Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology

Transcription

Remember when Inside the Magic Schoolbus shrank down and flew into Arnold? Yeah, science is actually doing that. THE FUTURE IS NOW. Giant feats of engineering like space vehicles, dams, skyscrapers and massive airplanes are complex, to be sure… but at least the engineers working on them can SEE what they're working on. Imagine engineering a pump which is only a single molecule in size. Yeah. It's REALLY HARD, but a team from Northwestern University did it earlier this year. In nature, molecules are constantly moving around in our bodies, transporting energy, oxygen, and even information from one place to another; this molecular pump is a rudimentary synthetic copy of something nature does all the time. This pump uses a dumbbell-shaped molecule, and a set of positively charged molecular rings. Sort of like two magnets repelling each other, the rings provide tiny amounts of energy that the synthetic molecule can use to make the pump ratchet at a predictable rate! The problem with nanotechnology, has always been powering itty-bitty things; and realizing they can harvest energy from nano-scale rings is enough is pretty huge… or… small… I mean… They're hoping if they can improve the tech and capture MORE rings they'd have enough energy to power artificial muscles, or even whole nanomachines! The development of nanotechnology has been steadily climbing over the last 40 years and with leaps like this, things are starting to get crazy. In 2004, scientists at New York University created a nanobot that bipedally "walks" on legs 10 nanometers long by adding a molecule called psoralen found in the seeds of celery, parsley, citrus fruits and the common fig. A few years later, a study on the future of nanomaterials said we're only 10 to 20 years from a nanosized factory. This psoralen molecule lets the nanobot "walk" along a DNA strand; the researchers envision this as the beginnings of a nanobot conveyor belt for nanoassembly… think about the coolness of a nano-sized car factory… assembling nanobots for any imaginable purpose. The NIH says nanocomputers and nanobots could revolutionize the medical industry by creating nanobots which could mechanically reverse plaque buildup in arteries, or prepare tissues for cryonic storage, repair spinal damage, rewrite individual bases in our DNA, improve the efficiency of our cells, or map the complicated connections of the mammalian brain. Things are moving real fast in this y'all. In 1998, researchers (hypothetically) designed a red blood cell 200 times more efficient than our own. It was, in essence, an atomic-sized oxygen tank that could fill up in the lungs and distribute oxygen to the tissues way better than our own cells can. If that sounds far fetched, take this for a spin. Papers in the journal ACS Nano and Physics Today (among many others) from the last couple of years use what researchers are calling "DNA origami," to carry medication directly to cancer cells. DNA origami is essentially a nano-engineered "barrel" that can carry drugs or information to a specific place, and release it! Nanotechnology is getting better and better and better…You know what else is getting better? Toyota! Toyota has been doing some tinkering of their own with the TRD line of Toyota Trucks. Enhanced to rule the off-road!