hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. If it could be scaled up to the size of an automobile engine, it would be 100 million times more powerful than a Toyota Camry’s 225 horsepower V6 engine, the researchers say.