Slanted Science

Archive for the ‘The Future Is Tiny’ Category

Hot on the heels of the news that bacteria in human guts make us fat comes this: scientists have shown that leafcutter ants also use the single-celled critters to give them some otherwise inacessible nutrients. They apparently use the bacteria’s ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen into a biologically usable form. Clever little fellas, eh? Read the rest of this entry »

Pentacene molecules imaged by IBM scientists

Those nanoscientists have done it again. Just a couple of weeks after showing us the power of small by making a cogwheel from DNA, scientists have now given us images of molecules resolved to the level of individual atoms. Read the rest of this entry »

I like it when my brain explodes.

Not literally, I am neither a suicidalist nor a dandelion. No, I mean that I like it – I love it – when scientists do something so fantastically beyond what I had thought of as possible that I can feel the big grey boy up there rattling the bars of his bony cage. Something like making gear wheels out of DNA.

I judge this sort of thing by applying a scientific method I have developed called The Grandad Test. Simply imagine (or actually do it, if yours is still with us) dropping the news into a normal conversation with the old fella.

Hydrogen-powered cars? Pfft, he’s seen the world move from horse to Hummer, hydrogen’s nothing. Incredible advances in increasing male fertility? Tsst, they called that stopping at five pints in his day. Try this one then, big guy: someone’s just made a cogwheel out of DNA. Yeah? That one got you? Choking on your weak tea, eh? What’s that? You’ve no idea what DNA is, and would I mind getting you a couple of HobNobs? Dammit.

The folks responsible for this phenomenal creation are Hendrik Dietz, Shawn Douglas and William Shih, working out of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard University. Through directing the base pair sequence during assembly, they have shown that it is possible to introduce specific angles of twisting and bending into a chain of engineered DNA. The work is published in Science.

The excitement created in the field of nanomachinery comes from the extraordinarily tight twists these guys introduce into their chains: they have managed to get the radius of molecular curvature down to 6 nanometres. This has allowed them to produce the geared wheel shown above.

We can’t yet know where this type of research will lead us, but the ability to produce cogwheels smaller than Simon Cowell’s modesty guarantees one thing: within a year, a Japanese company will be producing wristwatches for mice.