Nanowalker molecule opens the possibility of molecular computers
From Wikinerds
Below is an automated transformation from HTML to wikitext. This page will have to be wikified.
A research team created and successfully tested a molecule, "9,10-dithioanthracene" or "DTA", which walks like a human in a straight line on flat surface. DTA gets its energy from supplied heat and can walk without the assistance of nano-rails. During tests, the molecule took more than 10000 steps without losing its balance at all.
The research was funded by the US Department of Energy and the team was led by Ludwig Bartels of University of California, Riverside (UCR). Bartels is assistant professor of chemistry and a member of UCR's Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering. The study was assisted by Ki-Young Kwon, Kin L. Wong, and Greg Pawin of UCR, Sergey Stolbov and Talat S. Rahman of Kansas State University, Petroleum Research Fund, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The results of the research will be presented in next month's issue of Physical Review Letters.
The molecule works by walking on two feet, just like a human, and it can continue walking on a straight line even if it is disturbed.
The DTA "nanowalker" molecule opens the possibility of implementing a 1990s proposal by IBM for molecular computers in which numbers would be encoded by the position of molecules along a line, like a nanoscale abacus. IBM later abandoned the concept because at that time there was no way to manufacture the bars of the tiny abacus, but now the DTA could help engineers implement IBM's ideas since this molecule does not require any bars to move in a straight line. This means that we are now closer to the realisation of molecular memory which would be much more compact than contemporary devices.
More information on the Web:
Previous stories by Wikinerds Portal about UC Riverside:
The text of this story is Copyright (C) 2005 by Nikolaos S. Karastathis. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
