AND THIS ONE IS LOVELY
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Grow Your Own Chip
If you pick up a sea shell at the beach this summer, you’re looking at an example of nanotechnology. As this ScienCentral news video reports, sea shells could be the inspiration for the next generation of electronic chips.
How To Grow Electronics
Sea shells are a natural example of a primary goal of nanotechnology: useful structures that build themselves. Some nanotechnologists have studied how shells assemble themselves, with a view to making new miniscule structures in similar ways.
At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, materials chemist/bioengineerAngela M. Belcher belongs to the research team at the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN). The mission of the ISN is to design the military uniform of the future, to protect soldiers in unprecedented ways. For example, the uniform might be able to harden into wearable armor when its wearer turns on built-in electronics to create an electromagnetic field.
But such a uniform would require wearable electronics, even smaller and more powerful than the most advanced devices we have today. To find ways of making nanoscale electronics, some nanotechnologists are pursuing molecular self-assembly. “What we want to do,” Belcher explains, “is not only control the structure of new materials we make, but also have those materials pattern themselves into functional devices.”
Belcher’s own model is the natural world. “Organisms assemble themselves very well,” she points out. “You and I are examples of self-assembled systems. No one built me, atom by atom. My proteins and other biological molecules actually had a blueprint of how to build the individual components that make a human.”
Red abalone shells
To decipher nature’s blueprint and apply it to her own goal of nanoscale electronics, Belcher began by studying how red abalone shells combine their own proteins with calcium from the surrounding ocean, to fashion extremely strong shells. “One of the beautiful things about the red abalone shell is that it has evolved proteins to bind very specifically with calcium in the ocean. We had to come up with a new technique, a new way of having proteins construct other kinds of materials.”
IT COMES FROM A COLLECTION OF ARTICLES OF NANOTECHNOLOGY FOR SOLDIERS
http :// web.mit.edu /ISN/newsandevents/ index.html