Nanoassembly by "hand": pick and place of nanotubes

[flanchwerd]

This technology is too advanced for the mankind we DO NOT have the conscience to use it well and most of it is used to kill PPL at this hour!

[bLackmarketRadio]

is this how you pluck nano-pubes?

[NanoClips]

@bLackmarketRadio how did you guess?

[bommobiel]

What´s the name of the song? :)

[WhiteDragon103]

The music would have been better if it kept more of a pattern.

[NanoClips]

In these older films, we have to speed up the playback rate by a factor of 3-5, since we did the manipulation manually. When we run it automatically (yes - the nanoassembly line is here :-)... its much faster, i think, even faster than the sped-up view you see here. Ill see if i can get Volkmar to cough up some of the recent films :)

But... there are some other, pretty cool stuff coming up, when i get the time to edit the film ...

[Elvarks]

Is it realtime?

[kdomn37]

This was awesome thanks for sharing it!

[ace3esp]

i love the song whatever it is

[fnorgen]

awesome music

[native707]

...nanobots ..nice . ...

[Jenfucius]

WOW!

Nice video NanClips!

Now if they had thousands of these nano hands operated by computers they could theorectically start assembling small items.

[NanoClips]

That would be a bit difficult, but in principle - yes. Right now they can be mounted on small mobile robots (1 cm x 1 cm x 1 cm), which drive around on a surface... but making them much smaller is not very practical. Nanorobots are much easier (although not easy) by modifying bacteria and vira (which are nanobots), or making artificial cells with micelles, and give them functions by attaching molecules to them. In contrast, the microgripper here works best in vacuum :)

[Jenfucius]

I was thinking maybe using something similar to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software tech. for these little robots to recognized certain objects & assemble them together.

Could it be possible for nanobots to be powered from an external source (like electromagnetic induction)? Or even have their "brain" external but control remotely via radio waves from a computer to reduce its size?

I could see the technological hurdle if the microgripper works best in the vacuum.

[DPat6590]

@NanoClips How do they even make the little grabber device that small lol?

[goldmosaic]

i am just a little jealous of your job, by about a nonometer

[padrescout]

the song in this is freaking amazing. Anyone know who it is?

[NanoClips]

check out "battlesnack" at myspace. Its my oneman electronic music project - much easier to use my own or friends music than to get permissions :)

The track is called "denialistic" and has vocals - some people like it better without.

[rimpick]

you know in Singapore on 6 15, 2009 they created a controllable gear thats about 1.2nm!

[NanoClips]

nice - molecular engineering is awesome. And if you *really* want to see something impressing then google salmonella or coli, together with flagellae - try to google "images". The propeller proteins of bacteria never cease to fascinate me.. molecular engineering at its best. (Im *not* creationist, nature just had a lot of time to perfect the job)

[rimpick]

nice!

[DPat6590]

@rimpick Is that like the same thing in this video or is it even smaller?

[Andreas958]

how long are the pinchers that grab the little stick (in nanometers)?

[NanoClips]

The long arms are about 200 mikrometers long. The fingers that grab the nanotubes are about 4 micrometers long. The gap between the fingers is then typically about 2 micrometer. We are now making them somewhat smaller - we hope soon to show you what they can do :)

[UntoldSecrets1]

song?

[NanoClips]

Well - there is a danish group (iNANO at århus university) who has specialised in ultrafast STM (scanning tunneling microscopy) and they actually make the individual frames into totally mindblowing movies.... ill ask them if i can post some of them here...

[Xxero0]

Okay, just one thing. WTF type of camera is that small?

[DeltaWound]

Scanning electron. Scanning-tunneling and atomic force microscopes (this vid shows a tip being attached to an AFM) are sensitive enough to map out individual molecules, but can't produce a moving video.

[LinkBlink]

These are absolutely amazing break throughs in technology. How can we make a gripper 50 times smaller then this? that's like 2-300 nanometers across. Although my math is probably off seeing as I have no true scale to measure. Could it be possible to perhaps manipulate a single partical with this method in the future?

[NanoClips]

well - we are trying to make them 25 times smaller using focused ion beam. We etch out the structures using a 1 nm large diameter beam of gallium ions. But we havent tested them, and dont know if they will be useful. Yet :)

[simbu423]

excellent work

[Neophlegm]

The gripper stuff is brilliant. Don't the EM forces start to screw you about on such a tiddly scale?

[Subspace4d]

what scale is this?

[NanoClips]

It sort of shows in the beginning, but the scalebars dont appear very clear. The nanotube is a big fat multiwalled carbon nanotube of more than 100 nm in diameter, and the base is covered with amorphous carbon (i.e. not nicely crystalline like nanotubes), so it appears like a cone (a fat base) rather than cylindrical. The nanotubes are typically 10 micrometer long, i.e. 1/100 of a mm.

[Subspace4d]

Thanks for the answer. One more thing. Is their some possibility that we can make spheres of same diameter in the micrometer range? The preferred material should be titanium oxide.

[NanoClips]

I dont know, but if you google titanium dioxide microsphere you get a supplier from which you can buy very nice, regular spheres in all sizes :)

[Subspace4d]

This is great help thanks.

Are you doing this experiments by yourself? If yes then I have an idea of micro maschine you can build with spheres and nanowire.

I can also speak german

[NanoClips]

No i dont do the experiments anymore - these are done by my great group of researchers, students and of course collaborators. Actually the film is recorded by a german Ph.D. student, Volkmar Eichhorn, with my master student Kenneth Carlson.

[NanoClips]

Oopps i deleted a comment by mistake...the question was :can i pick up DNA? The answer is "no", because DNA cannot stand the heat. The gripper works by expansion caused by a temperature increase. It would kill the DNA. Also the DNA is too small... we are now making grippers that are 50 times smaller than these, and which can manipulate maybe even single walled nanotubes :)

[groznij]

I'm more interested in what the hell kind of camera they used to capture that.

[r8farm]

Great work, how complex are the nano-machines you build with the nanotubes, like how many moving parts ?

[NanoClips]

Actually the grippers are too small... The genitialia of insects would be huge compared to the size of the grippers. But actually, that is a good question. I dont know the size of the penis of a housefly. Do you?

[DeltaWound]

Best. Comment. Ever. XD

[CHIsassin]

can we use these as birth-control for insects?

[bluebishi]

nanotubes have never seemed so badass

[UWROTCIV]

Nice music, what is it?

[NanoClips]

battlesnack... check myspace :)... the track is called "denialistic"

[nanogirl]

Incredible work!

[prashantyours]

awesome video.....this is the first of its kind that i have seen.....really amazed me in the sense that we can actually handpick nanotubes...

[roidroid]

this is the first moving video footage from an electron microscope i have ever seen.

[DeltaWound]

What is the song? I must know!!

[cutterschoicenotmine]

Yet, nano tubes have no use at the moment. A technology that has been way ahead of its time with no use unfortunatly always dies a death.

[excellr]

Fascinating, thanks for sharing. Anyone know the background score?

[Max11551]

These clips by NanoClips all have great background musics. mp3s somewhere?

[plarkmoby]

I did a little bit of research.

taiis d0t mymusic d0t dk

I think it's this chappy. He was credited at the end of another Nanoclip video.

[NanoClips]

its "denialistic", check the band battlesnack on myspace

[RavnoUK]

Guys. why if the nanotubes are so strong, you can break them so easy?, and secon how di you film it? SNOM? or .. how?

[plarkmoby]

possibly strong when en mass. Not as strong when it's just one fibre. As is the case with most fibres.

[prashantyours]

when we are breaking them it disconnects from the surface on which we have grown it......in that sense we are breaking a bond between carbon and some other material ..........not a carbon carbon bond so i suppose it may be the reason

[NanoClips]

well, first of all the nanotubes only have their phenomenal strength when they are made perfectly. The nanotubes you see here have many defects... i would rate the rigidity (how stiff they are) as akin to hardened steel, and their strength perhaps 10 times higher.

[MotoX88294]

someone explain to me what nanotubes and nanofibers are and what they are used in/for...

:/

[RavnoUK]

dude... better google it.. is quite complex to say in 500 caracters.

[t4kne]

Stop the sensless slaughter of baby nanotubes!

[NanoClips]

yes, any time know the committee for protection of nanorobots could come and close our research facility ;-)

[nanotechworld]

wow great job that looks really cool

[NanoClips]

I would rather say just "nanoassembly" than "nanofactories"... :) its still really slow. We will need to speed the process up *a lot* to even make one-by-one assembly of AFM probes like this feasible.

[jlm2525]

This is great! I can just see nanofactories becoming reality in a few years.