Ever wish you had teeny tiny tweezers to pull a teeny tiny splinter from your pinky?
You’re in luck.
Researchers have developed easy-to-use “microtweezers” that are up to the task, and much more, such as plucking a cluster of stem cells from a petri dish and building all sorts of little mechanical devices.
Twelve atoms are all that’s required to store a bit of computer code – a 1 or 0, according to a new discovery that probes the limit of classical data storage.
Computer hard drives on the market today use more than a million atoms to store a single bit and more than half a billion to store a byte, which is an eight-bit-long unit of code sufficient to write the letter A, for example.
The new technique uses just 96 atoms per byte, allowing for hard drives that store 100 times more information in the same amount of physical space, according the researchers behind the discovery.
A wire that is just four atoms wide and one atom tall, yet works just as well as the ordinary copper wires running behind your wall, was recently created by an international team of scientists.
The breakthrough brings closer to reality a future where computers smaller than a pinhead are faster and more powerful than some of today’s supercomputers, according to the researchers.
Scientists have downsized the electric motor to the molecular level. That is, they’ve created an electrical motor that’s the size of a nanometer. About 60,000 of them equal the width of a human hair.
The molecular motor is a breakthrough that could lead to new types of electrical circuitry, according to Charles Sykes, an associate professor of chemistry at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
New membrane technologies could more efficiently turn billions of gallons of seawater full of salt, decomposed fish, and other bits of unappetizing organic matter into thirst-quenching liquid for people and crops, according to experts in desalination technology.
The problem is that these membrane technologies don’t yet exist in the right form to efficiently turn seawater into freshwater, they said in a review article aimed at spurring lab-level research with molecular models.
Desalination plants use membranes in a process called reverse osmosis. Seawater is forced through the membrane to filter out the salt in seawater to help make it drinkable and available for irrigation. The process requires a minimum amount of energy to do.
With the aid of nanotech materials, scientists have engineered a new way to convert the sun’s heat into electricity that is roughly eight times more efficient than previously reported solar thermoelectric devices.
What’s more, the device could be added to existing solar water heaters, giving people a jolt of electricity to power their gadgets along with warm bath water, noted Gang Chen, an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“We just changed the existing system a little bit,” he told me today. “Then we generate electricity and supply hot water.”
Swimmer Michael Phelps earns gold medals and piles of cash for his physical prowess in the pool. But that’s not the only way to get awards. Every year, for example, scientists and engineers get medals and cash for their mental prowess in the lab.