Nanotech news November 16th, 1998
Good news from the Sixth Foresignt Conference in Santa Clara.
Five major advances were announced. Here is a brief summary of each advance:
1 – Bucky Horns: Sumio Iijima of NEC Corporation, Japan, announced the ability to grow this new class of carbon nanostructures, the next step beyond buckyballs and buckytubes.
2 – Biopowered Nanomotor: Carlo Montemagno of Cornell University announced success in building biological-motor powered mechanical devices. All the tools are now in place to make this happen within a living cell.
3 – Nanomanipulator: MinFeng Yu of Washington University generated excitement by showing the first-ever movies of interactive 3D manipulation of carbon nanotubes, using a new research device built by Zyvex LLC.
4 – Nanotube Transistor: Cees Dekker of Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, presented work on buckytubes as a
new kind of molecular quantum wire and a field effect nanotube transistor, called TubeFET.
5 – Single-Molecule Tape Measure: Mark Akeson of University of California, Santa Cruz, announced the use of a molecular pore able to electrically “read” long molecules at high speed, even differentiating among DNA bases in groups as small as five. Next goal: rapidly read DNA base-by-base