Chattahbox.com reports that a professor of chemistry at Rice University has created a car slightly wider than a strand of DNA. Jame Tour’s nanovehicle is 3nm along and 2nm wide. “It rolls on buckyballs, which consist of 60 atoms pure carbon formed like a sphere, includes a chassis with an engine, a pivoting suspension.” Sweet ride! I mean, it does move, right? Absotinylutely! “By heating the surface that the cars are on, the team is able to excite the molecules in the vehicle, and they move forward in a straight line until they hit an object. [Are you in good hands?] The light motion works on the principle of photo activation.” But don’t get to thinking that this bad boy is ready for prime time. “They are manufactured in a 20-step process similar to the way many drugs are synthesized from small molecules in closed reactors. They are then suspended in toluene gas and spun cast onto the gold surface… it took Tour and his team eight years to build the car. One of the significant challenges was attaching the wheels because the buckyballs had the adverse affect of shutting down the binding property — the palladium reaction — used to form the rest of the vehicle.” Don’t you hate it when that happens?
18 Comments on “Presenting: The World’s Smallest Car...”
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How many miles per halflife?
And just like a Chevy Cobalt it lacks a NAV system as an option ;)
And to get it repaired, you have to take it to a quantum mechanic….
(i know… terrible!)
I roll on Buckyballs
New nerd quote. I shall inform the nerds at /. of this. And Weird Al.
A spokesman at Cooper Tire replies, “You see? This stuff is really freakin’ hard, okay? It’s the damn buckyballs, people!”
…and the point is?…..
I mean, science is great and all, but does it drive down your DNA and cure cancer? No? Call me when it does, I’ll buy 2.
Geez! Will it ever end. First the Chinese trade in their bikes for cars, now every bacteria on the planet will be buying an SUV and driving up gas prices even further.
mcs:
In this case, no. Global Warming will actually help them move their SUV’s with this technology!
8 years. That is freaking demented.
Lemme guess…2010 model year?
Perhaps they could call it the Volt.
Nanotech, and more specifically nanites themselves are the double-edged broadsword for the next 20 years.
So far, nanites have mostly been used in some rather rote applications – as reinforcing material fully encased in epoxies.
However, just handling them, they are hardly inert. Early indications are that if you are working with them without serious protective gear, you might as well chop up an eightball of asbestos and do your best Tony-fohkin-Montana.
It’s the self-replicating nanites that hold the most promise. And planet-altering potential downsides.
Of course, I’m just being paranoid. I know that it will get all the safety analysis of GM foods.
Just like Kudzu. Except smaller. And more far more dangerous.
This is old news. Tour published in Nanoletters back in 2005.
http://eugen.leitl.org/nl051915k.pdf
It’s also pretty silly. There are productive applications of nanoscience which might actually do some good in medicine, transportation, computing, etc., and then there are the “gee whiz” applications. I respectfully submit that this is in the latter category.
Self-replicating nanites, eh? Methinks you’ve been watching too much Star Trek, porschespeed. Nanotech science is still in its infancy, just simple machines like this car, simple sensors and unique structures have been fabricated to date.
The sad fact of the matter is that in today’s credit market, there are few strands of DNA that could hope to finance the purchase of a new nanovehicle.
Mike66Chryslers,
I haven’t watched Star Trek in years. A lot of silliness, but you can easily Google up the areas of futurism where they were (frighteningly) spot-on.
Remember when ‘Jurrasic Park’ came out? The upright scientists brigade said it could never happen. Or certainly not in a hundred years.
Well, oops. They’ve sequenced Wooly Mammoth. No amber required, just some fur and shampoo. They’ll grow one someday soon, just depends on who ponies up. Probably won’t work out perfectly, but it will happen.
Self-replication is the money shot for nanotech. The basics are semi-drilled down, the rest is just a matter of time. Depending on funding, 5 maybe 10 years.
I think this is amazing. Sometimes we have to create something with no purpose for the sake of artistic creation.
When it hits Seattle, the Scream Greens will demand steel wheels and tracks so it screws up the traffic for everybody else.