Slog

News & Arts

Line Out

Music & the City
at Night

« A Little Trade | Anyone But Frank Chopp »

Monday, January 18, 2010

Science Here Comes Tomorrow

Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 2:41 PM

Nanotechnology got a little bit closer last week:

Dr. Seeman shared the results of experiments performed by his lab, along with collaborators at Nanjing University in China, in which scientists built a two-armed nanorobotic device with the ability to place specific atoms and molecules where scientists want them. The device was approximately 150 x 50 x 8 nanometers in size — over a million could fit in a single red blood cell. Using robust error-correction mechanisms, the device can place DNA molecules with 100% accuracy.

When Al Gore was at Town Hall in November, one of the most mind-blowing things he said was that there are more transistors on earth than there are people. It took decades for transistors to outnumber humanity, but I bet it'll take a hell of a lot less time for nanorobots to outnumber us.

Comments (9) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

Um. There are more transistors on three or four Intel/AMD CPUs that people. If that blew yer mind, don't bother picking up the pieces.

Posted by oxyala trio

on January 18, 2010 at 2:54 PM

Uhh, Paul. I don't know what Al Gore said exactly since I wasn't there, but I think you probably misheard him. He was probably saying that in a single supercomputer nowadays there's more transistors than there are people on Earth. Because there's been more transistors than people for a LONG time. In terms of transistor count ~6.7 billion is not that much.

A single "Prescott" Pentium 4 chip has ~125 million transistors (via Wikipedia.) That's a fairly old chip at this point.

An 8086 CPU had 20,000 transistors. Intel only needed to make 300,000 of those to outnumber humanity (actually a lot less back then.)

Posted by Dave M on January 18, 2010 at 2:59 PM

There are more transistors in my house than there are people on earth. If I had to guess the year that transistors passed people, I'd say 1980.

Posted by Fnarf

on January 18, 2010 at 3:01 PM

Heh, that shouldn't be _too_ mind-blowing...a single run-of-the-mill quad-core processor (from the past couple years) has over half a billion transistors, and the newest high-end video cards have over four billion (two chips with two billion each). So there could be more transistors in a single sub-$2000 computer, with two such video cards, than there are people on earth.

Maybe he meant there are more microprocessors than people on earth, but that's probably been true for at least a decade as well.

Posted by nerdy electrical engineer on January 18, 2010 at 3:03 PM

Nano-bots shnano-bots tell me more about these transistors, commenters!

Posted by pasteyboy

on January 18, 2010 at 3:24 PM

100% accuracy - nothing could ever go wrong - let's get right to the manipulation of DNA

Posted by myr on January 18, 2010 at 3:25 PM

Sorry...my inner child is still chuckling at the idea of "Dr. Seeman" pumping test subjects full of his tiny, microscopic creations.

Posted by j.lee on January 18, 2010 at 3:31 PM

Using DNA origami constructions like Nat Seeman's, there are more "nanorobots" in a single test tube than there are people in the world. The actual paper, unlike the press release, makes no presumption that this technology could be easily implemented in living cells. There's a big difference between in vitro like this and in vivo devices.

Posted by schnoxl on January 18, 2010 at 4:16 PM